Tag: writing

“The Whooshing Sound They Make”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

The revisions have been going slowly. So slowly that I’d begun to think I’d set an impossible deadline for myself, that there was no way I was going to have the second draft of this ready by the beginning of August.  It was really starting to make me crazy.  After all, when I was doing revisions to Pomegranate House in January, I was blowing through pages and pages of material in each sitting. I didn’t get why I was having such a difficult time here.

Then, about a week ago, I finally figured out what was going on. I’m not revising, I’m rewriting.*  There’s a few parts, like the opening, that I’ve left largely intact, but almost everything else has gone straight to the chopping block.  Truth is, it’s been so long (over 6 years!) since I’ve worked on the second draft of a novel that I forgot what it was like.  And because this first draft was good — not great, but good — I somehow thought that would translate to less rewriting.

This new draft? It’s really good. Still not great, but it’s starting to sing. It’s also falling into place plot-wise.  There’s a big chunk near the end that I’ve been worrying over, because I knew I would need to cut out or completely re-write most of it.  It’s that chunk, in fact, that put me off revising for so long, because I simply had no idea what to do with it.  Now?  I’m not so worried by the fact that most of it is going to hit the cutting room floor and stay there.  In fact, I think the book will be better for it.

What does all this mean for my deadline?  Well, after seven weeks I’m about a third of the way through the original novel, but I’ve written an extra 10,000 words.   I also think my pace is going to pick up a bit, now that I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is a rewrite.  There’s no way I’ll have a completed draft in two weeks, but mid-end August might not be too far outside the realm of possibility.

 

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* I see rewriting as the thing that happens when you take your original scenes and rewrite them completely, adding or subtracting characters, text, dialogue, plot points, etc.  I see revising as the thing that happens when you tweak a word here or there, or maybe sprinkle in a few additional scenes, but otherwise leave the thing mostly intact.  I’m sure different people call these different things, or the same things, but it’s what I mean here, for purposes of this post.

When the Words Won’t Come

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

For the past few few weeks – the past few months, really – I’ve been having trouble writing.  It came on bit by bit, manifesting itself first in an uncertainty about how my current WIP was going to unfold, then as a somewhat scatter-shot attempt to work on other projects while I let the WIP alone, and now as an inability to make myself sit down and write in the mornings.  Those of you who are writers have probably been here (or some version of here) before.  For those of you who aren’t, I can’t even begin to describe how it feels.  Equal parts frustration and misery, with a dash of fury for seasoning.

It took me 6 years from starting the Persephone novel to querying it.  A good bit of that time was letting the novel sit in the back of my head while I thought about where it needed to go.  At the time, I thought it was because I was busy with law school.  Now, I’m wondering if the sit and stew period is part of my writing process and, if it is, what to do about it.  I don’t want to sit on this novel for another three years.  I also don’t want to find myself writing utter rubbish simply to put words on the page.  I’m not sure yet if the solution is to turn to another project for a time, or to go back to outlining and plotting this one, but neither is going to happen unless I can get myself back into the habit of sitting down to write every morning.

Mostly, I’m trying to be California Zen about it all.  Trying to be okay with my limitations, and with working within those.  Trying to be okay with the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of rejections lately, because that’s what happens to writers, even good ones.  Trying to forgive myself when I don’t sit down and write in the morning.  Because life isn’t going to get any less busy or less crazy, and re-working the balance now doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to do it again in six months, or six months after that.  And, above all, remembering why I write in the first place – for those moments when everything clicks, and the words do come, and everything is golden.

The Monster in the Maze

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Plot is not my strong point.

If you’re looking for beautifully written language, for characters with depth and knowledge and humanity, for a voice that’s all it’s own, I’m your girl.  But plot?  I’m terrible at twisting the threads of my character’s fates, at telling them where and when and how to move.  I can give them motivation, but I stink at placing obstacles in their way.

You remember how, in Sim City, you could chose to subject your city to earthquakes or fires or alien invasions?  I was the kid who always disabled that option.  I liked all my Sims.  I didn’t want to see them destroyed.

It’s the same with my characters. I don’t want to make them go through the Fire Swamp, falling into the quicksand and battling Rodents of Unusual Size.  I don’t want to put them into situations they can’t get out of themselves.

