Chasing the muse...literally

Or tempting her (him?) or...something.

So...the big writing puzzle for me at the moment is how to speed up the generation of 'ah ha!' moments.

My writing tends to go through fits and starts: weeks or months where I already know what comes next, interspersed with periods of 'I've no idea where this is going.'

So I back away and do other things (sometimes for weeks) and eventually, while I'm doing something completely unrelated to writing, I suddenly have it -- the perfect thing to happen next or shake things up. I love those moments. I had one back in December concerning a villain and it was awesome.

The thing is, that method of writing (literally sitting and waiting for the muse to wake up and give me ideas) works well for fanfic or anytime you're not on deadline. But if my eventual goal is to be published, I need to figure out how to goose the muse into working on my time schedule, not hers.

Brainstorming, where I sit and think, 'what if this happens' or 'what if she does that' can work sometimes. Other times, it just causes me to panic: "Oh, no. There's nothing there. I've written myself into a corner. Ack!'

Part of the problem, too, are the distractions of life. I have no problem scheduling time to write. But sitting down and staring off into space, waiting for the muse to show makes me itchy. "I should be paying the bills. Or reading that new book I checked out from the library. Or updating my blog. I can't just sit here and not do anything."

It's particularly a problem given that those cherished 'ah-ha' moments have most frequently come when I'm doing something else. That seems to reinforce the idea that sitting and staring off into space is a waste of time.

So I've been experimenting with ways of encouraging the creative center of my brain. I've noticed that doing something else (driving, for example) can free that part of me to come up with ideas. I've also realized that doodling during work meetings seems to have the same result. So yesterday, I spent some time listening to music and doodling while asking myself 'what comes next?' No 'ah ha' moments were forthcoming, but I'm going to continue with it.

What do you do to generate ideas when you're stuck?

Abandoning profundity as a blog requirement

I'm still here, and an apology is clearly in order. I started this blog, then let it die. Nothing too unusual there, as I've seen stats indicating a great many blogs are began and then abandoned. That makes my neglect worse, somehow, because I knew that going in and didn't want to be someone who did that.

But life interfered in the form of a class I enrolled in for work (which took over my life much more than I'd expected) along with some other distractions. (Including a belief that when time was at a premium, actually writing was more important than blogging about writing.)

And then, too, part of the problem was my own expectations: I felt a writing blog, by an aspiring writer, should be Profound. Should have something more valuable to say than "I wrote today" (or not.) Since most of the time, profundity on my part is off hiding with the muse, that made it hard to come up with posts, too.

But if I'm lacking in profound thoughts about writing, I have lots of questions. So as I renew my commitment to the blog, I confess it's probably going to be more musing about those questions than anything else. Hopefully, either through the writing of the questions themselves, or in the comments made by others (assuming anyone is still reading this) I'll find clues to the answers.

Metaphors for writing

When I first started writing, I remember remarking to someone that it felt like what I've assumed learning to juggle would feel like. There were all these things to keep track of at once: plot, subplot, character, dialogue, description, showing vs. telling, active voice vs. passive...

As a metaphor, I think that's still pretty accurate (even if I've since realized that you can focus on one of those aspects at a time -- that's part of the point of revisions) but I realized this week that I have another one as well: writing is like assembling a puzzle.

My current project is Karen Miller's fault. I'd written a fanfic, a short story I'd done to satisfy a question I'd long had about a particular situation a man and woman might find themselves in. (In this case, the fandom was secondary to the question of the story.) And after reading it, Karen told me she thought I could/should turn it into a novel.

I'd been assuming I'd write a contemporary novel (the 'write what you read' isn't very helpful for me, since the only genre I don't read is horror) and this would have to be fantasy or historical. I chose fantasy because it was a better fit.

With a fantasy story, which comes first -- the world or the characters? I decided first to focus on the worldbuilding, convinced that whoever the characters turned out to be, they would be heavily influenced by the world they inhabited. (We're heavily influenced by our backgrounds -- why wouldn't fictional characters be?) Building a world that was sufficiently different from the fandom I started out in then took a while.

