Once Upon A Time: On Henry

January 24, 2013 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I got the first season of OUAT on DVD for Xmas and have been doing a rewatch. Simultaneously, I’ve been plotting the second draft of my novel using the hero’s journey as a rough template, so I had the concept of the Guide archetype in my head while watching.

Assuming Emma Swan is the Hero of OUAT, the first Guide she encounters, at least in season one, is her son, Henry. He has the “Once Upon A Time” book, and he is constantly interpreting events and people for Emma (also, for Mary-Margaret/Snow White, and Graham/the Huntsman) in terms of the book so that she can see herself in the larger picture of what she is supposed to accomplish as the “savior.”

Spoilers through the end of season 1, with some unspoiled speculation

Writing update, week of… January so far

January 14, 2013 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I suppose I didn’t have an actual recorded New Year’s resolution to report about my writing to the webosphere, but I nevertheless thought that might be something I’d do for accountability purposes, now that I don’t have a reader waiting for new material as I did in my first draft. Somehow, though, the first two weeks of January passed before it occurred to me to do so. It is now mid-January. Mid-January! How did *that* happen?

Well, at least it feels like mid-January ought to feel. Brrr.

So, on the novel-writing front: there has been no writing. Which is not to say there has been no work on the novel. I have been doing plot-reinvisioning (work left over from PlotWriMo last month), and this past week, I have been doing research to feed the world-building muse I “played by ear” or something in the first draft. Short story long, I was not happy with the story-world rules I had going in that draft. They were not well thought out, and now they need to be before I spill another pixel on plotting.

I may, at some point, do some free writing just to stretch the writing muscles a bit, since I haven’t done much “writing” writing since the end of October.

Why is it I feel guilty–like I’m not “working on my novel” if I am not writing the text of the story?

Writing goals 2013

January 2, 2013 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

The problem I’m having with setting a writing goal for the coming year is that there is no one task I do everyday when I’m writing. Not even putting words on a page. Which is why a daily word count goal is meaningless. Jeez, if my goal was word count alone, I could do that with a manuscript like that creepo was typing up in The Shining. Writing is also not (for me) a linear process of going from page one to page 341 (or whatever). I don’t write start to finish. Sometimes, the end has to come first, or the middle, because those sections help determine the beginning. So setting a goal of “one chapter a week” or every two weeks or every month is also not workable.

I hop between composing, editing, plotting, and research depending on where the energy of my creative focus is that day and what my story currently needs. Yeah, I edit while composing. Bad me, no cookie. I go back and rewrite previously-written stuff when I’ve changed my mind about how it should go because sometimes FIXING old stuff is psychologically necessary for moving forward with newer stuff that contradicts it.

So I think the best daily goal is a time chunk. Two and a half hours a day, six days a week. Which comes out to only 15 hours a week.

My main goal in January is re-visioning my MacGuffins. The “obscure, powerful” archeological artifacts that are at the center of a story that is really science fiction, not fantasy. They can’t be supernatural–they need to be Clarkesque technology, but they can’t be ridiculously complicated Clarkesque technology, either. So much of January will be taken up by research and contemplation, and very little of the writing I do on this task will end up in the 100,000 final words of the story.

And yet, my goal is to have a draft worthy of beta-reading and possible publication by the end of the calendar year. Onward.

365 Things

January 1, 2013February 1, 2013 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

One of my New Year’s resolutions is less a resolution than an experiment. I am going to try to rid myself of one object, thing, trinket, machine, doodad, tchotchke, whatever a day for the next year.

There are not many people who would accuse me of having a cluttered house–I don’t think it’s cluttered–and yet, I still wonder what it would *feel like* to live in a house that isn’t full of what are basically useless distractions. Junk you save thinking it will “have a use someday” that sits there for years serving no purpose whatsoever, practical or aesthetic or entertainment.

The ground rules are pretty simple.

(1) The day’s discard can be one object (say, one issue of a magazine), or a group of objects (all issues of that magazine),
(2) It has to go in the recycling or be donated to a charity/or Good Will, unless it’s really truly biodegradable junk,
(3) It can’t be anything I’m getting rid of simply to replace it with a newer thing that performs the same function.
(4) It can’t be anything with a natural short life span, like fruit peels or paper towels.

