WIP Diary: We're Through!

You know why? Because I finally finished This Damned Book!!! That's right, at 9:00 last night, this monstrous, out-of-control thing finally wrapped up. I'm thinking it might have one of the longest, most drawn-out endings in YA history, but I don't care. I love it. It makes me happy to see it all tied up in dozens of pretty pink ribbons.

And I managed to finish it while distracted by day job angst, Christopher Plummer's loin cloth, a jackwagon neighbor who seems to believe that the way to fix a car is to repeatedly rev the engine right outside my window all flipping day long, and my deep concern over the fact that Dante Falconeri currently lies bleeding to death on the floor of Sonny Corinthos' coffee warehouse! That, my friends, is dedication.

At this point, I choose not to think (too much) about how many years I spent writing this thing. (Because A#1, I choose not to make myself any crazier than I already am.) Though I do wonder why I stuck with it. It's not like it's going to rival War and Peace or change anyone's life or anything. It ain't that kind of a book.

But it is my book and my characters and once they had taken life inside my head, I couldn't walk away from them. Oh, I tried. There was a whole year in there where I just completely abandoned them. But I kept thinking of them, home alone, living off of saltines and ketchup, and I had to go back and take care of them. Because that's the thing my writer friend keeps telling me. You are your characters' only chance. If you don't care about your characters, nobody else will. You owe it to them to give them every chance to live and breathe.

At this point, I'm not going to think in terms of revision or the possibility of having to cut drastically. (Maybe it's a blessing it did take me this long because if I'd finished a book this size five years ago, no one would have considered it. Now, a door stopper like this doesn't raise an eyebrow.)

But it's hard not to wonder if it will sell, if anyone but me will love not just the characters, but the frivolous details, the relatively pointless asides and extraneous interactions.

Whether it sells or not, it's done. It pleases me. It pleases me that I finished it. And now my terrier brain can move on to the Next Damned Book.

Final Statistics:

506 pages
125,089 words
6 kisses
1 death
3 sisters
1 cat
2 balls
1 muselar
3 handsome men
1 cold mama
3 dresses made out of curtains
1 snippy housemaid
and a curse

WIP Diary: La C'eran Baci

So stuff keeps happening to draw this ending out. I am violating every rule and tenet of structure here but I don't care. I'm just letting TDB roll out the way it wants to.

But I must say that at this point, I am rather tired of describing kisses. You see, there's been a bit of a pile-up of kissing in the last quarter of this novel. All of a sudden, everyone wants to kiss my MC.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy kissing. It's a very nice thing we humans have lit upon. But after about the fourth or fifth one, you run out of ways to describe the texture of lips and the spreading warmth of sensation a really good kiss can provide. In short, breaking kisses down into technical description gets annoying after awhile.

Today, I'm going back through the last couple of chapters to add in some details that I skated over. Oh, I know, you're not supposed to write this way. But you know what? This is the way I write. My mind won't be happy until we go back and make sure we've made it clear that James's shirt has been ripped open there in chapter forty-eight.

And then...and then...I might be able to finish today. Do you think I will??? Is this E-Day? (Ending day!) Stay Tuned.

WIP Diary: It's a Surprise Party In Here

So the other day, I'm all angsty about how there won't be a happy ending to This Damned Book because I was so smugly certain it just wouldn't work out that way.

Well.

I was wrong. Once I shut up, let go of the anxiety of rushing to the finish and just let my characters do what they wanted to do, guess what they did? Well, I probably shouldn't tell you, but it wasn't what I fully expected to happen, what I was actually planning to write.

Once again, this is the kind of stuff that makes you sound like a prime candidate for the laughing academy, but it's not as freaky weird as it sounds. It's about listening to the characters. Wait, no. That still sounds freaky, like you think they're actually real people or something. But that's getting closer to it.

Look, I know they're not real but the thing is, I want them to seem like they are to the reader, so I have to remember that when I'm writing, remember that they have reactions according to their own feelings that may not necessarily fit into where I think the story should go and I fail to listen to them at my peril.

Must go to the day job. Hoping to get to the end by early next week!

WIP Diary: Give Me Just a Denoueminute

(I know these entries are coming fast and furious now, but that's because I'm nearly done!)