The heroine fell into place pretty easily, given the overall story idea and the worldbuilding. But the hero has been more of a question. On the plotter/pantzer scale, I'm somewhat of a 'plotzer' -- I start out knowing the characters, how the story begins and ends...and nothing at all of the middle. So I find myself thinking about the hero and realizing that he could go this way, or he could go that way, (in terms of his goals and motivations, and the conflicts that grow out of them) or, possibly, even a third way. And whichever one I choose will drastically affect the story. It will still start the same and end the same, but...different story.

And that's what I was thinking when I realized I was approaching the whole thing as a puzzle. If the hero is like this, it will fit with this piece of the plot in that way; if he's more this other way, it will cause the subplot to go in this direction...

Nothing really earthshaking in any of that from a thoughts-on-writing perspective, though it illustrates, I think, how very different one writer's approach can be to things like plot and characters.

Oh, and I'm getting closer to figuring out who the hero is. I like puzzles -- did I mention that?

Still here, getting back on track

My apologies for appearing to have abandoned this blog. I didn't, and it certainly wasn't my intention to go so long without updating it. (In particular, I didn't want to foist yet another blog on the world that would be started, then dropped, the author never being heard from again.)

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I had to move in June -- from the place I'd lived for eight years to a smaller place. There are a lot of advantages to where I'm living, but much of May and June were taken up by sorting, tossing, packing, moving, and unpacking. With a couple of out-of-town family events (a graduation and a wedding) thrown in for good measure. Erg.

But things are starting to calm down now. I'm mostly unpacked, if not yet feeling completely 'together.' I've started writing again, and am working on a post or two for this blog, my goal being to post at least several times a week. Expect the first 'real' post by this weekend.

Thank you for your patience...

Writers who don't read

Another blog I've been following is fantasy author Glenda Larke's:

http://glendalarke.blogspot.com/

In today's post, she addresses a (presumably fairly recent) phenomenon of people who want to be writers, but who don't read. Glenda says many wise things in response, but the one thing I'd like to add is that I don't think people who don't read can be good writers.

Maybe these people love stories (presumably visual ones from TV and the film industry, since TV is such a fixture in so many lives) and assume writing a novel is somehow easier than writing a screenplay. Or perhaps they're part of that percentage of people who think authors are all automatically rich, and how hard can it be to write a novel, after all?

This theme even came up this week in a library based comic strip I read, Unshelved:

http://www.unshelved.com/

In the past week's strips, a mother drags her teen son to the library, because he doesn't like to read. The librarian tries mightily to interest him in one genre or the other, and fails. When he finally asks, 'but why don't you like to read?" the teen reveals he doesn't have the time -- he's too busy editing his manuscript. (Which, according to the librarian, is 'really good.')

I don't buy it. I don't think you can develop the necessary facility with words that writing requires if you're not actually reading them. It's that simple.

But perhaps a caveat is in order: one NYT bestselling author I know of is dyslexic. She types her stories, but has an assistant check for misspellings and typos, and while I think she does read, most of her story intake comes via audio books. But I'm certain she considers herself a reader.

So...thoughts? Comments? Can you write a novel without being a reader and loving books?

Playing catch-up

Well. I've had A Week. Insert just about any adjective before 'week' and it would probably work ('busy,' 'insane,' 'good,' 'exhausting'...)

But I've got a new place to live, the lease is signed, and I have six weeks or so before I actually have to move. This means, among other things, a chance to sort through clutter, catch up on various tasks, and maybe even get some writing done.

One of the catch-up tasks is some follow-up posts on this blog. I realized just this week that several people replied to one of my early posts on characters. I didn't respond because I didn't know the comments were there -- I thought I'd set things so I'd get email updates when people responded, and apparently hadn't. (I believe I've done so, now, but have been checking for myself rather than trusting Blogger to do it for me.) Anyway, sg1jb, Lex, and Marina all said interesting things I want to follow up on, and I'll do so once I've finished posting about the writer's conference.

