Month: March 2014

Toss It, I Say

/ Lisa / 134 Comments

Many years ago while driving down the freeway, my son pulled his sock off, opened the window, and held it out. In his mind, the wind would fill the sock like a balloon (which he’d lost out the window earlier) and slow the car. Instead, there’s a little white sock out there on the shoulder of a road, slowly decomposing.

I remembered that today, thinking about my writing process. So picture me speeding down the highway, ripping the following pages out of a rule book and sending them flying.

Writers must outline. Rip, gone.
Characters must be developed before you start the story (or writers must use character dossiers). Rip, really gone.
Keep your theme/premise in mind as you write. Also gone.
Know the motivations of your characters. That one went very fast.
Write every day. Rip, with laughter.
Write a thousand words a day. Rip, with hysterical laughter.

Why am I destroying this rule book? For years I’ve felt guilty that I don’t follow what I perceive to be the laws of writing. On one hand, I know that no writer conforms to all of these. And yet if you read books on writing, or attend conferences, you come away with guilt if you don’t.

I’d like to conform to at least one of the rules. Well, I probably do. Beginning, middle end. Show don’t tell. Eliminate the passives. Okay, quit laughing, those of you who have edited my stuff. I said I conform; I didn’t say I was successful.

Yet somehow I manage to finish a novel length story, and hey, that’s something to be proud of. Well, okay, that story might need some editing, or lots of editing, but at least it’s done.

When I write, I do so as the first reader. I have no idea where the story is going to take me when I sit down and pen the opening line. I have no idea who this character is that I just met. She’ll show me as we go along. I have a vision of the ending, but no idea how to get there when I start.

A good friend of mine calls this organic writing. I think it’s more like jumping off the granite Index Town Wall with no parachute or climbing ropes.

Whatever the process is called, I’m not the only writer out there who creates this way. And I do believe I’m done apologizing to my inner critic. So I’m going to admit it publicly and see if any other writers in the back of the room sheepishly raise their hands and admit the same thing.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying following the rules is a bad thing. A friend who outlines gets her books done much sooner, with a lot less editing, and she’s an incredible writer. But for those like me, let’s quit feeling like rules equal competency, and roll that window down.

Morning Star climbing route

Morning Star climbing route

Please Prompt Me

/ Lisa / 7 Comments

I am tasked with coming up with some writing prompts. I’m promptly challenged.

This is a topic I’ve talked about before, but keep coming back to. A wonderful, artistic friend, Lisa, over at satsumabug.com sent me writing prompts on a regular basis and I had fun with those. What I found, though, was that I picked the topics that interested me rather than ones that challenged me as a writer. I’d grab something fun, scribble a little, and feel like I met my obligation. I learned that those fun little interludes were great for warming up my brain so I could then dive into whatever my work in progress was. Rather like priming the pump.

I can also see lots of uses for them. To warm you up, as I mentioned above. To make you think about specific ways to write something you might normally struggle with, such as setting, description, dialog, etc. To force you to try a different style than what your normally do, such as present tense, first person, and so on. So I see them as beneficial even though, as I confessed above, I might not take advantage of these as I should.

One conference I attended gave us prompts with five minutes to write each one. For a half hour session she gave us four prompts, which meant she only had ten minutes that she had to actually speak to us. Supposedly the prompts were to encourage us to free-style write, to release the subconscious. Personally, my problem has always been more reining in that rampaging subconscious and imagination. For this upcoming event, I definitely do not want the audience looking at prompts as filler for speakers who have nothing to say.

A more relevant question for me at the moment though, is what should the prompt be? Reminds me of a creative writing course I took many, many years ago. The teacher told us to write about a peanut. I thought that was silly until I wrote and had fun. But really, trying to come up with an original prompt that will stimulate the imagination, not be something that’s been done thousands of times before, and that actually challenges a writer…well, I’m clueless.

Though I’m fascinated by asking writers to write a scene in a tense they normally don’t write in, because writing in present tense is so difficult for the majority of writers. I do believe, pondering prompts in this blog has given me at least one idea.

And I’d love your thoughts on prompts in general.

Word Conundrum

/ Lisa / 7 Comments

Which comes first, the final edit or the readers?

I have become hooked on the Game of Throne series and noticed that there are places where I skim. In some spots there will be paragraphs of names, as in before a battle starts, when the author lists everyone who’s there. I don’t really care; I want to see the fight. Plus, with all the names I’ll figure out who they are if they show up again.

The point is though, that I skim whole sections. And there’s that old adage that if the reader skims, that should be the part the writer leaves out.

And there’s my dang conundrum. By the time readers are skimming and making note of that in reviews, the book is out of my hands. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hopefully an editor is honest enough to point out the places readers might be tempted to skip, but obviously that isn’t foolproof. On top of that, what one reader finds boring another will not. If you left out stuff everyone skims you’d probably end up with two pieces of cardboard with great cover art and just empty space in between.

That leads to the old dilemma about editing: how to stop. It used to be once a book was published there was nothing more you could do. If there was a typo or a long passage people skipped, it was there for posterity, or at least until the next printing. These days, the temptation is to take the book back, make changes, and republish it.

Think about the chaos that could cause. Multiple versions of your book. And think about the temptation to revise in a series. You could be working on book three or book ten and realize you should have added a character sooner, or tossed in something in book two that would allow you to justify what you want to do to your character in book eight. Readers would be so confused. A clue that existed in version two of book one isn’t in version three, and on and on. I imagine the writer would be pretty confused, too.

However even though it’s possible these days to edit forever, obviously you shouldn’t. Still though, there are those skimming sections that I bet authors wish all the readers pointed out before publication. It’s too bad we can’t do a preliminary publication, similar to an audience screening of a movie. Something where more readers than just five or six would weigh in.

Oh well. Meandering brain this rainy afternoon.