So, as feared, the denouement is spinning out of control, heading into the third chapter of tying things up. The big problem is all the explanations. There was so much my MC didn't know that the reader also didn't know and it all needs to be explained clearly, quickly and realistically. Man, I hope this works.

And then there are all of the relationships to resolve. There is no room here for a romantic happily ever after. It wouldn't be realistic anyway. It would take a whole 'nother book. (And no, I ain't writing no sequel to TDB!) So I have to somehow set up a satisfying close that is really an opening, that will let the reader know that yes, this will happen in the future. Is that going to be satisfying enough? I don't know. I guess I'd better go work on that and see how it turns out.

WIP Diary: Dear Brain, Remember Me?

One of the great things about writing--the things you can never admit to non-writers because they will look at you oddly and back away very veerrrrrrry slowly so they don't startle you into a violent act--is when your brain knows more than you do. When it does stuff without telling you why. You know what I mean? (Please don't say "Nooooo, Melissa. Nobody else is this weird.")

So here are a couple of examples from this damned book (which I'm thinking of abbreviating as TDB) I'm working on:

Early on in the book, a cat showed up. I like cats a lot (I just can't live with them--the hair, you see.) So I figured a cat was a good thing to have in a book and I'd let her stay. I didn't think she was important and from time to time, I'd consider just cutting her because it was sometimes difficult to remember to keep her in scene. But my brain knew she was important and wouldn't let me cut her.

And damned if my brain wasn't right. Come the climax, the cat was a key to getting my heroine out of a sticky situation.

And then there was the cloak. At the beginning of the climax, one of the characters put on his cloak. Now this is a big old bloated book and I'm looking to trim words anywhere and wherever I can, so I was going to take out the bit about the cloak. It wasn't important. It wasn't needed. Who cared if he was wearing a cloak or not (sexy as cloaks may be.)

But no, my brain said. Do not touch the cloak on pain of screwing this thing up yet again! So I left the cloak. Now it didn't turn into some pivotal plot point, but there is a moment that would be far less poetic if this guy hadn't been wearing a cloak.

So you see, my brain knows more than I do sometimes. I try not to take it personally and I'm learning to just do as my brain tells me as much as possible.

I had this happen to great effect in Raising the Griffin, too. I had provided Alexei with a horse because I like horses and guys on horses are very sexy. But again, the whole horse thing was taking up a lot of room and I started wondering if it was really all that important. Then I reached a point in the story where I needed something that the people of Rovenia could give to Alexei and whoa! There it was! The horse! They could give him back the horse he had to leave behind.

If you read that book, it looks like I had that all planned out, doesn't it? Maybe I'm being stupid for publicly admitting that it was a huge surprise to me. But there it is. This is one of the cool cool things about writing for me, these secret brain surprises.

But back to the WIP (TDB), this week, I am working on the denouement and trying to ignore the feeling that it is spinning out of control. I was comfortable with the idea that it would be a long denouement that would nicely tie up all of the loose ends of the story into pretty little bows. (I think it's the kind of story that calls for that. You can't leave nearly 500 pages of painstakingly detailed fluff on a spare, stylistic question mark.)

But right now, I seem to be in a mire of explanation and that feels a little deadly. But I'm going to go ahead and write it all out and then go back and see how it feels. The problem is that it's a kind of secondary character who is doing all of the explaining and it just feels weird for some reason. Just not quite sure why, yet. But we'll see.

So today is "work my way back in" day. I work three days a week (the horror, I know) and there is little time to think of writing on those days. Work consumes me entirely. And it's hard for me to just leap back into the writing after a break of several days like that. If anyone has any tricks on how to do that efficiently and quickly, I'd love to hear about them!

WIP Diary: The End is Near!

I finally finally finally worked my way through the climax of this story. I think shifting a load of coal would have been easier. Dirtier, but easier. This was bloody hard work.

I was trying to describe the process to writer friends, thinking there ought to be a very good analogy for it. The best I could come up with is having a massive snarl in your hair where you have to go back and comb and comb this bit and that bit until you get it all worked out. But that's not quite accurate either.