The result tends to be that scenes which should be filled with tension end too early.  In my current WIP, one of the characters goes into the forest, gets a little lost, but comes back half an hour later, unscathed, and with strawberries.  In the next draft, she’s going to disappear for more than thirty minutes, and there will definitely be Consequences.  Problem solved.

The harder thing to fix is that feeling of drag around the 2/3 point, right about when the bad guys should be starting to close in.   This happens in my current WIP.  Where there should be several chapters of nail-biting, page-turning, edge-of-the-seat tension, I end up with several chapters of world building instead.  My notes to myself, after I read back through this, were something along the lines of “WTF??”

Fear not, though.  I have a plan.  I’m going to create a page in my Scrivener for the novel titled “Very Bad Things.”  And I’m going to write down all the bad things that can happen to my characters.  All of them.  Everything from death to dismemberment to imprisonment to torture.  When I’m done, I should have enough disasters to keep the plot moving and the pages turning.

Whether my characters forgive me for it is another matter entirely.

 

 

Reaching Up

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Last week, I emailed Brian White from Fireside Magazine and told him I wanted to help with the Kickstarter.  I offered to match pledges, up to $1000, for an hour.   Truth be told, I’d kind of been kicking myself for not trying to get on board with Fireside earlier.  I backed the first three Kickstarters, but that was the extent of my support.  When it looked like the third one wasn’t going to fund, I shrugged and was a bit sad but figured that was what came of trying to use crowdfunding on an issue by issue basis.

In the year since Brian started Fireside, though, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and even more thinking.  For better or worse, the traditional publishing market is dying.  Within the next five years, there’s a good chance that people will be able to trade and sell used e-books the same way they trade and sell (and give away and leave in motel rooms and bus stations) paper books.  There are so many, many books being published each year that the chances of any one standing out from the crowd are even slimmer than that of finding the proverbial needle.  And this market, where people no longer believe that a new book is worth $25, where people will be able to sell books for pennies, where each book is competing with millions of others, is the market I’ll be publishing in.

So how does Kickstarter fit into publishing fit into trying to make a living off my writing?

Connections.  I think, more and more, we’re moving back to a place where the artist needs to come down from the ivory tower and be accessible.  This means connecting with people.  Yes, connecting with fans and readers is important, but it goes beyond that.  It’s connecting with the people who read and/or write the same kinds of things you do and with the people who’ve never read a word you write but follow you on Twitter and the people who pass by the blog and leave the occasional comment.  Because over time, the connections start to matter.

It also means supporting other artists.  It’s no good to go out, hat in hand, if you’re not willing to chip in a bit when someone else comes asking.  Because Fireside funding another year means more than having another literary mag that pays above market.

It means there’s a community of people out there who think that stories are worth supporting.  And that’s a community I want to be part of.

“I know it when I see it”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings5 Comments

One of the questions I’ve seen floating around blogs and #askagent sessions is how you know when it’s time to put a manuscript on hold.  The answer, it turns out, is rather like Justice Stewart’s definition of pornography:  you’ll know it when you see it.

After 3 contests, several requests for fulls, and a little bit over a year of querying, with no offers of representation, I’ve decided to put Pomegranate House on hold.  The fact that this doesn’t seem like a tough decision at all is part of what’s convinced me it’s time to do so.

The feedback I’ve gotten has been remarkably uniform, almost always along the lines of “I love your writing, but I’m not connecting with this piece.”  Several agents have mentioned they’d like to see my next novel, once it’s ready.  My takeaway  is that I could keep trying working on this one, keep trying to coax it into something the market finds palatable – or I can work on the next thing.

I’m choosing the next thing.

I’ve got a novel in progress that I’m super excited about.  It’s set in the near future.  Bronwyn, the heroine, used to be the First Lady, but now operates a stop on the Railroad, an underground network that smuggles dissidents and members of the Resistance out of the former U.S.  Then there’s the coming-of-age story I want to write, the one that chronicles three generations – son, mother, and grandmother – as each one leaves home and sets off across the country.   I also have a story tickling the back of my mind about a teenager who goes to visit an uncle on a dig in northern Iraq and gets pulled into the Persian empire.  (That one’s going to take some serious research.)  And if I ever get time, there’s a summer camp novel I’ve been wanting to write…

And who knows.  Maybe, after I’ve written a few more books, I’ll take Stephanie out again and find her a home.