Tag: writing discipline

(OMG, don’t you want to be the dog in this picture????)

Several of you wrote to me yesterday and said how inspirational you found Jackie Woodson’s quote. I thought you would really appreciate something she tweeted late in the day: “My book is falling apart. I should keep writing but grabbing a towel & heading down to the water. Maybe the answer will ebb in with the tide.”

Perfect, isn’t it?

Even more perfect than you might realize because I’d been struggling with that feeling for about five days until late on Tuesday when finally, FINALLY, the line that totally helped me understand abo-so-freaking-everything about a critical character in my novel showed up.

(I felt just like the dog in the pic above! I tweeted my reaction: “Sometimes, after plugging away at a story for months or years, the perfect line drops into your lap. That line is a gift.”)

What’s the lesson here, besides the observation that tired, desperate authors vent on Twitter?

Writing a novel is never pain-free. In fact, I’d venture to say that most, if not nearly all, of the time you are writing a novel, you’re going to feel like crap. You have to find a way to simultaneously a) feel like a stupid, arrogant idiot who can’t write anything that is good enough to put on the bottom of a bird cage and b) believe in your dream and your talent and your vision of the story.

The secret is perserverance.

You muddle through the muck and keeping revising and eventually the story becomes less crappy. Marginally so, but you take strength from any source, right? As Jackie pointed out in yesterday’s quote, most people get to that awful hellhole, that spot where they have lots of pages filled with tangled plot lines and confusing characters and they become overwhelmed by the crappiness of it all so they bury the manuscript – and the dream – in a box, and tell their friends that really, they always wanted to learn how to play the glockenspiel much more than they wanted to publish their book.

I’m not judging here. To count the number of times I wanted to do that, multiply 365 days by twenty years. Seriously.

I think the reason I wound up with a career as an author is that I have a vivid imagination and I am epically stubborn. Every time I wanted to quit, the part of me that punched the boy from across the street when he teased my little sister rises to the surface. I. Don’t. Back. Down. Not from bullies, not from stupendously dreadful drafts, not from nothin’.

Make peace with the fact that you are uncomfortable with the quality of your work for most of the writing process. Take the energy you used to waste being afraid that your writing sucked, and apply it to making your writing sing.

Today’s Quote

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.”

Chuck Palahniuk

 

Today’s Prompt: As fast as you can, write a list of all the things you have learned in your life. Do NOT be philosophical or abstract. “You can’t change other people” won’t cut it for this exercise. “Don’t eat spinach at a business lunch because it’s hard to tell if it’s stuck in your teeth” does.

Bonus: Write a story about you or a character learning one of these lessons, or doing the opposite of the piece of advice.

 

 Scribble… scribble… scribble…

We are half-way through the challenge. It’s been interesting to see which kinds of posts generate the most feedback. In order to tailor the rest of the month to your needs, I need you to respond to these two questions:

WHAT KIND OF “LIFE OF A WRITER” TOPICS TO YOU WANT ME TO DISCUSS?

WHAT KIND OF WRITING CRAFT ISSUES DO YOU WANT ME TO TACKLE?

Today’s Quote 

“You’re writing, you’re coasting, and you’re thinking, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever written, and it’s coming so easily, and these characters are so great.’ You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart. That’s the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it’s the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.”

Jacqueline Woodson 

Today’s Prompt: Whose diary (of the people you know) would you like to read? (For the purposes of this prompt, you obviously have to pretend that everyone you know writes in a secret diary every day.)

After you have chosen your person, write a diary entry from her/his POV about an event that you were at.  The trick here is to take information that you already have (about the event itself) but filter it through the perception of someone else.)

Scribble… scribble… scribble…

 

 

Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion about the NPR’s Top 100 YA List. The good thing about lists and awards is that they tend to provoke conversation – sometimes debate – and in that way the titles of many more books are shared. And that’s a good thing.

But I really hope NPR follows up with some good journalism about YA and children’s literature by people of color as part of their  attempt to report about and for a larger audience. Let’s keep bugging them about that, shall we?

Question 5: How do you begin a story when you have numerous ideas circling around in your brain?

Answer 5: It does not matter. JUST START. Write them all down, every single one. Scribble down the ideas on a sidewalk with chalk. Then take a photo before it rains. Or open a doc on your computer or grab a pen and a piece of paper. It does not matter. JUST START. The ideas don’t have to be in order. They do not have to be complete sentences. You’ll probably find that as you scribble, they will grow, mutate, and give birth to new ideas. This is good!!!

When you have captured all the ideas buzzing around in your brain, take a day or so away from them. Let them cool down. Come to my house and help me weed my gardens while you’re waiting. Then go back and read them. Circle the ones that make your heart beat faster. Those are the ideas that you should be pursuing right now.

Today’s Quote

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.” 
                                                                                  Lorraine Hansberry

Today’s Prompt: I want you to think about someone that you went to high school with. It should be someone you’d say “hi” to in the halls, but not the person with whom you shared your darkest secrets. Or any body parts.

