Category: storytelling

Original fiction project – week of 07/31/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

Dis/inhibition:

I am working a little bit every day finishing the edits on this story, and when I am done and I have the cover art chosen, I suppose it will be time to pick a self-publishing venue. At some point last year, I went to several self-publishing/print on demand websites and asked for an information brochure. It’s funny how many of them took that as meaning I was signing up for their service, rather than shopping around for one. I don’t want to be rushed into making a choice, since I have heard some horror stories about these places and I want time to do research, which I just haven’t done up until now as I finish the manuscript. Enough time has gone by that most of them have stopped calling and emailing me, all except XLibris, which has this one persistent salesguy or whatever you call them. I think “agent” would be a misnomer here. They keep having sales on their services and he is trying to use that as a wedge to get me to sign up.

New story:

I had a heck of a time “outlining” chapter 4, by which I mean, cobbling together the various elements I want in the chapter into a coherent narrative. I am trying not to have a 185,000-word manuscript when I am done, which means those dozens of long, leisurely scenes in which my archeological investigators go about uncovering the clues in the main mystery of the novel are a luxury I can’t afford. I need to cover big chunks of their investigation as paragraph-long “this already happened” summaries that bring the reader to a present moment where an intriguing puzzle is set that defines the current action of the chapter.

I managed to get that done. Then the next challenge was that I decided to write the chapter, which is formatted as a four-scene day-in-the-life of my main character, not from her own (limited third person) point of view, but from the (limited third-person) point of view of a different friend or colleague she interacts with in each of the scenes. While I might not keep the chapter written that way in future drafts, this is really helping me bring out what a pain in the @$$ my character is supposed to be, which is what I want to explore. I may well keep the chapter this way, even though three of the four characters whose points of view I feature may not appear “on stage” again.

Original fiction project – week of 07/24/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

Dis/inhibition: I tackled all of my editor’s substantive comments except the ones related to race. This is a tricky area. I want to take my time considering what she has to say, understanding that she isn’t a person of color, either, and so whose instincts matter here? Her comments have certainly given me a lot to think about, and there will be some rewriting, mostly to change back things I had already changed before she read them, and to rewrite some stuff I was never that comfortable with anyway.

New story: I finished chapter 3 and sent it off to the Sculptor. Last weekend, I took a break from it to start thinking through what I want to do in the next few chapters. I am tackling this story like I did The Destroyer: I have a general idea where I want the characters to be at the end, but I only outline a few chapters in advance of the one I am writing, and even that is subject to change if I get a better idea.

This week’s goal: make some progress on chapter 4.

Original fiction project – week of 07/17/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

Dis/inhibition: I finished with my editor’s cosmetic changes and am now procrastinating taking on her more substantive comments. I thought I could handle a little constructive criticism, I weathered it fine in the past, but maybe I just had a trust-thing with my writing coach, where I felt it was okay to dismiss what she said if I didn’t agree with it. Now I find myself questioning my own writing, which is just paralyzing on the final draft when it should only be polishing.

New story: Still working on chapter 3, technically. I finished a full draft of it and decided to step back and think a bit about upcoming chapters, just in case there was something in them I needed to establish in chapter 3. In doing so, I discovered a plot hole I have been wrestling with. It’s not fatal, it’s just a matter of my imagination coming up with a good hole-filler. It’s a hole of missing motivation for a state of affairs that is central to the story and one of my character’s entire life circumstances. Nothing worse in a story than lame motivation for one’s Plot Device Darling.

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 04/17/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

988 words this week.

I don’t know if word counts are going to be a sign of progress going forward, since I started actually writing the full first chapter this week. Which so far seems to mostly involve piecing together already-written words. I smooth over the gaps with new words, but I really have no idea how many of my words are new or old. I think the fact that I am actually trying to write a full chapter and not random story snippets that could end up anywhere is Major Progress.

So, go me.

Where and when I write

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 11 Comments

I posted last week about a seminar I went to featuring an author who was speaking on her book about “discovering your true voice.”

Her angle on this much-tread topic is her background in yoga, and the basic premise is that, in order to discover your true voice–what you want to say with your writing and how you want to say it–you need to be in touch with your body and its habits and signals.

One of the first exercises in her book is to take a good look at your writing habits: how often you are able to write, where you write, what you write with, and how you use your body in writing. This was a little odd to me, since I conceive writing as primarily a mental activity, where the physical aspects are purely means to an end, but there’s a logic in the idea that your body is giving you signals about the content or manner of your writing, so I’m game to follow where she leads so far. So:

I live alone, which means I have the good fortune of spending my free time writing whenever and where ever it suits me. I am a creature of habit, though, so I tend to write in the same chair, in more or less the same physical position: legs up on the La-Z-Boy, lap top perched on one of those plastic-coated metal-rung kitchen shelves that fits over my hips with just enough clearance to ensure air is flowing between my lap and the bottom of the keyboard. This is a necessary thing, given the number of hours I often work, the heat of Arizona, and the heat of my middle-aged female lap.

Nowadays, I pretty much do all my writing tasks at the keyboard, rather than long hand. I used to write long hand all the time back in the pre-personal computer dinosaur days, and when I lived in San Francisco, I wrote on the bus or at bus stops, or at work. My writing at the present is confined to the lap top in that one same chair, where I sit for hours, eating, drinking, and watching television. I take breaks to run errands, go to the bathroom, or do a household chore or two, but that’s my Writing Way, for the most part.

Not sure what it says about me, or how it might effect my writing. I think sometimes I get “too comfortable” there, and it leads me to waste time on the internet, or “do anything-but-generating-new-words” because I can.

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.