Just came across this exchange in my first rough draft.
Linnea (new wife of the former Lindorm): “I’m sorry, but I will have to cry for a moment.”
Kennett (ex-lindorm), growing distressed: “Cry? What’s this cry?”
Runa: “It is a visceral emotional response, generally more common among the females of our species and frequently regarded as cathartic.”
Yippee!
Not bad for the first night after a full-week “sabatical.”
Not bad for any night, really.
I “sat a booth” at my local state fair for five hours today.
Then I collected my children from my mother before meeting some friends who proceeded to keep me company and help corral kids until nearly 10 tonight.
The interesting thing about sitting a booth is that you see people you may not have seen in a long time. And, of course, you exchange the obligatory How are you? and must make that devilishly challenging choice of how much to say.
Personally I hate “Fine.” as an answer. Just because it means *nothing* and you might as well not have spoken.
So here’s the line I actually managed to pull off the top of my head for someone who hasn’t seen me since I was wearing my second child (in a sling).
I’m keeping busy (an equally useless alternate for Fine.): three kids under age six, teaching myself guitar and working on a novel. (At this point I get the same twinge as I do when I tell people I’m 29 and add defensively:) I’m almost finished and I’ve had an editor ask me to send it to her when it’s done.
Why I feel this need to justify or explain myself to near strangers who care no more for me than for anyone else in this aimless mass of humanity, I don’t know.
And I forgot to mention at the time I start officially homeschooling my oldest this fall.
But I’ve got another 3 hours in a different booth tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll get another chance to try and squish it all out.
Pen wins. No question.
I’d heard it before and never paid much attention: pencils write slower.
Last night (or early this morning, rather), as I was racing to capture images before they left my dream-memory I was repeatedly frustrated in my attempt to speed up by the simple… physics (I guess you’d call it) of scraping particles onto paper, rather than rolling ink.
My hand is already too slow to keep up with my brain. I need a pen.
I’ve been working on this with “no end in sight” since November 2006.
When I shifted my focus to a smaller portion of the story I was able to frame a smaller, more realistic, goal and had some form of hope that finishing a story was possible.
Last night I completed another chapter, and when I printed out my latest “status report” on the story I saw this “wonder of wonders”:
| Chapter 1 | The Meeting |
| Chapter 2 | Despoiling |
| Chapter 3 | Old friends and Others |
| Chapter 4 | The next meeting |
| Chapter 5 | The Storyteller |
| Chapter 6 | Unwilling Rescue |
| Chapter 7 | Without Honor |
| Chapter 8 | The Fitting |
| Chapter 9 | Princess Cecillia |
| Chapter 10 | Tykone’s Loss |
| Chapter 11 | The Wedding Night |
| Chapter 12 | Kjell’s discovery |
| Chapter 13 | Dangerous New Family |
| Chapter 14 | The Safety of the Swamp |
| Chapter 15 | Out-law for an In-law |
| Chapter 16 | Rescue in the Swamp |
| Started | |
| Ready for draft 2 |
The Chart says I’m almost done. I can hardly believe it.
And, yes, “done” is a highly subjective term. Just now I’m excited to have the possibility of having a complete story in writing.
It should go without saying that it will next be subject to revision, research and more revision. But, wow. This is closer than I’ve ever been to ending anything. And I’ve started a bunch.
The kids are playing with a friend right now, and I’m writing at her table, but I’m a little psyc’d out about writing on my novel just now.
Because I’m so close to the end? Because this is the more baseless section I’m having to create from scratch?
Whatever the reason, I’ve told myself I’ll be able to do it in my next “real” writing session, in my normal writing-space, with my peach white tea and the kids asleep. Everything seems to work then; my brain’s just used to that drill.
For the balance, while I have time to write meaningless ramble, here’s a meme that no one would ever ask me to do, but is entertaining for me. And, as I keep pointing out, that’s what this blog is for.
The Writer’s Meme
What’s the last thing you wrote? The beginning of Chapter 15 of The Lindorm and his Lady (that title’s sort of a take-off on Beauty and the Beast is that weird?). My beginnings in these later sections have been discouragingly slow, but I remind myself just getting it down is the first step.
What’s the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? A piece I “worked on” while in 5th or 6th grade and actually typed up the beginning of in 8th grade. No digital copy, just a print-out of “No Puppies Aloud.” Yes, I noticed the mis-spelling before submitting it to my teacher, but I didn’t change it because I thought it would be clever to keep it this way– since part of the reason no dogs were allowed was their noise.
Can’t remember what my teacher thought.
Favorite genre of writing? Fantasy. Less initial research required. Doesn’t stay that way, of course, but it doesn’t get in the way of writing the way is does in, say, non-fiction.
Most fun character you ever wrote? I don’t know about most fun, but I’m really enjoying Runa, who’s a totally cerebral person—very Spock-ish to the point that the “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” line is actually true of her.
So now I’m more than half-way through my scheduled chapters: 10 out of 17 1st-draft done.
And there’s this pesky chapter that has been jumping in and out of the book, and around within the order of this book. It’s causing more trouble again as I haven’t been able to decide which POV it needs.
Currently titled “Without Honor,” it shows a confrontation between a 1/2-djinn major character and a full-djinn: his father and the big-baddie. Useful scene because it shows the difference in power, avoids a talking-heads scenario, and shows a lot of relationship dynamics.
