Would that Edits were as Habit-Forming as Words

With the notable exception of pantsing my way through my rough drafts, I'm very into planning. I am a big fan of the idea that it takes 21 days to make a habit. The Franklin Covey system and I go way back. I like SMART goals and spreadsheets and timetables. My planner is color coded in addition to being prioritized by type of task. I'm a huge planning nerd.

I was talking to someone about writing the other day and I happened to mention NaNoWriMo. We were talking about getting over the two-page problem. (You know, where you never get more than two pages into a story because you get stuck trying to make it perfect or your idea just runs out of steam after those first few moments of inspiration.) The reason I always recommend NaNoWriMo to people with the two-page problem is two-fold.

1. That's how I got over my own two-page problem back in November of 2006.
2. NaNoWriMo, falling in November, is 30 days long, giving you more than enough time to turn writing daily into a habit. (If you recall from the first paragraph, I firmly believe habits take 21 days to form.)

Not only did NaNoWriMo get me into the habit of writing every day, it got me into the habit of writing whenever I had time, of keeping a notebook on me for sudden moments of inspiration, and of expecting writing sessions to yield at least a thousand words rather than just two little pages. I found my writing style through NaNoWriMo, which just happens to be perfectly compatible with the program.

Other people have to work a little harder during November, being that they're not complete and total pantsers capable of banging out 1000 words in 15 minutes if hyped up on enough coffee and leftover Halloween candy. I spare brief moments of sadness for those poor unfortunate Wrimos. And then, you know, I have to get back to work, because there's likely a word war I'm supposed to be paying attention to.

But, Nikki, you might be thinking, it's April. Why are you talking about all this now?

An excellent question! You see, I have a problem. NaNoWriMo gave me the perfect way to form a writing habit. I have yet to find anything that helps me form an editing habit.

My style of editing is meticulous, with many methods and tools layered on top of each other. It can't be accomplished in the same fast-paced, no sleep, go-until-you-die-and-then-get-up-and-go-some-more fashion as my writing. I've tried it. I ended up completely burned out and almost decided to give up writing altogether. I also didn't get through the revisions, so, other than being a nice lesson in what I can and cannot do, the exercise was quite pointless.

Since getting pregnant, I've fallen off the wagon with regard to my writing. I spent my first trimester basically living the life of a newborn. Wake up. Eat something. Throw up. Gee, that was exhausting. Go back to sleep. Repeat for three months. There was not a lot of writing. There was definitely not a lot of revising. And now here I sit on the other side of it, completely out of the habit of working at all with no spiffy internet competition to help me get back on track.

I suppose I could try Script Frenzy, but I have no real interest in writing a script and I feel like that would just slice another month out of the very limited time I have left to get my current WIP completed and queried out.

And so I guess I shall have to get back into the habit the old fashioned way, just trying to remember to do it every day until I don't need the reminder anymore. It would be nice, though, if editing was even half as much fun as playing with shiny new words.

I'll have a Good Story with a Twist, Please

I don't know about you, but I read the books I buy over and over again. If I've got a few hours to kill, or it's a rainy afternoon, or I wake up thinking about a character from a story I liked, I grab the book in question and dive back into it. Sometimes I'll just read a key scene or two -- my favorites or maybe the ones that got stuck in my brain and sent me hunting for the book in the first place. Sometimes I start at page one and read all the way through to THE END. Depends on my mood, I guess.

Reading a book the second time is very different for me than my first pass. So different, in fact, that I usually read everything twice right from the start, just to get the full experience. The first time through, I get completely caught up by the action. I plow through the story, desperate to find out how it all ends. The second time, I don't worry so much about the plot, because I already know what's coming. The second time through, I notice all those little details I missed during that first, very rushed, experience.

Now, because I read things over and over again, my favorite books are ones that offer me something new on the second reading, something that I couldn't have gotten on the first go around even if I had been reading carefully. I like stories that have a good twist, something that not only takes the plot off in a new direction, but also colors everything that came before it once you know the secret.

I want to give examples here, but I think it would make for an unnecessarily long blog post if I started pasting in excerpts from entire novels. Plus, I don't want to spoil things for folks if they haven't had the pleasure of reading those books yet. However, a solution popped into my head in the shower this morning (as it seems all solutions do) and I think I've got some examples I can use now.

And now I shall reveal to you all my bumpkin side. I listen to a lot of country music. I could blame this on my residence in South Carolina -- it's tough to live here and listen to anything else -- but the truth is that I've been listening to country music since long before I relocated to the Deep South. And, as with novels, my favorite songs are those with a twist, a line somewhere in the song that changes the meaning of every line that came before it, so that you end up enjoying the song in a completely different way the next time you hear it.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give you pages and pages of song lyrics. Just a few snippets here and there.

The first is a fairly new song, the one that was playing and got me thinking about this idea today in the first place.

Pray for You, performed by Jaron and the Long Road to Love, written by Jaron Lowenstein and Joel Brentlinger
Haven't been in church since I don't remember when
Things were going great 'til they fell apart again
So I listened to the preacher as he told me what to do
Said you can't go hating others who done wrong to you
Sometimes we get angry but we must not condemn
Let the good Lord do his job and you just pray for them

Chorus:
I pray your brakes go out running down a hill
I pray a flower pot falls from a window sill
And knocks you in the head like I'd like to
I pray your birthday comes and nobody calls
I pray your flying high when your engine stalls
I pray all your dreams never come true
Just know wherever you are, honey, I pray for you

The song goes on from there, with more examples of this guy's special brand of prayer for his ex and how much better he feels now that he's found his way back to the church, but I think you get the idea.