See, here's how my process works. (And "works" is a very loose term.) I write largely linearly. In that I start at the beginning and write to the end. Ideally, that is. I do occasionally write out scenelets and snippets out of order as inspiration strikes. And I do spend an awful lot of time backtracking. This usually happens when I get stuck. I get stuck because something I've written previously is wrong and I just have to go back and rewrite until I figure it out. This is why the shitty first draft has never worked for me. My brain just doesn't work that way.

Now the problem with the climax is that it's not only the point where the action of the book leads, the point where the problem posed to the main character is resolved (or not, as the story desires,) but it is also where the theme of the book--er--crystallizes. Or something.

My problem is that I almost never know what my theme is. No different with this project. Naturally, that complicated figuring out how the climax should play out. I had to keep writing out thoughts and dialogue that weren't going to end up in the scene in order for me to understand what was really going on with the characters.

The climax was the first time we really "see" this pivotal character. Her presence has been felt all along, but now she finally gets a voice and the opportunity to give her side of things. I don't think I realized until I started writing it out just how important that was. Suddenly, I couldn't make her do what I thought she had to do in order to bring my climax around to a resolution.

Instead, I had to go back to this event that had happened long before the action of the book, an event that I had already described from another character's POV. I had to understand it from hers. Even though she takes up such a small amount of page space, understanding her is important. Understanding why she is doing what she's doing is crucial for my MC because the final choice is going to come down to her.

One of the great challenges of this book has been letting go my notions of what a book should do and be (structurally, mainly) and allowing this book to roll out the way it needs to roll out. Be what it wants to be. I think I've been resisting that all along. First, I've been resisting the length the book needs to be. And maybe I've been resisting what the book is really about. That I'm not sure of because I think that will be revealed as I work through the denouement.

So that's the next challenge. I'm still not sure what my MC thinks about all that has happened! If I can figure that out, I may very soon be able to write "The End!"

WIP Diary: Unsubconscious

Had a major breakthrough on a plot element that had been hanging over my head for a good part of the book.

Conventional writing wisdom says to jump over it and write on, come back and figure it out later. This approach has never worked for me. I wish it did, but I have to work with what I've got. And for me, I need to know how things work before I can move on.

In this case, the solution is so beautiful (I think so, anyway) that it changed the way I felt about the whole scene and my approach to the next plot element. If I'd jumped over it, I'd have screwed up the rest of the scene anyway.

I wish I could articulate how I finally figured out the solution to this particular problem, but I can't. I have to put this one down to the subconscious again. Or, to be fair, a combination of the subconscious and staring at the page while thinking through various scenarios until one of them clicked. That sounds like it should be easy but it's not like leafing through a handy selection of story solutions. It meant thinking through every character's motivations and possible reactions to what any of the other characters might do. I did write out little bits of those reactions and things so they were there in front of me to help me along. Okay, so this isn't very subsconscious-y at all, is it? Except I do think my subconscious did a lot of the work while I was doing other stuff. Like sleeping.

Now I'm hoping that over the last week, my subconscious has been at work on the next hurdle in this scene. Someone's gotta die and I'm not quite sure who is going to make that decision. It could be any one of three characters and each one would change the meaning of the book itself, maybe.

WIP Diary: The 2:00 AM Moments

You know what those are, right? That's when your brain wakes you up at 2:00 in the morning because it just had the most brilliant idea for either a new story or a solution to a plot problem or a more clear character motivation. Your brain can't wait until a civilized hour to have these revelations. No. they always happen at 2:00 in the morning. And you ignore them at your peril. (You also--at your peril--fail to write them down immediately, thinking you'll be able to remember them later. You won't, you know.)

Well, I've been having a lot of those 2:00 AM moments with this WIP. And it occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons is that I've been pushing the writing instead of letting it roll out organically. I've been pushing characters to do things to move the plot along rather than taking the time to figure out what they would really do. Then at night, when I'm sleeping, my subconscious apparently has access to my files and noses through them (yes, my subconscious has a nose) and comes and tells me how I've screwed things up.

Usually, my conscious knows something is wrong. It knows it in that down-dragging, grump-inducing "Crap, I know something is wrong but I don't know what or how to fix it" kind of way that makes you stomp petulantly through the house and take your mood out on the chicken breasts.