It's the writing, stupid

I'm working on posts about a couple of the workshops I attended, but in the meantime, here are some rather rambling thoughts on what felt like the theme of the weekend. It seems strange to me that reminding writers to focus on the writing is necessary, but such seems to be the case.

When I first began to consider writing for publication, I joined an email loop dedicated to a particular publishing house that was targeted by new writers, mostly because they accept unagented work. I lurked on that list for several years, and learned a great deal about both writing and the publishing industry. (Published authors frequented the list, so it wasn't just a group of unpublished writers confusing one another.)

One thing I learned is that unpublished writers look for magic bullets. For some, it’s rules – not of grammar, but of writing: "no headhopping! no more than one POV per scene! It's a RULE. You can't *ever* be published if you break this rule!" -- ignoring that there are very successful authors who do just that. There are other such 'rules,' and from what I can see, they give writers a false sense of confidence: "if I follow all the rules, I'll be published.'

The reality is that most of those ‘rules’ are good things to follow, particularly for new writers. It’s not that a skilled writer can’t change POV in the middle of a scene if the story calls for it, it’s that such switches are difficult to pull off and someone still struggling with the basic mechanics of writing is better off not attempting it.

There are many such 'rules', including genre conventions, (i.e., in a romance, the hero and heroine *must* meet in the first few pages of the novel) that take on a life of their own among writing loops, as authors grab hold of them the way a drowning man might grab hold of a life preserver. I’ve seen flame wars break out over some of this stuff. Seriously. "But it's a RULE," they howl.

Something similar is the way in which writers (and not always new ones) see signing with an agent as the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail: "I can't sell my book, but if I can only find an agent, they'll be able to do so."

Well, maybe. There are publishing houses that only accept agented work. But there are many ways of getting your work in front of an editor, even of a house that doesn't take unagented work. Conferences and contests are two of the best.

This attitude of, ‘if I do X, I’ll get published.” was everywhere I turned this weekend. On Friday night, there was a Q&A with the three headlining authors at the conference (all three New York Times bestselling authors) and inevitably what I think of as The Agent Question came up: “How did you get your agent?”

The authors exchanged baffled looks (though why, I can’t imagine, when I know they’ve heard the question before) and two of them then offered their stories of how they met their agents. (One sent query letters to agents picked randomly out of a guide because she didn’t know any better; the other got her agent after she’d sold her first manuscript.)

The third didn’t answer the question as asked. Instead, she said that the desperate hunt that a lot of new writers go on for an agent is misguided, in her opinion, and is really about finding validation for their work. It’s not that agents are bad, or can’t help you – they can. But agents don’t sell books. Good writing sells books.

Let’s repeat that: Agents don’t sell books. Good writing sells books.

In other words, take much of the energy you’re putting on finding an agent and put it into becoming a better writer, whether through starting a new manuscript, or finding a critique group, or taking a class. Don’t stop hunting for an agent completely, but don’t let it be your focus.

This came across again and again all through the conference. At the editor’s Q&A, all three editors repeatedly said that they’re looking for good writing. Even the two that don’t accept unagented work said that if they see good writing (through a contest, for example) they get excited. They want to find something they think will sell, just as much as we want to sell it.

Another way of getting your work in front of an editor (or an agent, for that matter) is charity auctions, where a critique or reading of a partial manuscript by a professional is auctioned off, either through a conference or through eBay. This is NOT the same thing as paying an agent to look at your work, which is generally regarded as a scam being perpetuated on desperate writers by unethical individuals. Rather, these are bona fide, respected editors and agents offering their time (and your money) to charity in hopes that they might find that next author/novel they’re looking for.

Why do I mention that in a post about not looking for a magic bullet of publishing? Because it illustrates, I think, that editors and agents do want to find good novels. It's their fondest dream. If you have a quality, well-written manuscript, they want to find you as much as you want to find them.

But don't get hooked into the temptation of thinking, 'if I can only find an agent, I'll sell,' because there are no magic bullets in selling a book. Good writing sells books.