The second starts out sounding a bit more like a stereotypical country song. Man watching a woman dancing with another man, lamenting about how she used to be his. Oh, boy, it's another breakup country song. Um . . . or not.

I Loved Her First, performed by Heartland, written by Walt Aldridge and Elliott Park
Look at the two of you dancing that way
Lost in the moment and each other's face
So much in love you're alone in this place
Like there's nobody else in the world

I was enough for her not long ago
I was her number one, she told me so
And she still means the world to me, just so you know
So be careful when you hold my girl

Time changes everything; life must go on
And I'm not gonna stand in your way

Chorus:
But I loved her first, and I held her first
And a place in my heart will always be hers
From the first breath she breathed
When she first smiled at me
I knew the love of a father runs deep
And I prayed that she'd find you someday
But it still hard to give her away
I loved her first

I think this is now probably one of the most popular father-daughter dance songs at weddings.

And for my final example, I give you the chorus of one of my favorite fun songs.

Cleaning This Gun, performed by Rodney Atkins, written by Casey Beathard and Marla Cannon-Goodman
Chorus:
Come on in boy, sit on down and tell me about yourself
So you like my daughter, do you now? Yeah we think she's something else
She's her daddy's girl, her momma's world
She deserves respect, that’s what she'll get, ain’t it son?
Hey y'all run along and have some fun
I'll see you when you get back, bet I’ll be up all night
Still cleanin' this gun

Seems like a fairly benign conversation between a father and his daughter's date. Until you realize that he's been sitting there with a gun in front of him the whole time. I feel like all those questions got answered with a good solid "Yes Sir".

So there you have it, a few examples of the type of twist I'm talking about. Now if I could just figure out how to write twists like that into my novels, I'd be all set . . .

Pass the Plot 3, Scene 11

Bitter defeat coated the back of Nara's tongue, making her swallow convulsively. This was the end.

Even as she threw her body to the side to avoid the laser blast, she knew it was hopeless. One Garid drone she could deal with. The idea of sneaking through a Garidan raider filled with them had been daunting enough, but that was what she was trained for.

This was something else. She was surrounded by armed enemies of unknown origin -- who had just managed to silently kill her entire boarding party while she stood less than a tharspan from them. Victory was out of the question.

Hell, survival was probably out of the question.

Laser fire erupted throughout the shuttlecraft and the surrounding bay, Eloin and her minions all trying to catch her as she slid across the floor. They're not as quick as drones, thank the moon, Nara thought, relief flooding through her chest. A Garid drone would have cut her down before she'd even finished thinking about running.

Nara fired over her shoulder without looking as she scrambled for a door on the far side of the room. She didn't have a hope in hell of hitting anything that way, but the idea was just to throw off their aim long enough to get herself out of here.

The doors in front of her slid open and Nara dove through, not caring what waited on the other side. Storage closet, warp drive chamber, or escape hatch -- it didn't matter so long as she put a wall between herself and Eloin's creatures.

She spun as she fell through, shooting the control panel next to the opening. The doors slammed closed and sparks rained from the locking mechanism.

Safe. For the moment.

"Nara, don't make this harder than it needs to be," Eloin called through sealed door. "If we have to chase you, you'll get all messed up and then I won't be able to use your body."

Nara shuddered at the sound of that and turned around, facing her new surroundings.

A scream lodged itself in her throat, stopping her breath. She scuttled backward toward the doors, regretting the moment her back hit them that she'd just locked her only means of escape. She blinked slowly, hoping that when she opened her eyes, the sight that met them would be different. Hoping that the mangled remains of cybernetic-enhanced bodies -- some of them human, some of them not -- would no longer be littered about the room, soaking in thick puddles of blackening blood and purple Garidan acid.

No such luck. Eloin had been busy during her brief stay aboard the raider. Every Garid drone in sight had been ripped to shreds, and, judging by the pile of corpses cramming the door on the far side of the room, possibly every drone throughout the rest of the ship too.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Nara toyed with the idea for a moment as she surveyed the wreckage of the conversion chamber. Then she remembered Eloin's threat about using her body.

No. No, Eloin was definitely not her friend.

Nara forced herself away from the wall and started picking her way through the remains on the floor. She needed a better weapon, a way out of this room, and backup. Lots of backup.

Free Fiction Friday: Twice Dead, by Kalayna Price

Due to a little mix up, this post didn't actually go live on Friday, so it's sort of Free Fiction Monday now, but that doesn't sound as good so I'm declaring it Friday in my world. (I have a very casual relationship with time under the best of circumstances.)

Kita is adjusting to her new liquid diet -- an adjustment she rather resents. Not that everything was chocolate and sunshine before (though both were possible before the sexy but infuriating Nathanial sank his fangs in her business). Kita's ability to shape shift into a kitten when her peers shifted into lions and tigers complicated her life, to say the least, but getting stuck in one form -- that of a human shaped tick, a.k.a. a vampire -- sucks, literally. Her adjustment period is violently interrupted when she discovers a headless corpse during a party for a visiting vampire council. But, the headless dancer won't be the only corpse she encounters.

Kita's involvement draws the attention of the Collector, an ancient vampire with an inclination to acquire two things: power and oddities. As a pureblood shifter turned vampire, Kita ranks high on the collectability list -- not a safe place for anyone who values her freedom, and Kita is not the only one on the list. But with the body count rising, there is more at stake than freedom. A killer is slithering through the underbelly of Haven's vampire community, and with the supernaturals dealing in unnamed favors, it's a bad time to be a kitten who can't slip her skin.