It also makes moving forward in the story tough because you know that somewhere behind you, you've done your characters wrong. And while maybe they won't tell you flat out, but they keep looking reluctantly over their shoulders like actors who know the director has gone nuts.

Example: Here's what woke me up at two this morning:

So I knew that these two characters had to kiss at some point and I figured Chapter 43 was a good a time as any. We had the "big reveal." The MC knew most all there was to know. A kiss would help her decide the next step to take. Right? Right? Of course right.

Wrong. I wrote through the whole next chapter--where my MC was actually walking from one place to another--and I could feel her dragging her imaginary little feet the whole way. She knew something was wrong. I knew she knew but I didn't want to admit it because.....

Okay, let's just admit it. Because I didn't want to have to think too hard about where that kiss really belonged and why.

There. I am lazy. Okay? The problem with that is that I always always always end up working harder when I try to take a short cut because I always always always end up screwing things up.

Thank goodness I still have a functioning subconscious to keep me in line and figure things out for me. At the end of chapter 44, there is the perfect place for the kiss. It's not even really a "place," like I went looking for a parking spot for it. It is what would happen. It is what these two people would do in the course of events. And I would have figured it out, maybe, if I hadn't been pushing so hard to fit everything in that I thought needed to be in there.

So memo to me: just write this @#$%& thing out first. Follow the characters. Worry about where everything fits later. Because we are getting too old to be awakened at 2:00 AM every day.

I'm going to need a nap.

WIP Diary: Let Me Explain This To You

I am at the point in this novel (fina-freaking-ly) that I have been thinking of as The Big Reveal. It is at one and the same time a huge relief and a massive pain in the posterior.

Because this means it's time for all of the backstory to come out. Yes, I know there are many nifty techniques to weave backstory into a novel, even if your novel is written in first person present tense and your POV character is utterly ignorant of said backstory. Yeah, you can still get it in there. Unless....it's important to keep the reader ignorant as well.

Keeping the reader ignorant without pissing them off has been one juggling act. Now I have to tell the reader everything I've been withholding from him and make it seem natural. And you know what? That's not even the biggest problem!!!

The biggest problem is that there is a supernatural aspect to this story and I am constantly resisting the urge to over-explain it. This is because I am of a pragmatic turn of mind, myself and like everything to have a logical explanation.

But there's that thing called the willing suspension of disbelief and I think in fantasy, it's even more willing than usual. A reader who picks up a fantasy book is already halfway suspended. Not that you can get away with the completely illogical, but you don't need to dissect everything, either, and that's what I have to keep stopping myself from doing.

But it's hard! It's like expecting me not to pester my kids about picking up their dirty clothes! It requires sheer force of will. As I am writing along, I have to keep explanation alert on full blast. When I find myself explaining too much, I cut out the explanation and stick it to the bottom of the ms. That way, I know it's down there if I decide I truly do need it later.

But you know what? So far, it's all still down there.

WIP Diary: Another Brick Wall

Yeah, I seem to keep hitting them with this book. And every time, I think "This is it. I can't figure it out. I'm giving up." And then something will occur to me and I'll figure it out and move on until I slam up against the next brick wall.

One of the things that "occurs" to me is to call my friend Shelley Sykes. Shelley is the award-winning author of the YA mystery For Mike. And mystery writers have a way of looking at a story as a puzzle. So when I've got a particularly nasty snarl, I know I can put it before Shelley and instead of wanting to gouge her eyes out (which is the way I'm feeling about the problem,) Shelley will go "Oh, look! What a marvelous little mess you have presented me with. Let me fix it for you." (Actually, Shelley sounds nothing like that at all, but in essence, this is what she does.)

This current brick wall involved a massive motivational issue with the mother of my MC. Dear old Mama had made a pretty dastardly arrangement. And when you have the mother in your story do something dastardly, she had better have a really supremely excellent reason for it. Mothers--in stories as in many arenas in real life--are held to a certain standard of behavior. When they deviate from that, you've got to make sure it's believable and understandable or you will hear the dreaded phrase "But mothers don't..." It doesn't matter that mothers actually do dastardly things all the time in real life. If you haven't heard this before, here it is: this isn't real life. It's fiction. And fiction has to be more real than real life.

