Category: disinhibition

Original fiction project – weeks of 7/03 and 7/10/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I was on the road last weekend and so didn’t have the opportunity to check in on the writing.

Dis/inhibition: I have started folding my editor’s corrections into the manuscript. She also had some really complex questions for me about my handling of race and subculture with my characters, questions I am doing my best to consider.

New story: I handed over chapter 1 of the story to the Sculptor to read a couple of weeks ago, and gave chapter 2 to her Wednesday morning, so I guess I’m on my way. She is reading mostly in a motivational/cheerleading capacity, and so far it does seem to be helping me keep working on this steadily, and dig a little deeper in each chapter as opposed to just spitting out a thin half-assed first draft as I have done in the past. Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach–it’s like writing and outlining at the same time; it helps you figure out what the story’s about. But I wanted to go deeper in this story’s first draft, and see where I can take it that might end up more interesting.

Currently in the midst of writing chapter 3.

Original fiction project – week of 6/26/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 10 Comments

Progress on my two main writing projects:

Dis/inhibition

I have four artists I ended up commissioning via etsy.com to illustrate the front cover of the book. Three of the four have finished, the other has promised an end-of-July completion. My most immediate goal, then, is to do the final edits on the text given to me by the editor I was working with last Spring. That’ll be my job for July.

New Story:

I’ve noticed many writers on my flist tend to give stories titles before they’ve finished writing the first draft. This seems very strange to me. It’s not until I’ve finished the first draft, or written the vast majority of it, that I know what a story’s even about, and my titles are almost always based on the theme of the story, or the central plot point.

Anyway, I peeked in at chapter 2 of the the new story Tuesday morning. It was interesting, reading what I’d left of it. The “voice” of the writing was all wrong for the featured character in that chapter. So I was able to see it with fresh eyes after three weeks. I started rewriting it here and there to make it sound more like her voice and less like my formal, over-educated-vocabulary Narrator Voice. I also picked up on the undertone of animosity between the two characters in the chapter that was only hinted at before and really brought it out.

I think, sometimes, when we’re busy writing a chapter and putting a lot of work into just getting words on the page, we sometimes become wedded to things that are bland or aren’t working well because it took so much effort to get any words down at all. Come back three weeks later, and you’ve forgotten all that effort, and all you can see is the ugh, and you fix it.

Short story long, before I knew it, I was essentially done chapter 2. I finished the week by starting to arrange my thoughts for chapter 3.

Original fiction project – week of 04/03/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

1562 words this week. Yay me.

I’ve actually written a lot of words to this story, most of which I still feel will never end up in the actual first draft. I’m still unfocused, not sure what I really want to say. Aware of this frustration, I went to a writing workshop last night at Changing Hands bookstore. It was a spontaneous decision based on the description of the workshop, which was about “finding your voice.” I’ve taken workshops on that topic before, and I’m pretty aware of techniques for helping you determine what you really want to say in your writing, and express it in your own unique way. And yet I still struggle with it, so I thought I’d hear what some who wasn’t my old writer’s voice teacher had to say about it.

The speaker said something I already knew, which was you often won’t know what you’re trying to say until you’re done the first (or second or third) draft. Which I trust in, as it has happened to me before, but in the mean time, you have to find another motivation other than passion for your “point” to keep you returning to the story.

She didn’t delve a lot into techniques themselves since she was allowing the attendees to set the agenda, but she said enough that she sold me her book, which is, I suppose, what her purpose there was. I’ll see if the book has anything insightful to say.

In other writing news, I took anneth‘s suggestion and posted a “wanted” post on Etsy.com looking for illustrators. I got several replies, and since all of them made reasonable bids in the same ballpark, I am entertaining multiple preliminary sketches. It makes me feel like I’m “doing something already” with this old story, and that feels like a relief of something that’s been hanging over my head for a long time.

Finding an illustrator

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 12 Comments

I have pretty much decided to self-publish my old novel, just to get it out in the world and out of my hair. It’s completely (professionally) edited at this point, and now I need a book cover illustrator, and am not sure where to start to look for one.

Well, actually, I take that back. I started with my gf, and she said she’d help hook me up with someone, but then never did, and at this point, I’m tired of nagging her about it. She’s sort of a flake that way.

I know LJ/DW is overflowing with artists, but I’m not sure where to go to get their attention. I have skimmed Craigslist for locals, but all that sort of makes me nervous.

I have the concept of the cover in my head, I just need someone with more talent than me to pull it off.

Question about novel organization

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 10 Comments

I’m pulling together the “final” draft of my old novel to send on for proofreading, and discovered, to my dismay, that there is a scene in one of my chapters (8) that actually chronologically happens in the evening *after* the events of the entire chapter after it (9, which happens over the span of the afternoon).

The wayward scene was tucked in with the rest of the chapter it’s in because they are cause and effect. But I feel like, in a book where every other scene is ordered chronologically, it needs to go where it happens in time, not where I put it–where there is that interesting contrast of (1) character A finds out something about character B and (2) we see the consequences to character B that we know the reason for and she doesn’t.

I can’t mess with the timeline of the chapters by saying the events of chapter 9 happen the day after everything in chapter 8, because we see events in chapter 7 that are the same day as 9, only earlier, and heck, even characters from 9 in chapter 8 getting ready for the events of 9.

The alternative is to move that one little scene into its own chapter and proper spot in the timeline, and renumber all my chapters to make room for it. Which kind of rankles me, given my exponential chapter count already. But that out-of-sequence scene, happening in the evening of that same one day, represents a shift of the weather and mood from earlier in the day, and it’s just weird to then cut back to earlier in the day in the very next chapter.

Any thoughts? Would an out-of-sequence scene like that bug you? Or would you even notice it?

Unamused

~ 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.

I write too much

~ 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.

Writing question du jour

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 18 Comments

I’m trying to think of the legal term for stealing someone else’s unpublished ideas, specifically in a science context, but the same term probably applies generally. I don’t think the term is “plagarism”, because that’s really about stealing actual text as well as the ideas themselves.

Question for the grammar geeks

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 40 Comments

In fictional dialogue, when someone yells a question, do you include both the question mark and the exclamation mark? If both, what order are they in? My inclination is to make the question part paramount and put it second:

“What is this!?”

As opposed to:

“What is this?!”

Thoughts? Opinions? Official positions from grammar gurus?