The TriMu and I discussed it and we decided that maybe we're not the best candidates to present a review of this book. We all think Kalayna's a genius and love her work unconditionally, which kind of makes objectivity a challenge. I mean, I could sit here and gush in geeky squealing fangirl fashion extol Twice Dead's virtues as a supportive critique partner, but then I would feel a little silly.

Outside the TriMu, some folks over at Fictionwise, where it' hanging out near the top of the Dark Fantasy charts, seem to like it too. People on goodreads have been enjoying it. It's getting good reviews on Amazon as well. Oh, and Mandi over at Smexy Books gave it a 4/5 this weekend while this post was busy not showing up on the internet.

So it's not just us. We love it, others feel the same, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it as well.

To win this book, leave a comment on this post including the following information:

1) Your name
2) How you found us
3) A question for us to answer in our next Mailbag Monday post

Comments will be closed at midnight (Eastern) on Sunday, February 28, 2010 and the winner will be announced on Monday, March 1, 2010 Comments will be closed at midnight (Eastern) on Thursday, March 4, 2010 and the winner will be announced by Kalayna on Friday, March 5, 2010.

This is just my opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members of the TriMu. Also, I didn't get this book for free. I bought it with my own money from the bookstore, and it's not an ARC or acquisition reviewed for compensation.

Pass the Plot 3: Scene 5

Nara stood behind the security console in the secondary shuttle bay, an old-fashioned Earth shotgun braced against her left shoulder and trained on her target. "Whoa there, Colonist. Where do you think you're headed?"

"Nara? I thought you went over with the first boarding party?" Darrew leaned against the side of the shuttle craft, hiding his weapon behind the curve of the deflector shielding.

If Nara hadn't caught a glimpse of the cannon when he'd first come into the room, he might still have retained the element of surprise. She shifted her finger from the guard to the trigger. A click rattled around the shuttle bay, announcing that her weapon was pumped and ready to fire.

"Yes, that was the plan, but then Ellie sent me to make sure you were safe in your cryo unit before we left. She worries, you know." And she'll use just about any excuse she can find to keep me off an away mission. Still, it was just as well that Nara had gone looking for him. She wouldn't have overheard his transmission to the raider if she hadn't.

Darrew laughed, the teasing hint of rebelliousness Ellie had found so charming lighting up his expression. "I guess you found me out. I was going to try to sneak over to that other ship with the second boarding party once you guys cleared it." He shifted his weight -- probably looking for a better grip on the rocket launcher he was still trying to hide. "Is it really a Garidan raider?"

Nara stepped around the console, making sure her feet were firmly planted with each step. The gravity in this section of the ship was still holding steady, but if they took another knock . . . She didn't want to risk missing when it came time to shoot.

"Yes, it is." Nara measured the distance between them in her head. Too close and the buckshot wouldn't spread enough to do enough damage. Too far, and he'd be able to move before it hit him. This would be easier if Garid drones didn't move so damn fast. "I imagine they're busy converting the boarding party as we speak."

Another two steps ought to do it.

"Converting?" Darrew looked around, his eyes lingering on the shuttle bay doors and the airlock. "Come on now, Nara, you don't really believe those silly old wives' tales, do you? I mean, they can't really still be out there, converting people into drones." Incredulity tinged his tone. He focused on a point on the wall just over her left shoulder, his gaze turning a little glassy. "Earth has recorded no evidence of Garidan activity in this sector in 106.73 years."

He shifted his weight again, and this time she felt the weapon in his hand hum to life, a subtle change in the vibration of the air. If she hadn't had her sensory nodes turned all the way up in preparation for boarding the raider, she would have missed it.

A spray of antique buckshot mixed with a few super burn pellets and two drops of laser acid exploded from the barrel of Nara's gun. Darrew dropped like a stone, wiring and metal plating exposed and melting now that the pretty face the drone had hidden under had been ripped to shreds.

Nara rushed over to the security console, engaging a max level containment field around what was left of the body. "That's because we keep destroying the evidence whenever we find you."

Making Up For Lost Time

Deadlines are a tricky thing. You set them, you remind yourself of them, and hopefully you meet them. But life is complicated and tries to derail you. You have to prioritize and reprioritize and pick and choose your battles with the calendar.

Time management can sometimes feel kind of like balancing a ball on your nose while juggling knives and dancing on a balance beam.

On occasion, you drop a knife. (Hopefully said knife does not land on your foot or end up clipping an innocent spectator . . .) Falling a little behind in your time management is okay; mistakes happen and life gets in the way. You buckle down, devote a day or a week or whatever you need to really focusing, and get back on track.

Sometimes, though, you drop all the knives, the ball bounces right off your nose mid-step and lands under your foot, and the next thing you know you're down on the mat, staring up at the ceiling.

You're so far behind that you can't catch up with a little extra diligence. It's just not physically possible. Crap! What do you do now?

My answer: you catch up with a lot of extra diligence.

I'm in this position now. I have this glorious three-book-a-year plan with writing timelines and revising timelines and querying timelines and everything designed to overlap beautifully. A key component of that plan, however, is that I get the first 50,000 words of my winter project written during NaNoWriMo.

The problem: I did not win NaNoWriMo this year, and I'm not even keeping the 36,000 words I did write. I'm scrapping it and moving on to a whole different project. So now I'm 50,000 words behind schedule. That's not something I can make up in a day or two.