But anyway, because of other events in the story, Mama's motivation fell apart and I couldn't get it back together. Now my initial response to plot problems like this is to write like crazy and introduce all sorts of new elements to try to bolster my point.

This is almost always a disaster. It's like trying to find something you've lost by going out and buying lots of other things you don't really need. Kind of stupid.

So I call Shelley and she can almost tell by the ring tone that I'm calling her with a problem because she goes "What's wrong?" And I try to lay out my problem to her. It's such a jumbled up problem, even I don't understand it while I'm explaining it. But Shelley's going "Mmm. Mmm. Mm hm." And then she says "Let's go back. What was the conversation like, when Mama made this arrangment?"

Now I know that even though this book is in first person from the POV of my MC so that she would not have been present to hear that conversation, I also know that I--as the author--most certainly should know. But I didn't. I hadn't thought it through. Sometimes you need someone to remind you of these things. Sometimes you need someone to tell you that the answer isn't something in front of you that you don't know. It's already there in the story, even if it isn't in the existing text. You just need to go back and find it, rather than creating all kinds of new bits of story.

And that's what Shelley did. She rooted through the musty old root cellar of my brain and pulled out this and that and shook them out and held them up in front of me until she picked up one specific story point and said "How about this?" It was a genuine eureka moment. The solution! Right there. Simple, clean, direct and already part of the story. And while you may not like Mama for what she does, you will understand why she does it. And that's all I need.

Can I just say what a massive feeling of relief that is? When you have got a story issue that is blocking your brain, like a wad of hair in your bathroom sink. (I know, I paint a picture, don't I?) And then whoosh! The drains are clear again and you can think. My friend Shelley. She is like literary Draino.

WIP Diary: Gutted

This is one of those times when I wish I was an outliner, a plotter. That I had some sort of organizational and planning turn of mind. But I do not, and so I spend a lot of my writing time in musing, thinking things through, writing down blind alleys and into corners and backtracking.

I like to tell myself that none of this is wasted effort. That I always learn something, no matter what I write. At the very least, I learn what doesn't work. But sometimes that isn't a terribly comforting thought. Like when you've spent a week writing gangbusters and quite sure you've figured the whole thing out and are zooming along towards the climax and the ultimate ending of the Book That Wouldn't End, only to have to sit back and admit to yourself that sorry, but those last three chapters are pointless meandering, serve no purpose in the narrative, offer no needed information and in fact pull the story in the wrong direction. Three chapters. And I write long chapters. They've got to go.

To which I say right now: Crap. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. I think I may even have stomped my foot.

But it's back to that gut feeling thing. In this case, the more the chapters piled up without getting any closer to the climax (like one of those nightmare scenes in the movies where someone is running down a long hallway lined with doors and the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer,) the more I knew I had a problem. I was circling the climax, trying to write in all of the stuff that was still hanging out there in space that I thought needed to be laid out in preparation. I was writing like your mom who keeps stopping you on your way out the door to make sure you have your scarf and your hat and your gloves and a quarter in your shoe. Enough, Mom! Just let me go already!

What's worse is that when I look back to where I went from the direct line of the story to where I started mincing around writing chapters of nothingness, I had something really hot and dramatic going on right there. That's where to make the leap into the climax. You want emotional peaks and valleys in your narrative, but this close to the climax is no time to take things back down.

Worse still, I thought I was so clever in moving from that scene to those dull, dead chapters. Oh, how we can fool ourselves. Sure, maybe I wrote in complete sentences. Maybe some of them are even beautiful or entertaining. But they aren't doing what they need to be doing, and so.....

There. They are in the "cut" file now. And I am flung back 25 pages. In the immortal words of Dorothy Fields, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again. Or at least, start at page 383 again.

Crap.

WIP Diary: Going With Your Gut

In general, I classify myself as a plunger-type of writer. I start with a situation and/or a character and write from there to see what happens. I usually have a vague idea of the ending, so I know where I'm heading. I'm just not sure how we're going to get there.

But somewhere around....maybe the last eighth of the book, I suddenly start plotting. Or something like plotting. What I do is start to make lists of things that need to happen. Because now suddenly, I can see the things that need to happen in order to get to the ending that has become more sharply focused in my mind.

