NaNoWriMo Day 16

November 16, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

New words: 1,702
Total words: 30,920
Goal: 50,000

30920 / 50000
(61.84%)

NaNo notes: I sometimes wonder what people must make of my entries on writing, assuming they make anything of them at all. I must appear to have the most convoluted writing process ever. I can’t just do as other writers/NaNoers seem to do, say, “I have this idea for a story…” and then sit down to write it, challenged by coming up with good characters and plot to fit my idea. That is such a logical, top-down, blueprint-for-a-forest approach. No, I have no forest blueprint, no idea for a novel, I have only this urge to write that needs an outlet, and no idea what I want to say.

I must simply start planting trees willy-nilly, trees and rocks and random deers and other things one might find in a forest, then test my feelings about each of them and eliminate the things I don’t like, then generate some more. Eventually, a forest will emerge, and it will have some sort of theme/story to tell/thing to say that was buried deep in my subconscious in a way I have no direct access to.

Or if you prefer another metaphor, writing for me is like an archeological excavation. A Neolithic archeological excavation. I have to pull my story up out of the ground, piece by piece, and be able to tell the difference between stone tools and plain old stones that can be tossed away. After many years, I might have a story/ancient dwelling site. Or I may end up with a pile of rocks.

“What do you want to write about?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure that out after I write it.”

That about sums it up.

NaNoWriMo Day 12

November 12, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

New words: 1,928
Total words: 23,889
Goal: 50,000

23889 / 50000
(47.78%)

Quote-worthy snippet:

And when she came down, when she had her mind back, when things weren’t torment, restlessness licking like flame under her feet, crawling under her skin, buzzing in her head, not leaving her alone, she could see the havoc she’d wrought, and feel only supreme helplessness to stop it.

Because all the medications in the world couldn’t stop it–not the ones the so-called ‘professionals’ gave her, and not the ones she found herself.

NaNo notes: Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve marinated in the story this month long enough for words to come to me spontaneously *after* I’ve shut down the computer and closed the laptop and wandered away from my chair. Yesterday morning, I scribbled some stuff on a notepad at work soon after I arrived there, just because my laptop wasn’t up and running quite yet. Then, yesterday evening as I crawled into bed, another scene (dialogue, it’s almost always dialogue) played out in my head, forcing me to head back out to my writing chair, find a paper pad, and scribble it all down before sleep took most of it away. Sure enough, this morning, I’d forgotten I even wrote it, and only went looking for that pad as fatigue made me cringe in despair at the thought of having to feed the damned word count today. But my hastily scribbled bits could be typed into the computer and expanded on. A lot. I do really write too much. Which makes NaNo a Big Giant Enabler.

But honestly, writing stuff that isn’t pure crap is hard. It’s really hard. So you take those moments when the quality is effortlessness as a gift, because they come from a part of your brain that won’t perform on demand and that is much more intuitive and in touch with what you want to say.

Mulling out loud

November 7, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 18 Comments

So in the shaking-loose that is becoming a theme for NaNo ’10, I came up with this notion in the wee hours of this morning that I should merge two characters. Two major characters. I have this one character who is more than likely going to be the main character of at least the first book in what I hope will be a series, and my biggest hurdle with her is she is, frankly, dull. A couple of days’ writing of her going through her deceased grandmother’s belongings with warm sentimentality is making me cringe at the thought of being shelved with the feel-good chick-lit.

I needed to make her more interesting, give her complications, and the thought occurred to me for story-line reasons that she could have rejection issues. But I already have another, much more interesting character, with rejection issues. So then, I thought, “merge.” But then the question becomes, how?

The new hybrid character would be an archeology grad student like Boring Girl. But Boring Girl is white (possibly Jewish?) and Interesting Girl is asian. I’ve written Boring Girl as straight. Interesting Girl is gay. If I merge them, I either lose a POC character, or I lose one of the only straight characters in my novel. Having at least one major character be straight is sort of important to me so my story doesn’t get pigeon-holed as lesbian lit, but I think her straightness is part of the reason Boring Girl is boring. To me. I really don’t care about her love life or love life issues, unless she were to get together with a really unusually interesting guy character, which I did sort of have planned for her (but I haven’t gotten there yet).

Okay, so maybe she’s a bisexual asian archeology student with rejection issues. But then I’m stuck on her rejection issues. Some are family-related, but in Interesting Girl’s old back story, it was mostly that women were constantly breaking up with her. If I make her straight or bi, and have it that men are constantly breaking up with her, suddenly, it’s a romance movie cliche. Or maybe, both genders are constantly breaking up with her. That would be pretty pathetic. In an interesting way.