So today’s Thing is

(1) a basket full of silk flowers and plants.

Writing plan 2013

December 31, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

It’s Monday morning, December 31st, 2012. Do you know what your writing plan for 2013 is? I recently read an article by Dean Wesley Smith on the topic, and his take(s) on it were (1) clearly for full-time writers, and, also, (2) insane.

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=8367

But I am not here to be his poster girl for failure, making excuses why I can’t follow any of his suggested plans (words per hour? Seriously? How can anyone even have a ballpark figure of “how many new words they can write per hour” when no hour is ever equal to any other in (a) state of mind (b) state of life (c) level of distractions (d) level of carpal tunnels syndrome… Um, what?)

Word count goals, at any rate, never functioned for me. I can set a goal of say, 250 words a day, but quality and quantity are not the same thing–I mean how many of us have writtenshit during NaNo just to “win” and come out of that with only a few scraps we can actually use?

Smith has one suggestion that makes more sense to me–a “production goal.” Instead of counting words, you set a goal of what you want to produce. This, of course, depends on having not just an end-of-the-year goal, but a weekly goal, maybe even a daily goal, that you can stay focused on so your progress towards the big picture doesn’t weigh you down or discourage you.

He apparently writes short stories. One a week (what). I am a novelist, and I want to write the second draft of my novel. This goal does not mean just cleaning up the old draft, though, since as I indicated elsewhere, that draft turned out to really be more a first draft of the second book in a trilogy, rather than the first. So my job is to take the elements from the first draft that belong in the first book and give them their own structure (something I’ve been working on in December), then write that story in full.

And, at the same time, fix the stuff in the first draft I was never happy with, which is the real challenge. Every first draft has a universe-given right to SUCK. Second drafts need to rise above that.

So, fine, I will write my second draft. The next question becomes, do I write it in (1) a month, (2) three months, (3) six months, (4) 9 months, (5) a year? There are different pros and cons to each of these scenarios, but this is really where you have to Know Your Own Brain. And my brain works best when I give it space. This is what I’ve learned in thirty years of creative writing. I work, and work, and work, and work, fingers to the keyboard like a maniac, get frustrated because some story element is eluding me, get up out of my chair and do something else.

Then, days later, when I’m doing something Really Awkward like showering or trying to fall asleep, or lying with a dozen needles poking out of my skin, the answer comes to me. Or an answer to a question I never thought to ask comes to me. And I have to give my brain the space to work this way. Saying “I will write this draft in six months” and setting writing time goals and all the like is all well and good–priming the pump or whatever–but the best ideas will not come on demand.

Still, a year seems too long. I’d like to light the fire under my butt a little. These things drag on too long.

Well, as with all great ideas, I need to give my brain time to think about this. Brain, you have until the end of the week to come up with a great writing plan for 2013. Hop to it.

The Plan

November 3, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I am in the throes of NaNo-Envy, but I am still happy not to be doing NaNo. Yes, a contradiction, but I love the social energy this month brings in what is often such a solitary activity. OTOH, I am feeling under the weather, and I finished the first draft of my novel last Sunday, so… not great timing for me this year.

But I am in earnest planning mode on the second draft and the general outline for the trilogy of novels that is going to emerge from my first draft. I’ve actually been thinking of turning the novel into a series for a while now, because I see a lot of possibilities and stories in the world I am building (still building. I think my story-world was a bit thin in the first draft).

Back in July, I came across an online writing school, the bill-paying day-job of author Holly Lisle, http://novelwritingschool.com/. Other than a one-on-one writing coach and writer’s workshops, I have not taken any “writing classes” in the sense of instruction since I was a teenager/twenty-something. At that age, I was obsessed with learning “how to write fiction” and so never did any actual writing. Experience is the best teacher, IMO. I learned more from writing my first novel, Dis/inhibition, and The Destroyer series than I could have learned in a hundred writing classes. But I figured Lisle’s “How To Write A Series” course might have a few pointers.

I got through the first two of four lessons in July, then RL got in the way. The lesson videos and exercises guide you through the process of identifying what kind of series you will write, planning how it will unfold, etc (although I must say the video transcripts included are FULL of typos….)