Sometimes, though, that kind of thinking can lead me astray and that's when I have to listen for and trust my gut.

I don't know how you learn about the gut. Some writer friends and I were discussing this. I think it has a lot to do with what you have picked up about storytelling through lots of reading and--for me, anyway--other forms of story, like movies or TV (or plays and opera and blah blah.) And also what you know about people. Because story is the story of people. It's not a story about what happens. It's a story about what people did. So if you don't understand why people do things, you're going to get all tangled up.

But anyway, trusting your gut feeling on story can be really tough. Why? Because usually your gut is asking you to work harder. And me, I want things to be done. So sometimes I will shut out my grumbling gut and just plow forward and it always always ends in frustration and I have to go back and work hard to fix things anyway.

But more importantly, gut-level reactions--following the story where the story wants to go instead of where you intellectually think it ought to go in order to get where you think you need to be--that's where the cool stuff is! If you shut that out, you can miss great opportunities in your story.

The other night, I was struggling mightily with a scene where I had this idea of what I needed everyone to say in order to get from that point to where I wanted to be in order to kick-start the climax of the novel. This, this and this had to happen.

But the scene didn't want to be that. It read okay. It worked in its own way. But my gut was saying "Nope. This isn't right." I could have ignored that and let it go and kept writing, but I'd probably have ended up in a hopeless snarl anyway or wouldn't have really made the point I wanted to make.

And I thought I was doing really well because I was thinking "Okay, I can do a chapter about this and I can have him pop up here and say this and then she can go over here and hear that," etc. But it was like moving dolls around in a doll house. And it was all turning out to be expository dialogue that didn't have any real purpose behind it. Like nobody was saying things because they were feeling like they had to tell someone or were reacting to what someone had said or done. They were saying things because I stood them there and made them say it because I thought it would get us from A to B.

One thing that was going on is something I have a very bad habit of doing to my female characters. I tend to make them behave like therapists, where their sole function in certain scenes is to ask questions that will draw out the other (usually young male) character and get him to talk about his problems. This always ends up sounding really stupid because people just don't do this (unless they're being paid $250 an hour.) Teenaged girls whose hearts are aching and who want to fling themselves on their beds and weep don't stop and do this.

And then you've got this guy over here who ends up looking like a total jerk because he is unloading his problems and never noticing that the girl in front of him is hurting and confused. No, he's like someone with a social disorder who only wants to talk about their problems, it doesn't matter that you're a trembling basket case standing before them. Oh, he said things that seemed important and would make sense later when All was Revealed. But it was boring and had that repetitive feeling.*

So I went back and tried to think in terms of reaction. How would he react on seeing her all upset? How would she answer him out of her own emotional turmoil? They could still talk but I couldn't forget the other stuff that was going on.

And you know what? They didn't say what I wanted them to say, what I thought they needed to say. They said stuff that was better. And wow. Drama happened! Something I don't think I could have intellectually planned out without working it through this way. It will take the story to the climax with a bit of a ticking clock effect, rather than a series of polite conversations.

As my writer friend put it, when you feel something is off in a scene, step one should be to go back and try to connect with each character in the scene. Try to figure out where they are at that moment and what they are feeling.

But you have to listen to your gut. And I think that takes practice. See, I personally recognize three different gut reactions, and it's important to learn the distinctions between them, which ones to listen to and which to ignore. I've got one that goes "Ugh, I'm tired." And more frequently, one that goes "Ugh, I'm scared!" The first one you can either ignore or heed and take a nap. The second you just have to ignore because it has nothing useful to offer you.

But the third one goes "Uuuuuugh, this isn't working." It comes with a heavy feeling because it means you have to go back and rework something. It means you have to think again and rethinking something is hard. But if you don't listen to it, you're either going to end up in a dead end or a snarl and have to work your way back anyway. Or you're going to end up with something that could have had much more impact. It might be okay, but it could have been a lot better, that's what your gut is telling you.




*Even though I went back through the ms and couldn't find other places where he said the same thing, this feeling of repetition is an important clue to another problem I have, the tendency to not trust the reader, to want to bang them over the head with things. It felt repetitive because it was stuff the reader will figure out on their own. They don't need me to tell them. Over and over.