A wretched hive of scum and….

November 5, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 39 Comments

I have had some issues with my new story that have made my work on it…intermittent over the past two years. One of the biggest hurdles has been I don’t like my antagonists. Somehow, they have become paranoid minute-men taking potshots at invisible spirit-folk they fear just out of fear of what is unknown/out of their control, and no matter how justified I tried to make my antagonists (there really *are* some bad spirit-folk out there!), or personal their motivations (“I saw my own bruthah kilt by one of them!!1!”) they still seem horribly boring to me.

It’s like I just need there to be bad guys for my good guys to fight, and so I have set up these prop bad-guys, but I don’t care about them. And you know that will mean the reader won’t care about them, either.

Honestly, my story is going to turn into a Disney movie with a general “Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to the dark side!” moral.

So I try to take a cue from other writers, say, oh, Joss, and make my villains personal (“my heroine falls in love with a guy who is one of the antagonists and starts to see his point of view…whatever that is….”)

But I still…can’t get myself…to care about these people. They’re still props.

Unamused

September 4, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

Main characters are my muses, the spark that drives my desire to write a story. One reason I have such difficult time starting a new story is I don’t know my main character well enough to feel that necessary passion for them, yet. It’s a catch-22, because you can’t feel passion for them until you start writing, and write long enough to find something in them that sparks your passion, but if you can’t write until you feel passion, well…. That’s why I have to find other ways to motivate myself to write until that passion can take over. In the case of my old novel, my early writing was simply a way to distract myself from my doctoral dissertation. That story started out as a big, fluffy soap opera with no particular plot or lead character. And then, gradually, one of the characters emerged as someone who could carry my interest in the story herself.

Different case with my fan fiction epic. I developed a passion for the character while watching a television show–an unanalyzable fascination and emotional investment that demanded I continue to tell his story when there was no more television show to tell it.

The issue with my new story is that I don’t have a muse yet to motivate me. So I rely instead on the obligation to do these weekly updates and to send them to my writing coach, whom I am paying, to be a substitute motivation. And of course, there’s also that deep down hope that I will reach a place where I am writing with passion, and the belief that I can get there if I keep pounding at it long enough.

But so far, I am un-aMused. I have all these characters, and none yet is emerging as the character that sustains my interest in the story. I suppose that, so far, none of them is emotionally screwed-up enough to be interesting. Not that I think that’s the definition of “interesting.” It’s just, looking at my own track record, that’s the sort of character that gets under my skin–infinitely vulnerable, emotionally volatile, angry, and with major parental issues. Don’t ask me why. Those are not words that describe me, just what I’m drawn to. Which…okay, let’s just skip past the psychoanalysis of yours truly.

Writing is hard

July 24, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

This week, I finally got done all that “big picture” sorting of what-happens-next ideas, and it was time to start writing again. Which I did. I plunged into the POV of a new character, someone who should be interesting and engaging, but was a little on the alien side, so the potential for discontentment with what was coming out of my fingers was high (not alien enough! Too alien!)

Shortly after plunging in, I realized there was a bit of prose I had already written for another character that suited this one better, and all writing came to a halt as I tracked it down. During the tracking, I found a lot of other old blurbs of writing that I had stored away for when and if they became useful, and realized, well, gee, I need to go through these and see if any of them match up to my list of story ideas. After all, nothing gets the writing going like already having a little something to jump off of.

So I started poking through my back-up prose, sorting what was useful and what seemed too far afield. I felt this palpable sense of relief; “Yay! I can procrastinate writing some more!”

Writing is hard. It’s always hard. Editing a written draft is tedious, composing a first draft is like coaxing blood from your pores and dribbling it on the page (who was it that said something like that once?) It’s a magic moment when the words flow freely, or, alternatively, when you are ridiculously pleased with the words you’ve produced. But it has happened to me enough times I keep chasing that feeling like an addict.

I write too much

May 29, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 10 Comments

I write too much. This is one my biggest flaws as a writer, and cutting things down becomes one of my biggest (and most tedious) chores. This is the lesson I learned (and am still working my way out of) in my old novel, and the thing I have been trying so hard to avoid in my new one.

Maybe too much. I wanted to try to stick to just a few character points of view (like, oh say, four), rather than ten, like my old novel. I think showing a peripheral character’s POV on a situation can really shed light on the situation and showing a peripheral character’s POV on the main characters can really give depth to the main characters. The problem that arises is that when you write from a third person subjective stance and want to enter the head of a peripheral character, you have put “padding” around their thoughts with scene-setting and action.