I suppose I could shift my deadline. It is my deadline, after all. One of the benefits of being an unpublished, unagented, aspiring novelist is that the only person I report to is me. But because all of the timelines are wrapped around each other, moving one deadline means moving them all. And I don't want to derail my whole year just because I spent November working on an idea that turned out to be a dud. Dud ideas are bound to happen and I need to work around them.

So instead of a few days or weeks of extra focus, I'm going to try to spend the next few months making up for that lost time. I spent the morning going through my goal tracking spreadsheet, tweaking the next three months. I cut out a few of my days off. I raised the bar on my daily goals by 1000 more words on writing days and 5 more pages on revising days. If all goes according to plan, I'll be back on track by the end of March.

It'll be harder. It'll take more dedication and effort. But I'm creating time here. That ain't easy.

Process Story RE: The Process of Writing a Novel

Last Wednesday, Kalayna posted about her writing process (crossposted here and here) and as a writer with the opposite type of process, I thought I'd expand on it.

(Turnabout is fair play!)

Kalayna has a very detailed pre-writing and writing process. I have no pre-writing process and a completely scatterbrained, I'm-sure-there-is-a-method-to-the-madness-in-here-somewhere writing process. You guys all know I'm a pantzer; we don't need to into that again.

But I have a really detailed revisions process. I revise in seven different waves. This process first came into existence with Aundroma, because I revised the first book so many successive times, each time looking for different things as I learned more and more about craft, that the waves just kind of happened. That very haphazard experience formed the basis for revising as I do it now. With Familiar, I think I finally got my revising method down to a solid process.

Wave 1: Macro-edits After the initial crazy first draft writing phase is complete and I've let the story rest for about a week, I read through the whole thing again and look for major plot holes, scenes that I meant to include but forgot about in the frenzy of writing, characters who appear out of nowhere or disappear with no explanation, and subplots that never resolve. I don't do any line editing in Wave 1. All I do is identify these major problems, make notes to myself on existing scenes detailing the changes that will need to be made, and write any new scenes that have to be inserted into the story.

Wave 2: Highlighting With Familiar I tried out the EDITS system, as taught by Margie Lawson and I am totally hooked on it. If you can get into one of her classes, do so. EDITS is fantastic. I go through my whole manuscript and highlight all of it using the EDITS technique. I do end up doing another round of reading through the manuscript at this point (it's hard to tell whether a sentence is yellow or green or blue without reading it) so I do also end up making some more notes to myself during Wave 2, but that is not the focus. It is important, I think, to note that I don't analyze the highlights at this point. All I do is read the sentences and classify them. Analyzing comes later, in much smaller chunks.

I call Waves 1 and 2 my second draft. This part of the process takes about a month. At this point I stop working with the manuscript as a whole and work waves 3 through 6 on each scene before moving on to the next scene. I won't look at the manuscript as a whole again until Wave 7.

Wave 3: Scene edits At this point, I break the story down into small chunks, usually scenes or chapters and go through a really detailed edit. This is where I look at the EDITS highlighting to make sure all my colors are balanced. I go through all those notes I made before and fix the random little issues. I make sure the flow of the scene works, that the tension is right, and that the story is moving the way I want it to.

Wave 4: Micro-edits Once I've got the scene just the way I want it, I start really drilling in line by line. I'm looking at this point for repeated words, excessive adverbs, passive voice, grammar issues, etc. This is also the phase where I start reading the text aloud, because I catch a lot of errors when reading out loud that I miss when reading silently.

Wave 5: Critique I am blessed with a fabulous critique group that meets once a week. I try to bring 10-20 pages to critique every week. I recommend every writer find a critique group. A critique partner is a must, but a group, in my opinion, is better. By getting multiple perspectives, from writers all over the board when it comes to genres and career levels, every scene gets filtered through a slightly different lens, which gives me a better overall view of what works and what doesn't. I don't always make the changes my critique group suggests, but they are pretty smart, so I go with their advice more often than not.

Wave 6: Scene polishing After the pages go through the group--assuming the group doesn't read them and tell me they just don't work at all and they need to be rewritten--I make whatever adjustments need to be made and give it one final look, making minor tweaks here and there. After that, barring a major story change occurring to me during the revision of later scenes, the scene gets locked. I put it in a separate file and don't look at it again until Wave 7.

Waves 3 through 6 make up the third draft. Now, assuming I've made it through the whole manuscript without going totally insane, we're back to working with the whole text once again for the last wave.

Wave 7: Final polishing After putting all these pretty revised and analyzed and critiqued and polished scenes back together into a manuscript, I have to go through the whole thing again on an overall level, just to make sure the whole things flows together right and that the overall plot arcs in the right way. If I'm lucky, I don't catch more than minor tweaking and transition smoothing here, maybe a balance here and there of the scene/chapter breaks.

Theoretically now my manuscript is perfect and lovely and ready to send out to agents and such. I try not to look at it again after this point, but I don't usually succeed at that. Invariably, a random little quirk here and there will occur to me and I'll open the document and make a quick change.

So that's my process. What about you? What's your process?

Ambidextrous

I'm a pantzer. I've discussed this before. I write by the seat of my pants. I don't plan things out in advance. I don't outline. I, on occasion, allow myself to jot down ideas for a future project in blurb form, but I usually only glance at them once before I start writing, just to point myself in a vague direction of the idea.

That is not to say I have not tried to plot. I have. It just doesn't work for me. I've talked on my blog before about how I'm getting more and more plotter-ish, but I don't think it'll go any further than it has. I like the freedom and the thrill of pantzing too much.