So finishing that course is one goal I have set for my post-novel time. I also plan to work through The Plot Whisperer Workbook. Both of these are merely tools to help me focus on plotting and locating strong and weak story elements for the purpose of revision and expansion.

I reviewed the first two lessons of Lisle’s course this week, and realized quickly that a lot of the course exercises could benefit from me gathering together all the “future draft” notes I tucked away while working on the first draft–changes to plot points and characters I envisioned, ideas for expansion. So that is what I am working on now. I’ve got some good ideas brewing, and a LOT of research work ahead of me in physics, mythology, and random bits.

I just finished the first draft of my novel

October 28, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

Woo-f***ing-hoo!!

But yes, alas, that means I am officially not doing NaNo this year, ’cause October has been my NaNoWriMo–a non-stop writing-and-editing spree that began each morning as soon as I woke up , stopped only so I could go to the stress-hell that has been work this month, and resumed the minute I got home until I collapsed in bed.

I think part of the reason I managed to whack out the rest of this story in one month is that work has been so sucky, writing distracted me from dwelling on it. Which, bonus. But I overdid it. I have been sick with the flu for over a week now. Still working at my job from home–blast modern remote login computers.

I crawled into my actual place of employment for meetings twice last week and couldn’t even sit up for the length of them.

Now I am all jealous of my friends prepping for NaNo. Not because I’m dying to spew out 1,667 words a day, but because it’s fun to be part of all that energy. My Nov and Dec will be spent planning the second draft of my novel (and posting on that process, hopefully). And it will need planning–lots and lots of planning, ’cause for Pantsers, the first draft is really the “outline.” It is the raw material out of which the “actual” novel is formed.

And there was so much I wanted to include in this draft I didn’t have room for, I slowly concluded it was three books instead of one. So now I need to plan out three books. And then, hopefully before the new year (but I’m not pushing it), start the “second” draft of the first book.

NoNoWriMo

September 29, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo, gets a bad rap. I certainly used to knock it. What could you possibly accomplish in the attempt to pound out 50,000 words of new original fiction in one 30-day span, other than incoherent drivel?

I still sort of think if I attempted the above exactly as stated, that’s what I’d get. Of course, I’m a pantser, not given to overly pre-planning new writing before I start it, because the act of writing itself always transforms whatever I thought to write into what I really wanted to write. Your mileage may vary.

NaNoWriMo is still considered by many the playground of enthusiastic amateurs. Still, I’ve come to like it and look forward to it. It’s like an annual party for the novelist crowd.

I was tempted into “NaNo,” as my friends call it, watching the social energy they harnessed at that time of year–how one person’s effort made it a little easier for someone else to put the effort in themselves. My friends aren’t the type to actually gather in rooms together on November evenings with laptops and paper pads like some participants (not my preference either–I find the presence of others distracting when I’m writing). They mostly blogged about their progress and process, but the result was much the same.

I have now “NaNoed” three times in the last six years. And every year I’ve participated, I picked a project I was already working on. One time it was a few episodes of a fan fiction WIP. Another time, a fleshing-out of an original story I’d been working on for about a year. Some days, I’d let words I wrote before November slip into my word count. This year, I had fully planned to set a goal of writing only 250 words a day instead of the recommended 1,667 that gets you to 50,000 after thirty days.

In other words, I’ve learned to find NaNo useful by never following the rules. Not exactly, anyway. And the folks who bring you NaNoWriMo, the Office of Letters and Light, have embraced the people who do that. They have a forum board just for the “NaNo Rebels” to hang out in together.

Alas, this year, it doesn’t look like I’ll be in a position to do NaNoWriMo. I am scrambling to finish the next-to-last chapter of the first draft of my novel before the end of the month, and I don’t see the final chapter going any faster. I think October will get eaten up by it. I had planned to use October to plan out the second draft. My suspicion is this first draft is going to end up being expanded into three separate novels, which will require actual outlining and plotting and Time to figure out. I won’t be ready to start writing the second draft of book one by November lst.

I’m kind of bummed about this. The social energy of NaNo has got to be, like quadrupled interstellar on Twitter, which I’ve only just started using this year. Maybe I will try to blog more about the Planning and Plotting process as it is going on, and post snippets in later months when I have them.