In other words, you have to increase your word count exponentially for each new perspective you bring in.

That paid off beautifully in my first novel, although it made the length prohibitive for publishing. And I’ve been trying to avoid doing it in writing this new one from scratch.

Except for the part where I’m finding that I can’t avoid it, at least not upfront. I don’t know the overall situation in my new novel well enough yet to do that. I am finding it extremely useful to add in new scenes (::ca-ching::, ::ca-ching:: word-count register adding up those words) from the POV of characters whose POV I have no intention of leaving in in the final draft, just to understand their motives.

And it’s necessary that I do this. I am discovering all sorts of interesting things about the characters whose only purpose in the story is to make things more complicated for my main characters. I am discovering their motives, and *why* they are making my character’s lives more complicated, and in the end, when their POV scenes drop back out, I will have a richer story for it.

But right now, for right now, it’s giving me a bit of anxiety. Because I’m editing my old novel at the same time I’m writing my new one, and the goal in the first case is to cut out words (>36,000 at last count), while the goal in the second case is to write my brains out until a story starts emerging.

It’s no wonder sometimes I put the computer away and escape to paint brushes and power tools.

Original fiction project – week of 04/11/2010

April 17, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 4 Comments

Another big-picture planning week, in which I tried my hand at something that I am not as good at as I’d like to think I am: plotting. Plots are important. Plots make the story. How many great premises with great characters end up suxx0ring due to weak plots? Too many to count, as we all know.

As I well know. And yet, I have difficulty with plots, one of the most obvious being that when I’m writing the first draft of a story, I don’t want to know what’s going to happen next. I want it to “come to me”, and then I write it, and then wait again.

And before anyone starts wagging a finger at me for this, let me just say that this has been successful for me. This is not a pie-in-the-sky style of writing for me. The plain fact is, my right brain has better ideas than my left brain. My left brain is the top-down, before-hand plotting organizer, my right brain is the “let me stew on that, and I’ll get back to you when you’re in the shower covered in soap.” And almost invariably, the ideas I set out before hand are not as good as the stew-and-soap ones, because those come from somewhere deeper, the part of me that actual yearns to write.So I’ve always written this way, at least during the years when actual words got written, as opposed to the years where I just planned out stories and never wrote them.

So there’s that. The other thing is, when I sit down to draw out a general outline, a fuzzy watercolor version of my story, I can never think of anything. I do my best, but….

One of the things that was helpful to me when I was working on The Destroyer, where story-telling with an active audience demanded I have some CLUE where I was going, was to borrow from the classics in plotting out a seasonal arc. Season 1 of The Destroyer, for example, was a retelling of the myth of Odysseus, except from Telemachus’ (Connor’s) POV, rather than Odysseus (Angel). The bad guys of the season–Penelope’s (Faith’s) “suitors”–were demons trying to take over L.A. in Angel’s absence, which I renamed the Syndicate. Having the basic outline of Telemachus’ attempt to find his lost father and Penelope’s struggle against the Suitors gave me the basic idea for the season, including its climax, and the details could be made up by me as I went along, which worked well.

Similarly, season 2 was based on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, and I used the different phases of that journey to plot out various episodes.

I picked the stories I picked for those two seasons based on what I wanted to go with Connor. In season 1, I needed him to fully reconcile and develop a relationship with his father. And I did that by giving him a mission to find his lost father, who was in hell after the battle in the alley in NFA. In season 2, I needed to turn a young man who was still traumatized by his early years and overly-enamored with “being normal” (as a result of his implanted memories) into a hero.

So I am doing something similar with my original characters. Figuring out who they are and what their basic situation is was something I had to do through writing. I wrote as much as could of the actual story before it stalled out due to a lack of a plot, and now I am revisiting the stories that I love, seeing if I can borrow from them to give an actual spine to character journeys I am writing now.

Too many stories

April 10, 2010June 1, 2012 ~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

One thing I’ve realized this week is that there are too many stories I want to tell all at once, and I am trying to tell them all in one novel. Now, the simple reply to that is, “Concentrate on one character, one story, and write a book series for the others.” Except that all of the stories occur simultaneously and are interconnected. Gee…just like my last novel. Now one idea I had was to write a series that tells the same story, each time from a separate point of view. Or, write one long story in such a way that it has convenient stopping points in mid-stream, so that book one is part one, and then the story continues in the next novel.

Then I smack myself and say, “You haven’t even scratched the surface of the first one, and you’re planning a series? Get back to writing.”

It’s just…I can’t stop myself from writing all of them at once. I can’t.