Category: the writing process

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.

Original fiction project – week of 04/11/2010

~ 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

~ 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.

Original fiction project – week of 02/14/2010

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

This had been a productive week in fiction-land. I am not sure what clicked, exactly, but last Sunday when I sat down to do my obligatory “ten minutes” on the story, I got an idea about one of my characters’ motivations, what drives her, and it opened a lot of, well, not new writing, necessarily, but a lot of digging around in old writing to start filling in her back story.

Lately, I have been stalled on this character. I knew more or less what role she would have in the story, but I was less than enthused about writing it. I didn’t find her particularly compelling. But she is one of my POV characters, and she was currently “on stage” for my morning writing blurb. I started out just working on the scene I had “outlined” for her and it got me thinking about who she was and why she would do the things I’ve planned for her. And then, I knew.

This is the kind of thing you can’t “decide” ahead of time when you’re “outlining” a story. You only understand a character when you’re in their shoes–when you’re writing them.

This particular character is a character I recycled from my ’99 story, and though a lot of elements in my new story are pulled from that abandoned story, I had already decided to not include her in it. But then, after I began writing, she sort of re-insinuated herself. Not because she is so compelling on her own, but because I needed a human POV character to give the reader an up-close and personal view of one of my spirit being characters, who cannot be a POV character for reasons I’ve already discussed. So she came back. And then I found her difficult to care about. So being able to nail her down and give her a history is a good thing.

I took a lot of her history from her history in the old story, tweaking it a bit to fit my new ideas for her and the circumstances of this story. Then I found places for some of that backstory to go in sections I’ve already written. I did all this on Sunday, but it set a tone for the week, because as I moved on to other characters, my task for the week seemed to be to dig up the background ideas I’d had on them and find places in what I’ve already written to have them muse a bit on this, and in that way, flesh each of them out.

There was also some writing in the current scenes I’ve got going as well, so all in all, a productive week.

Shut up and let the subconscious do the driving

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 4 Comments

Not quite as much writing this week due to being out of town over the weekend, and then having to stop and mull over “what should happen next.” Although I have lots of story ideas for my various characters, I still have to decide what, if any of it, I should use, and I took a couple of mornings out this week to mull.

I’ve gotten far enough into the story now that I’ve settled on about four point-of-view characters and don’t feel the need to jump into the point of view of every character like I did when I was first starting out. So I’ve been alternating between the four, writing a scene for each which advances their story. Early on in the week, though, I finished up a round of scenes and realized I wasn’t sure what should happen next to my main character. I’m kind of “meh” on the stuff I outlined.

So I spent a couple days going through all the material I had on the characters, picking out what’s next for each of them. One scene ahead is as far ahead as I really want to think here. Which leads to a more rambly, meandering first draft admittedly, but I think, in the end, a much better story than one I could have outlined in advance. The best ideas occur to me spontaneously, and I have to give them the time and space to do so. I came up with a lot of good ideas in the past year that way, but I have to allow that there might still be something better buried in my brain.

One thing I do know is, the actual act of writing, getting into the real details of character and plot, can often prove the ideas you had ahead of time are just not workable. And if you have this whole outline based on those ideas and have to ditch it, that work is suddenly moots-ville.

I tried outlining ahead of time, I really did. But in the end, that’s not how my brain works.

Original fiction project – week of 01/10/2010

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

The story continues, some of it matching my outline, some of it not. And I’m content to let it go wherever it feels like going. It’s still tough, every morning, picking it up and working on it when I haven’t bonded with the characters and I don’t know who they are, and nothing feels like it’s going anywhere…yet. That’s the downside of not outlining in advance–the story kind of sits and languishes or something until you start getting a sense of the characters and what’s at stake. I outlined and planned and plotted a lot of “at stake” ideas, but in the end, the story has to write itself, the characters have to tell it, and as the writer, it is my job to find the story and the characters.

This is a vulnerable time because you can just feel like setting it aside for something more interesting or set it aside hoping something will come to you–anything except slog on, waiting for the emotional connect to the story to happen.

But that’s why I’m writing updates in here and sending them to a coach–to keep me plugging on until my drive to write the story is coming from the story itself, and not simply my inborn need to be writing something.

Ever wish you could have a left-brained lobotomy?

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

A temporary one, at any rate?

I’ve been fishing around trying to find some way to deal with my creative block, because it’s not the same as writer’s block. I can write lots and lots of stuff. It’s just not going where I need it to go. Tapping into the subconscious mind where my story is hiding…that’s a challenge for a heavily left-brained gal like me.

Anything I do that is truly creative has to burble up on its own from my subconscious. And there’s only so much my conscious efforts can do to bring it forth. And of course, there is the issue of garbage in, garbage out. My subconscious mind is only as creative as what it has been exposed to in the universe.

I have gone back to all those creativity manuals, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, “The Artist’s Way”, “Writing Down the Bones”. And then finally, I dredged up my (very old) copy of “Writing the Natural Way”, trying to find some exercises that can accomplish a left-brain by-pass.