In fact, during this year's NaNoWriMo, I set an all time pantzing record for myself. I came up with my idea for my current project approximately 10 hours before the event started.

I've noticed something funny this year though. Perhaps it's been going on for a while, but because I'm more involved with other Wrimos this year than I have been in the past I'm just now witnessing it, but I've seen a whole bunch of people trying to mess with their method. I've seen pantzers try to bang out and then stick to an outline. I've seen dedicated plotters pick up a shiny new idea and try to just run off with it with no direction in mind at all.

I applaud them for their bravery.

I fear for their sanity, even more than I do for every Wrimo's sanity. (And I fear for us all a great deal, trust me.)

But I wonder if they will make it. Will those panzters trying to plot get a few weeks (or possibly days) into November and then suddenly toss the outlines out the window and take the story off in a whole new direction? Will the plotters giving pantzing a shot break down and take a few writing days off to outline and world build and character sketch?

Or will the event reveal an ability they never knew they had? Will they come away from it able to write both ways from now on, like a right-handed person who breaks their arm and has to learn how to do everything with their left as a result?

NaNoWriMo has always felt to me like a pantzer's paradise, but I know plotters who swear by it too. It really is all about getting out of your own way and letting the words rule the day. I've often toyed with the idea of using NaNoWriMo to experiment with writing in a different genre than I usually do, but it has never occurred to me to try a whole different writing style.

What do you think? It's too late for me to try it this year, but is it something to keep in mind for next year? Or are these plotting pantzers and pantzing plotters even crazier than I am?

Also, are you one of the switchers? If so, how's it going for you? Has it made you nuts yet? Have you given up and reverted to your familiar form? Or is it working for you?

Phoning It In Or Watching It All Unfold

I've always been kind of fascinated with how other writers come up with their stories. Not the incredibly impossible "where do you get your ideas?" question, which I don't think anyone can actually answer with anything other than "everywhere". More, once you have the idea, "how does a story take shape in your head?" How does it go from the random light bulb flicked on by the muse to something coherent and beautiful filling up the pages?

In my experience, there are two types of writers. Those who have the story told to them by a character (or sometimes by a few characters) and those who watch it like a movie playing in their head and just scramble to get it all down on paper.

I am a listener. A character moves into my head, plunks down on a squashy old sofa, and then proceeds to ramble endlessly about their life. They call me up, chatting away until the cell battery dies about random, sometimes incomprehensible things (which will sound familiar to any of you who've ever talked to me on the phone) and I struggle to take dictation, snatching at every word in case it turns out to be important later.

As with anything else, there are plusses and minuses to being a listener.

On the positive side of things, I never have to worry about what a character was thinking when something went down. I don't usually struggle to figure out what a character would say or do in a certain situation. (If I am struggling with that, I know I'm really blocked and it's time to break out the meditation.) I don't have to worry about figuring out their backstory or analyzing their wants and needs. They're there, in my head. I just have to ask them.

Oh, yeah, the character interview is my best friend.

On the other hand though, characters tend to be very self-absorbed. They don't notice what other people are doing unless it directly impacts them. They also don't stop to smell the roses very often. Or notice what's out the window next to them. Or pay much attention to the scenery at all. If you're familiar with the EDITS system, this means that I get a lot of yellow, and struggle to find even the vaguest hint of green.

At times when I'm begging for green and despairing my overabundance of yellow, I'm jealous, horribly, irrationally jealous, of the watchers.

Watchers see the scenes in their head like a movie. A couple of my critique partners are watchers and when I listen to them talk about the way they work through a scene, I am struck by that crazy the-grass-is-always-greener (oh, no pun intended there!) kind of envy. Their stories don't come in as a monologue over a sometimes crackly connection. They see it all in full-color, high-action cinema form.

Again, there are plusses and minuses though.

Setting? Check! Action and stage direction? Check! Dialogue? Check! Internalization and motivation? Um. . . not so much. Unless they're lucky enough to be watching a movie with a voiceover at the time. (Those are kind of annoying in real movies, but I imagine must be very much appreciated in muse-movies.) Watchers have to work at the whys. They have to look at the reactions and puzzle out the backstory to find out what's really going on. "What were you thinking?" is a popular question, I imagine, in the character interview.

I say that to my characters a lot too, but usually shouted in a frustrated, you're-killing-my-plot-with-your-damn-antics! kind of a way. The watchers probably sound more curious and interested when they say it.

So what are you? A listener? A watcher? Something else entirely that I just haven't had the benefit of encountering yet?

Practice Your Pitch In Unexpected Places

Last week I was on vacation with my husband and his family in the Catskills. The trip was very nice, and I had a lovely time. And there are some places that are just too scenic not to be inspiring. I love mountains. Mountains are my favorite places to vacation. (Other than cruise ships, that is.)

But I'm back from vacation and Moonlight & Magnolias is only a few days away. And I have plans to pitch my current urban fantasy project there. I've been polishing my manuscript and fine-tuning my pitch for weeks. And this past week, I got some unexpected practice.

This is the first time since I started writing full-time that I've been introduced to a large number of people. Invariably, when you are plunked down in a small talk situation, people ask what you do for a living. And for the first time, I decided to answer the question with "novelist". I might not have had anything published yet, but writing novels is what I do after all.

This, of course, led to that terrifying question "so, what do you write?" I've posted before about the benefits of contests like TwitchWeek for coming up with the one-line answer to this question. But sometimes you have more time than that to talk, and the dilemma becomes how much information is too much. You never want to tell someone interested in your book "it's complicated" or "it's a long story" or "it's hard to explain". At the same time, you don't want to launch into one of those boring, long-winded, why-don't-we-just-sit-down-and-I-can-recite-you-my-entire-manuscript-verbatim explanations.

