Category: the writing process

The Plan

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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.

In defense of fan fiction

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 2 Comments

Earlier this week, I sent my website designer the content for my new author website. It contained a lot of things about me: my published novel, my current writing projects, my past projects. One of the things it contained was a blurb about and link to my fan fiction story, The Destroyer. I figured, why not, I worked hard on that story and readers liked it. It is an example of my SFF writing and series writing skills.

I think I forgot how few people out in the webosphere really understand what fan fiction is and why it can be a legitimate art form–an engagement with and reinterpretation of an existing text that can entertain us by continuing its story (or expanding the existing story), or shed critical light on aspects of that story the author might not have realized were in it.

Read more

Adventures in Indie Publishing, pt IIa: formatting for print

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I think the most difficult, grief-inducing part of self-publishing is formatting. I say that because I am still getting into the marketing part, but stay tuned, because I might change my tune later. But I spent a good two months getting my manuscript into a form–no, I take that back–THREE forms–that would deem it acceptable to book distributors.

The three forms are (1) print, (2) eBook ePub, and (3) ePub mobi. Print is pretty self-explanatory, although not easy, necessarily. ePub is the most common eBook format and you can find services that will turn your manuscript into an ePub file, but you have to do some work upfront to not have aforementioned manuscript kicked back to you as “not ready to be turned into an ePub yet.” mobi is just a fancy word for the format used by Amazon Kindle, which in their infinite near-monopoly wisdom is different from every.other.eBook.seller.everywhere, who of course all use ePub.

Print Formatting

Character rising

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

This is an interesting blog entry on what the writer calls “Self-rising characters”–characters who weren’t in the original outline or conception of a story, or who were but were minor at best, who become (spontaneously) fully realized as you are writing because the story needed them, or at the very least, they were a voice inside you somewhere that needed to speak:

http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2012/06/27/practical-meerkat-returns-on-self-rising-characters/

I never thought of these characters as being a Mary Sue danger, however. And as the author points out, we use that expression way too much and too lazily. There are very few characters labelled ‘Mary Sues’ that actually are one by the actual definition, and sometimes, even if they ARE one, so what? Sometimes, that’s the whole point of the story/character.

But that’s a digression. I have always seen self-rising characters as awesome, because they come from that “Shut up and let the subconscious do the driving” place where your story actually lives. This is why I am a pantser, at least during the first draft, and find outlines so antithetical. The story I really want to tell, and the characters that really need to inhabit it, are locked in a vault on the right side of my brain I can’t access during the very left-brained, top-down, before-hand outlining process.

The main character of my first novel, Valerie, was a self-rising character, stepping out from a cast of a dozen names and descriptions to take over the story and make it her own.

In my new story, I had a young man appear out of nowhere to become a love interest of sorts for one of my main characters, who was supposed to eventually get involved with another guy–a guy who as the story evolved developed no chemistry whatsoever with her.

Self-rising Young Man didn’t appear spontaneously in the story in order to be a love interest, he entered the story to spy on Ms. Main Character, which he did by seducing her. And then they sort of fell for each other. And doesn’t love/lust/hate always read more convincingly when it isn’t forced on a character?

Adventures in Indie* Publishing

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 1 Comment

Most folks in the writing/publishing bag probably use the term “Indie publishing” to mean small, independent presses that are, for all their smallness, still publishers in the traditional sense: they accept submissions, chose what works they will put out into the world, and then produce and promote them for the author, either in print or electronic form or both.

But I am seeing the phrase thrown around a lot now to signify those who are really self-publishers, authors who do all the work themselves, or at least arrange for and pay for it to be done: writing, formatting, distributing, and marketing.

Read more

NaNoWriMo Day 12

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

New words: 2,762
Total words: 19,524
Goal: 50,000

19524 / 50000
(39.05%)

I finally made it through the entire draft doing the dialog. Of course, I haven’t written all the dialogue. If I wasn’t sure of something, I skipped it. Now I plan to go back through and figure out the parts I like best, and make sure those get supported and expanded before I really dig into adding action and blocking bits.

I am starting to have an image of the ending of the story, one that is both interesting and wraps up the immediate conflict, but leaves enough hanging for there to be plenty of material for the next novel.

I have also been experimenting a bit with writing from an omniscient point of view. Something that would allow me to get in the heads of characters as I choose, or not. It’s REALLY hard.

I’ve always preferred Alternating Third Person Subjective, with a clear delineation in the text (marked by a paragraph change and a symbol, like a centered – or ***) when the point of view changes. Point of view has always been a conscious element of my stories, in which I could show different characters reflecting on the same thing and explore their totally different perspectives on that thing . It is one of the more Artistic elements in my writing.

And my third person has always been as close to first person as you can get without actually writing in the first person. The “voice” in the narrative is the point of view character’s, I write the way they talk when I’m in their head.

Changing that style to a more omniscient POV is going to be a challenge, especially if I want to keep the intimacy of third person subjective.

There is a form of the omniscient view point that is kind of like a screenplay, where you never get into any character’s head. Everything is the “camera-eye” view, but you have the freedom to go anywhere, show any character doing anything.

While I found writing in screenplay format rather freeing while working on the Destroyer, doing it in a regular narrative format lacks intimacy. I think readers want to be with the character, living the story through them, not just observers, and for that, a story needs introspection.

Another form of omniscient viewpoint switches between character’s heads within a single scene, sometimes within a single paragraph. There are so many ways to screw that up and confuse the reader. But I think that’s what I need to figure out how to do.

Eep.