WIP Diary: Dip! Just Dip!

So this book is a romance. But it's 1810 and my MC is a rather innocent, prim little miss. So the romance is quite chaste. A glance, a word, palpitations, that sort of thing.

How is my little romance going to hold up to the steam of other YAs out there? So I'm trying to inject as much steam as I can, trying to step out of Jane Austen a little bit. But sometimes when I'm working on it, it feels quite like the first two and a half minutes of this clip from the film version of the musical Gypsy:




I've got this voice in my head, yelling "Dip! Just dip! Take something off!" Now, I'm getting palpitations writing it, so it feels pretty rooty tooty to me. But then, I am an old lady of German extraction. Are the scenes that seem steamy to me going to seem like the mere drop of a shoulder strap to experienced YA romance readers? We'll see.

WIP Diary: Words from the Unwise

So I know that chapter titles are not in vogue for YA novels. Possibly they never were and never will be. But for some reason my brain is keeping to itself, I started giving the chapters of this blessed WIP titles.

Oh, and not only titles, but clever (I thought, anyway) little bon mot-based puns. Sounds fun, right? Well, yes and no. See, we're at chapter thirty-six and counting. Do you know how hard it is to come up with thirty-six plus bon mot-based puns that apply to what's going on in each chapter??? Well, I hope you will take my advice and never find out! Don't do it! It's evillllll!

But in happier news, we are now making forward progress. Revision-on-the-run is done. Love interest properly (I hope) in place, and we are proceeding with new actual words. I love the new words. I dislike the revision, so I am a much happier me today. I like the thrill of the sense of discovery that writing new stuff gives me. I don't know where these people are going or what they're going to say or do and that fascinates me. Revision is a little too clinical and calculated for my tastes. I do it because I have to, but it always makes me feel like a mother, spitting on a hankie to wipe her child's face down before he goes to school.*

*Actually, that's not exactly how I feel, but I like the sound of that, so I'm going to leave it there for now. No revising today!!!

WIP Diary: Divine Inspiration

So I'm still working out these scenes between my MC and one of her love interests as per massively helpful comments by dear friend (see this entry.)

I'm not gonna lie. I've been having a bitch of a time with it. I was talking about it way back here on August 11th for pete's sake. Two crummy little scenes and three weeks down the road, I'm still struggling.

This is why I hate revision. (Although this isn't really revision. This is just patching things up so we can move forward. And don't give me any of that shitty-first-draft crap either. No can do. Certain things have to be in order for me to move forward. We all have our own methods. Which won't stop me from giving the shitty-first-draft line to other people. Ha! I don't know. Sometimes it isn't so much as a method as it is a freeing thought, the SFD thing. But I'm drifting. Back to my problems.)

Why I hate revision--and I've said this a billion times--I just have a terrible time rethinking what is already there. But when the original thinking has been incomplete, you have to come up with another approach.

One of the things that has always always helped me and that for some idiotic reason I keep forgetting is pictures. I'm a visual thinker. I see the story on a little movie screen inside my head. (I know. You wouldn't believe what goes on in there.) Many eons ago, I used to draw pictures of my characters. These days, I need photographs of real people. And it really has almost nothing to do with having the photographs so that I know what the characters look like. It's about knowing that they are real people.

It started with my first published novel Raising the Griffin. In the first few drafts, I had been head-over-heels in love with the idea of my MC being all tortured and stuff. And so those were the only reactions I drew out of him. You know, the sort of reactions one would have to being tortured. Miserable grumpiness. The kid didn't have a pleasant moment in nearly 300 pages. I loved him. Other people found him to be a pain in the ass.

But as hard as I tried, I could not see him any other way. He was my tortured darling. Maybe this goes back to my need to be in love with my characters. (Yes, I know. I don't have time for therapy.) I get a bit of tunnel vision about them. I could only see this one side of Alexei, as he had been created on that movie screen in my brain.

What it finally took was for me to fall in love with the face of a real person, someone who reminded me of my MC. In this case, Russian-born-Canadian-figure-skater-sometimes-A&F-model Fedor Andreev:



Look! He's smiling! I don't know how stupid this sounds, but that was all it took to pry open my closed little mind and insert the idea that Alexei could smile sometimes. That in spite of being in a miserable situation, nobody is miserable 24/7. (Okay, not many people. I could name one or two.)