And then my opportunistic side took over: What a perfect opportunity to try out that two-minute agent pitch I'd been working on!

After all, there was no pressure here. These people were just random people I met at a vacation resort. The odds were pretty slim that they were in any way involved in the publishing industry. But if I could take people with only a fleeting, polite curiosity and get them really fascinated in under two minutes, how much better prepared would I be for someone who started out interested?

Several people glazed over and zoned out well before my pitch was done. But not everyone. And by the end of the week, I was much more comfortable with talking about my book.

Knitting a Novel

You can't just fall in with any group of writers and form a critique group. You have to have common ground to work from. You have to have other things in common, besides writing, so that you can understand where your partners' perceptions are coming from. At least, you do in my experience.

When it comes to this critique group, we have lots in common. Of the many things, in addition to the obvious writing thing, we all knit. (Well, I shouldn't say "all"; Sarah doesn't knit. Yet.) Yes, you heard me correctly, we knit. And not just in our private homes either. No, we have been known to engage in this completely granny-ish activity in public. In cars. In subway trains. In meetings. In restaurants even.

I'm new to the TriMu; I have no idea how knitting became a group activity. In my mind's eye, I have a fuzzy image of a poorly planned outdoor NaNoWriMo write in on one particularly chilly November day. The original TriMu sat there, plotting and trying desperately to keep typing away, even though they shivered so badly that they couldn't hit the right keys. ("Hey," they told one another bravely, "it's Nano -- it's not like you were going to write anything comprehensible anyway!")

"F-f-fingerless g-g-gl-gloves!" a Mythmaker shouted through chattering teeth. "What we need are fingerless gloves!"

At this point, I'm assuming someone had some spare yarn handy or maybe an extraneous sweater got unraveled for a good cause, and another of them happened to have a set of knitting needles on them for reasons at which even my whimsical imagination cannot guess. And thus a craft habit was born. As I said, I don't know how exactly it all went down. By the time I joined the TriMu, knitting was already the thing to do, and I was taught the craft as part of my induction.

I like how I say "induction" there, as though there was a formal ceremony and the TriMu didn't teach me how to knit in Tori's living room while we watched the California Raisins' Claymation Christmas Celebration last December.

In any case, we "all" knit. (It's only a matter of time for you, Sarah.) And as I was sitting on a train last weekend with my most recent knitting project, it occurred to me how very like knitting writing a novel can be.

Finally! I can hear you all thinking. She had to get to the point eventually.

You start out with a pattern, a plan for what you're going to knit and what stitches you're going to use to make it look the way you want it. This sounds suspiciously like an outline for writing a novel. As a pantzer, I don't hold with that kind of nonsense, but I do at least go into a new writing project with a vague idea of what I'm starting up. So maybe you don't always start with a pattern, but you at least sit down with some vague inkling as to the shape of what you want to knit. I'm fairly certain most knitters don't sit down thinking they'll knit a sock and come away with an afghan. I'm sure it happens that way sometimes, just like novelists sometimes sit down to write a romance and come away with an epic high fantasy trilogy. . . Not that I've ever done that. ;-)

So you have your pattern and you get your yarn and your needles and stitch markers and what have you together and you start off with the knitting. And maybe while you're knitting, you decide you like the way something might look if you tweaked the pattern a little here and there. Or maybe you make a mistake (this is something I never do. . . *innocent whistle*) and end up liking the way that new "pattern" looks and so you just go one with knitting it that way instead. Or maybe you make a mistake that you don't like the look of and so you sit there and spend an hour or so unknitting. Which is a lot harder than it sounds, by the way, so much so that unknitting is something I actually never do. (Incidently, why do we never notice these mistakes at the time we're making them? Why is it always rows and rows later that we realize them?)

Or, put another way, you get your research materials and notecards and word processing programs and what have you together and start off with the writing. And as you go, you might come up with a smoother way to make that plot you outlined earlier work or the characters might go off in a direction you didn't expect but really love or you might get six or seven chapters in and decide that your main character needs to die and someone else should be telling this story and so you have to go back and rewrite it all.

Or, put still another way, you work the craft, whatever it may be, and gradually make the project your own.

And then the project starts to really take shape. Your fingers get used to the pattern of the stitches and you get into a rhythm and rows (or words, as the case may be) just start to flow off your fingertips. There may still be tricky moments, mind you. You might have to sneak an extra stitch in here or there to make up for dropping one somewhere else, just like you might have to throw in a line of dialogue you didn't anticipate to set up the big twist at the end that you didn't see coming before. But the point is that things are starting to tumble and if you just keep going with it, everything will work out.

And before you know it, it's time to cast off. Time to type "THE END". You've finished. It might not be what you set out to do, but who needs more socks anyway? Epic high fantasy trilogies are so much warmer.

Do Not Skip Ahead

I've been having a little trouble lately reining myself in. I finished a first draft recently and there's a huge part of me that just wants to query the heck out of it, even though it's nowhere near ready for submission. I know better, and I will restrain myself, but every time a "perfect" opportunity shows up on my radar, I have to talk myself down.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite agents opened back up for submissions on a very limited basis. And she's asking for Urban Fantasy.

And then I saw mention of a contest that looks oh so very cool.

New agents with an interest in my genre are popping up left and right.

And urban fantasy is on the rise.

Look hard enough, and "perfect" opportunities will just jump out of the woodwork at you.