Write about what that person might be like today. Construct a family or a lack of family. A job. A house, or maybe she’s living under a bridge. Start with your memories of that person (which will be shaded by how you felt about them), but let your imagination fill in the blanks.

Hint: Try to make your details as specific as possible. That she likes coffee is not specific enough. Precisely how does she take her coffee? Where does she buy it? Who does she drink it with? In what kind of cup or mug?

 

Scribble… scribble… scribble…

 

Question 3: Any plans to write the final book to Chains – Forged series?

Answer 3: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! As soon as this YA is done, I will dive into the final book of the trilogy, called ASHES. I can’t wait.

Question 4: You’ve never seen or met your characters, I assume: what techniques do you use to construct dialogue? How do you translate REALNESS into what they say?

Answer 4: I hear dialog in my head. It is often where my stories start; I’ll be out running or driving and I’ll hear the main character talking. Even though dialog comes easily to me, I find that I revise it countless times. In early drafts I’m often unaware of the nuances of the relationships between characters. As the book comes together, I might realize that a short line of conversation in chapter three sets up the Enormous Plot Twist in chapter 37. Also, my early drafts of dialog always, always, always, contain kitty litter.

“Kitty litter?” you ask, with a polite, nervous smile.

Indeed. Kitty litter. And occasionally turds.

Kitty litter is the stupid fillers that like to gum up a sentence so that the important words get lost. People speak in short, often broken sentences. If your dialog reads like narrative instead of sounding like it could be spoken by living human beings, look for the kitty litter. Cut mercilessly to bring dialog to life.

The turds are clunky bits of backstory that stink up perfectly good dialog. “As you remember from our childhood days at the lake, Jethro, I never learned to swim.” I wind up with dialog turds all the time in early drafts, largely because I need to remind myself of backstory elements. You must go through and remove these horrors when you are revising!

Today’s Quote

“[I start with an emphasis on] character, definitely. And by character I mean a person drawn full-round, not a caricature. E. M. Forster refers to “flat” and “round” characters. I try to make all of mine round. It takes an extrovert like Dickens to make flat characters come alive. But story as such has been neglected by today’s introverted writers. Story and character should grow together; I think I’m lucky so far in that in practically everything I’ve tried to write these two elements have grown together. They must, to give an impression of life being lived, just because each man’s life is a story, if you’ll pardon the cliché.”

William Styron

 Today’s Prompt: Eavesdrop in a public place and jot down the bits of conversation that you hear around you. Cafeterias and food courts are good for this. The New York subway is an exceptionally rich spot. The point is not to steal something for your story, or to be arrested. It’s to get you to hear the rhythms of real speech and get a sense for what they look like on the page.

If you have a work in progress, ask a friend to read and record several of the dialog passages for you. Play back the recording and mark what sounds natural and what sounds clunky. Toss out both the turds and kitty litter and start fresh.

 

 

Question 2: Do you do any editing as you go or do you puke it all out (so to speak!) then do all your revision once the draft is done?

Answer 2: Yes. And no. It depends.

Questions like this are tricky and I hesitate to answer them. I suspect that underneath this question is anxiety about the questioner’s writing process. He could be stuck in the middle of a project. Or he has completed a book, but is unhappy with the quality of it. Or he thinks he has a great idea, but is feeling unsure how to build on it.

I know the feeling!

It doesn’t matter how many books I’ve written, I have never written the book I am working on right now. In my experience, each book wants/needs to be written in its own way, much as every child needs to be parented in the way that best suits her, not necessarily what worked for her siblings.

 I also understand the desire to ask other writers about their process. I am a voracious reader of auther biographies and particularly like seeing other people’s marked-up manuscripts, like the opening of Charles Dickens Great Expectations, below.

(Read more about a facsimile version of Great Expectations)

All that being said, my books generally start with an idea and the voice of a character in my head. I scribble a lot; dialog, scenes, backstory, and often several different directions a story could go. When I get frustrated, I go back and try to figure out which scenes have energy and which ones are useless. I cut out the crap, often restructure what’s left, and fill in where there are plot or character holes. During the cutting and filling I will frequently polish those key scenes until they are pretty much ready to be printed, while others scenes are still incredibly rough (often just a line or two.) Why? Once I understand the emotional state, desires, needs, and weaknesses of my characters in those scenes, I have a clearer sense of how to pace the rest of that story.

But your mileage may vary.

 

Today’s Quote 

“Well, there are only three possible endings—aren’t there?—to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.”

Jeanette Winterson

 

Today’s Prompt: Choose one of the following character scenarios.

    1. Girl meets Girl

    2. Girl meets Boy

    3. Boy meets Boy

    4. Boy meets Girl

Now choose a setting: basketball court, bus stop, library, summer camp, elevator.

Then choose a problem: blind date, someone cheated, death of beloved pet, joined the military, lost movie tickets, earthquake, stubbed toe.

Finally, take one of the three endings proposed by Jeanette Winterson in the quote above: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness.

With those building blocks, start writing and see how far you can go.

 

Scribble… scribble… scribble…