I have come down to writing two versions of the scene (neither is done yet, they’re both written about to the same point– in two different nap-time writing blocks), in order to see which has more of what I want to be shown by the scene.
When viewed by Runa (the novel’s voice-of-reason character), I end up with a completely different feel and set of characters revealed than when I’m in the head of Ivan, being nearly torn-up by his father after decades of careful grooming.
Ivan’s trying to leave the djinn-world for a human life. I imagine it’s a bit like trying to leave the mafia.
I might have to finish the whole book before I know which point of view, ultimately, will be the most useful. The main criteria I’ll use are
(H/T to the Book Therapy blog. If you had a search bar I would have linked two specific articles. :) )
Here’s one I haven’t seen before that illustrates a bit of Sol Stein’s “suspense technique” that I alluded to in my last post.
I know it didn’t originate there, but it sound’s better than “Go read Redwall.” which you can still do if you want to see this technique used with mathematical precision.
The simple summary is that you want to keep your reader tense. The way you do this is by not answering the questions as soon as they arise; you create a question an then take a walk with someone else getting in trouble before you go back.
Here is my chart:
Cutting edge, I know. Moving on.
What you see here is my effort to visually represent the pattern of each returning character’s appearances (by chapter).
That is, any characters appearing only once (my crowded Inn in Chapter 3: Old Friends and Others is a great example. Characters that don’t come back until a later installation) don’t make this list.
You can see my main character in the third row, and I was pleased to see my section-working has her plot advancing just about every-other chapter. This was my goal.
In the case where she appears in two chapters in a row (e.g., 2 to 3) I changed the POV (point of view) so that the interaction still feels different. We’re not in her head the next time we see her, so we still have the lingering question of how she recovered from the events of Chapter 2, and new information that we wouldn’t have seen from her POV: that her face is bruised.
~ ~ ~
This chart helped me in several ways.
This last is (currently) the most useful, not the least because of I’m at an early stage in this draft.
When I made my first version of this chart (While I snuggled my kids watching The Hephalump Movie) I realized that Ivan– the purple in the middle– disappeared after chapter 8 and reappeared at the denouement to produce the Perfect-Thing for the rest of the story.
I hate it when I read stuff like that, so I had to go back and look for other places to lay the foundation for that same act. Those are the empty circles I added.
The bottom color, Garm, needed to be added to almost every chapter Linnea (MC) is in because he’s her dog, and it’s a sort of plot-point that he’s always around. I had forgotten this as I went along.
I still have to decide how present her son (second from the bottom, light-green) is. There are some places he’s necessary and some places he just can’t be.
~
So, there it is, for what it’s worth. Very helpful exercise for me; maybe to someone else too.
Karen asked some questions that made me think, so here I go answering.
These answers are only related to my work, that is, my novel and the Young Adult (YA) category, that I’ve researched as I’ve been writing. If you want more widely applicable (and experienced) advice related to writing fiction you need to check out Kaye Dacus’s blog: Write Place, Write Time.
1. How many words are you aiming for?
The number I’ve heard batted around (for YA) is 50,000 words. I’m aiming at the high end of the age-range, so I think I’d be “allowed” a few more words than that, even being a new face, but I don’t know how far I’d be able to push it.
I can’t say what I’m aiming for or precisely “expecting” because I have no other experience in length to compare this one to. This book is my classes 102-105 in writing for length, and I expect to know more when I’m done.
2. Are you an outlined or inspired writer? Or something in between? I’m sort of in between and I suspect that is the trouble I’m having in deciding exactly when my story will be finished.
The language I’ve heard is “Seat-of-the-Pants” rather than “inspired.” I prefer this because I think we’re all inspired or we wouldn’t be writing. ;)
I did my 50,000 NaNo words mostly SotP, jumping to a new section when where I was stalled or got boring. I had the basic structure of the folktale (without which I don’t think I could have written as fast as I did) and I had a list of names and “terms” I had researched in the month before I started, so I didn’t have to slow down and work our plot problems or stop to find the perfect name.
I discovered holes as I wrote, but November wasn’t the time to contemplate or fix them, so I just kept a document of questions to return to.
Solid 3,000 words today. Jay gave me most of the afternoon to work. Good, good man.
Most of that increase was from importing and revising sections of the first draft to fit the new format. I’m still working at getting back into the rhythm of the story after being gone for a month. It’s harder than I had expected or I might not have let it alone so long.
Also working on a new spreadsheet to solidify the time-line of events (in the actual novel, not the whole world), where multiple things happen within a short time, and making sure that’s logical with travel-times and all.
This draft has been more streamlined than the first, so I am (when I let myself think that far ahead) waffling again on whether the story will be better served as three too-short books (I’m visualizing Spiderwick here) or one long-ish one.
Also, due to the need to polish my first 10-pages for a mss consult coming up, those pages are now (tentatively) available upon request. The tentatively part depends on whether I know you. ;) I’m not yet so confident about it all that I’ll give it to anyone.
E-mail me if you’re interested.
Still hoping to get a few hours of writing in after the kids’ bedtime. My goal is to be back to normal production by the end of the weekend. If I can do that I should still have the first book (or first third of the book) done by the time school starts.