But it's more than just that. It's like being on a jury in a murder trial and being shown a picture of the victim in happier times. The prosecution can talk and talk about the poor victim but all you see is the torture of the defendant, who is right in front of you. You see their face and you see their humanity. You need to see that for the victim, too, to remember that this was a person like you, going about their life, feeling happiness and sorry and above all, hope for the future.

So that's what I get out of pictures: the humanity of my characters. And so the other day, stuck stuck stuck on this blasted scene, unable to figure out how the character would really react, what he would say in the situation I'd plopped him in, I was idling on the internet, cleaning out my bookmarks and came across a forgotten webpage I'd bookmarked. A picture. A picture of a guy who looked the way I thought my MC's love interest looked. (This is British actor Joseph Morgan. And no, it never really crosses my mind to consider how these people might feel about me hijacking their faces for my own ends, which actually sounds pretty callous now that I've typed it out, but anyway.)



Ta da! Inspiration. And divine, isn't he? Sigh. But no, really. It isn't about that! I swear. It's about looking into that face and seeing a person, a whole and rounded person. This only works with a face that suggests that kind of activity and life. Here, it's in the eyes. He's got things to tell you. That's what I need out of my character and that's what this photo gives me.

WIP Diary: Fitting In

This is not a post about the Hunger Games or Catching Fire*.

So now that I've figured out the proper heart of my story, I've had to go back through and try to find places for a couple of much-needed scenes that will show the reader what to want for Eddy and also (I dearly hope and desire) move the story toward the climax and bring about the proper ending.

The problem is, this is--by my writing standards anyway--a bloody big book. And it's not even finished yet. We are at 372 pages at the moment, nearing 94,000 words. It is.....difficult to keep every one of 94,000 words straight in one's head. Very hard to remember who said what to whom and where and when and who else was there when it was said and how whosis reacted.

I've outlined the story on a calendar, a trick I learned from my FSG editor, who made me account for the whereabouts of the MC in Funny How Things Change on a day-to-day basis. So in anticipation of having to do that again, I figured it would just be easier to keep track from the start and it has saved me countless hours of rooting back through the ms trying to find what happened when.

And of course, HOSvision is a big help.

This is always one of the hardest things for me, to reimagine what is already there. To take scenes that already exist and alter them, imagine them happening in a different way, in this case, allowing Eddy to have meaningful conversations with this guy. So I have to move everyone around in different ways and try to bring this guy into a scene where he didn't exist before.

And the problem with that--for a linear writer in particular, someone who starts at the beginning and writes the story sort of "as it happens--is that you get this sense that the story is "flowing" and going back in and monkeying with it interrupts that flow. What Eddy says here at the end of this scene moves her into the kitchen where she has a scene with this person and that's very important. If I try to put in another scene with this guy, I lose the point of the last thing she said over there that moved her over here. So sometimes it's hard to let go of what's there and try to get it all flowing again.

And then there's always a little line or something that gets messed up by the addition that I'm thinking "Oh no! I really LIKE that! It works so well! I can't lose that!" Or something. Or I just can't make myself see it in any other way. It's like trying to reshape a clay sculpture after it's been fired. You have to get out the chisel.

Not to mention, then you have to go all through the rest of the thing and see if there are going to be any repercussions--even slight ones--to adding that scene. Because see, she was really mad at this guy and that carried through something like fifteen chapters. But if they have this talk, then I have to go through and take out all of the little bits where she sniffed and turned up her nose whenever he walked by.

But anyway, I think I have actually found two spots in this ms where I can see a conversation happening. So now I'm going to go see if they will.



*Heh heh. I discovered that my blog gets a ton more hits if I mention any of those titles.

WIP Diary Archive Link

Getting ready to make this a mirror blog to my livejournal. In prep thereto, I refer you to this archive of posts on my livejournal regarding my current work-in-progress, affectionately known as HOS. Not telling what that stands for because it's a spoiler. Which kind of makes it a bad choice for a title, but that's where it stands right now. Don't ask me to be too logical in a first draft!!!