Except that they're not "perfect", because my manuscript is not done. As I have to remind myself every single time I see one of these tempting blog posts or tweets or news articles, trying to query right now would be bad for me.

Why? Well, there are many, many reasons. And don't worry. I'm going to list my favorites here! (Admit it; you were worried I was just going to say that and run, weren't you? Okay, maybe you weren't, but I'm going to list them anyway.)

• Agents and editors say it all the time. "Do not query your novel before it is finished!" I literally see someone tweet or blog about this at least once a day. Sometimes as often as ten or twelve times a day. With so many "unspoken rules" and "unseen observers" in publishing, breaking a rule that all the gatekeepers are shouting at the top of their internet lungs on a daily basis just seems like a bad idea.
• I know, in the logical side of my brain, that my WIP isn't ready to be seen by anyone outside my critique group yet. So why would I send out a query that would just make me afraid that someone might request the manuscript? What would be my plan really? I query, and then when I get the request, I scramble and try to force myself through the revisions in the amount of time I could reasonably pass between receiving the request for a full and sending it? In today's instant gratification, technology on demand world, how much time is that really? It's not like I have the US Postal Service to blame for a delay if the agent asks me to email them the file. How much time would I really be able to buy myself then? A few hours? A day? A weekend? Not enough, no matter what kind of excuse I came up with.
• Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I did manage to buy myself a few weeks so I could crash through the revisions process. It can be done. I've seen it done recently to marvelous success. Some people are capable of that kind of thing. I envy those people, because I am not. I know it would show in the manuscript I sent out, and then, when I got the inevitable rejection, I would always feel like I blew a great opportunity. Sure, I could revise it and requery, but I think agents and editors are probably inclined to look even more critically at a second submission. Why raise the bar for myself needlessly?
• In business, they say "dress for the job you want". As an unpublished novelist, I don't want to put anything less than my absolute best work in front of industry professionals. I'm sure, as a newbie, I'll still make a ton of rookie mistakes. Adding an extra one that I know about just seems silly.

But knowing all of that doesn't stop me dreaming. It doesn't stop me seeing a "perfect" opportunity arise and saying to myself "Oh, if only my novel was finished, I know that would be just right for me. . . Well, they only need a query letter and the first five pages to start with. My first five pages are pretty good. Maybe I could just submit and then revise like mad crazy, just in case I make it to the next round?"

No! Stop! Do not pass Go; do not collect $200 in imagined royalties. It can be hard sometimes, letting a "perfect" opportunity pass you by, but that's the name of the game. When the manuscript is ready, there will be other opportunities out there for me, opportunities that really are perfect. Until then, though, I just have to keep restraining myself, reminding myself.

Do not skip ahead.

There's No Crying In Baseball

Some of aspiring novelists have very lofty goals for their writing. They seek to be international bestsellers, crafting works of fiction that the whole world will read and recognize, that will integrate into pop culture and be remembered for centuries to come.

If those are your goals, that's fine. To each his own. (Cicero. Now there are some words that endured for centuries. Twenty of them.) Those are not my goals though. I mean, don't get me wrong. If one of my novels ends up that way, I'm not going to say no. It's just not where I see myself going.

Truthfully, at this point I would be psyched to have a real publishing house offer me just about anything to publish one of my novels. Just having my words go into print and show up on the shelf at the bookstore would be amazing.

In the end, I think my goal is to be midlist. To make enough from my writing that I can support it but not enough that people sit in their living rooms with their critique groups and bitch about how crap my work is. (Not that I've ever done that. . . *innocent whistle*)

But beyond the money or the publishing, I will now confess something that has long been one of my most desperate goals: I want to make someone cry.

Yes. I just said that. I want to make someone cry.

I am one of those people who is very susceptible to the emotive content of a story. I have been known to sob at the movies. To blubber at the end of books. I have even teared up while listening to the radio. That last one is dangerous while driving. I don't recommend it.

And I want to be able to do that to someone else. I want my writing to draw them so far into the story, to make them care and invest so much of themselves in the character, that when something sad happens, they really feel it. And they weep. Maybe they don't bawl like a baby, because they're not like that. But they get misty-eyed and possibly there's a sniffle. That would be awesome.

Ladies and gentlemen, mission accomplished! The other day, a fellow member of the TriMu (who I will not name here; she can out herself if she wants to, but I don't want to embarrass her, in case she never reads for me again) read the first draft of my latest project and called me to tell me she cried at the end.

Victory is mine! (Points to whoever comments the origins of that one first)

Working Through It

It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks for the TriMu. We've had a lot of writerly stuff going on and that's taken its toll on us all. (See Sarah's post from last Friday for more details of the tragic brain explosion.) I've also had some personal stuff going on that's been dragging my brain off in ten thousand other directions, none of which involves a familiar.

But through all of that, there are still things that need to be done, other projects that cannot be abandoned in light of our having other things to do. Deadlines are deadlines and even self-imposed ones must stand or the whole system falls apart.

So even though I was feeling tired and burned out and my Muse wasn't speaking to me, I kept opening up my WIP every day and pounding away at it. The words came with painful slowness, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming out of my imagination and forced through stiff wooden fingers to grind past the keyboard and onto the page.

To say writing was difficult for the past few days would be the understatement to end all understatements.

And then, as it always does, something lovely and amazing happened. I was sitting at my laptop yesterday, at a ridiculously late hour of the night (or a ridiculously early hour of this morning, if you want to get technical) because I was still several thousand words away from my goal for the day, when my Muse snuck back into the room.

