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!!!
Monday, September 06, 2010
Thursday, September 02, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
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!!!
Saturday, September 15, 2007
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