She stuck her arm through the doorway, waving a white flag fashioned out of either a crumpled paper napkin or an Armani handkerchief. (I'm not sure which as I was tired and getting a little bleary-eyed.) She even offered to bring me a caffeinated beverage if I would just let her play with the familiars again for a few hours.

Two hours later, my word count goal for the day was met by over one thousand words and now the last few chapters of the book are sitting right on the edge of my brain, just waiting for me to let them fly out onto the page.

The morale of the story? Even when your brain is 'sploded and you feel like you couldn't string together a coherent sentence to save your life, keep writing. Write your way through it. It's the only way to get past it.

Or, as Kalayna says, the Muse comes to those waiting at the keyboard.

Letting Art Imitate Life

I spoke back in June about paying attention to the reality around me and injecting that into the lives of my characters. I really think there is no better research opportunity in the world than a cruise. So many people from so many places in such an odd circumstance, where the mundane parts of reality are gone and all you have left is the real stuff about them, the people they are when they don't have ten million other things going on. Plus, cruises are fun.

Unfortunately, there are some less than fun experiences in life that can be good sources of research material too. For example, last Thursday night, on my way to meet Tori and Darlene for our weekly dinner/write in/social hour, I was in a car accident.

First, I'm fine. Thank you in advance for your concern, but there's nothing to worry about. No one was hurt. My car is totaled, and that is sad, but both I and the other driver are uninjured and that's all you can reasonably hope for in a car accident.

I did notice something in the aftermath of the accident though, something that made me very happy. (Well, it made me happy later, once all the shock and adrenaline and general freaking out was past and I was capable of achieving "happy".) I had a little video recorder running in my brain the whole time, taking notes about everything that happened and everything I thought about, with the express purpose of using that information in a future novel somehow.

It made me happy because it means that I've now turned looking at life through a novelist's eye from a habit into an instinct. I didn't consciously decide to take detailed notes in my head of how the scream that came out of me when the airbags deployed sounded or what my thought process was when I finally worked up the courage to look at the damage to my car. I just did it. It was automatic and effortless, like breathing.

Now I don't have a project in the works just now that involves a car accident, but you can bet there will be one in my future. And when that project comes along, I'm reasonably confident you'll see the following little scene in there somewhere:

"I'm fine" I told the paramedic who'd come to check me over. "I broke a nail and I scraped my arm on the airbag, but I'm okay."

I confirmed that I didn't need to go to the hospital and signed the release. I listened politely while he told me where the nearest urgent care was in case I changed my mind, knowing that I wasn't taking any of it in and that I probably wouldn't need to go anyway. My injuries weren't bothering me and I was pretty sure they weren't going to.

What was bothering me was that I'd actually listed a broken nail as an injury. And I'd given it top billing, no less. Oy!

Yes, that actually happened, just like that. Yes, that is exactly what was running through my head at the time. I advise everyone who writes to start running that little video camera in their head; you can't pay a Muse for that kind of stuff.

Feeling Twitchy?

Today two of the agents at BookEnds, LLC started a pitch contest on Twitter. They're calling it Twitch* Week and if you want more details, click here.

There have been several of these types of contests over the past few months. The Knight Agency did their Book In A Nutshell pitch contest a few months ago. Colleen Lindsay over at FinePrint Literary Management did a Query in 140-Characters or Less contest on her blog back in January. (Our very own Darlene got a nod in that one!) These contests are all over the place if you keep your eyes open.

I love them.

There are a number of skills you must have to be successful in publishing. First, most importantly, you must be able to write. Some people will quibble over the degree of skill you must have here in order to be published, but I think we can all agree that, to at least some extent, you must be able to string together various words in a form which conveys some semblance of a story. I'd like to think you need to be able to write really, really beautiful prose in order to be published, but the cynic in me is forced to admit this isn't always the case. (The self-doubting pessimist in me is secretly glad!)

Also, because the days of over-the-transom submissions have pretty much passed, you must also be able to write a good query letter. People hem and haw over the nature of the query letter system, but right now it's the name of the game. If you want anyone in publishing to look at your manuscript, you have to sell it with a solid query letter first.

Another skill you need is the ability to pitch, succinctly and yet still coherently. Some people call it the elevator pitch, the quick little plug for your book that you could communicate to someone in the time an elevator takes to reach its destination. It's a very important skill. As writers, we attend conferences and conventions and the like and try desperately to get thirty or so seconds with our choice editors and agents so we can convince them that our book is their next big thing. It's also a skill that very few people tell you that you need when you set out to be a novelist.

I realized the lack in myself of this particular skill almost right away. Here's how: once I started telling people I was a "novelist", the following conversation invariably took place:

Me: I'm writing a book.
Them: Oh, wow. What's it about?
Me: *blinks blankly, twice, before taking a deep breath* Well, you see, there's this guy. And he thinks his life is. . . but then this other thing happens. . . and then he finds out this. . . and he has to do this. . . and this. . . and there are these other people -- they're the bad guys -- who want to do this instead. . . so then they. . . *voice trails off as previously interested person wanders away into a wall with a glazed over expression*

Oh dear, I would think. I need to come up with a better answer to that question.

Contests like this week's Twitch Week do just that. When you can only explain your story in 140 characters (actually 123 for this one, since you have to add the @reply tag in there somewhere) you learn to boil your plot down to its bare necessities while struggling to hang onto its unique voice. The first time I entered one, it was like an epiphany, a lightning bolt striking my brain. So that's what my book is about! I get it now!

Several of the Modern Myth Makers are participating in Twitch Week. I've already entered two of my projects. What about the rest of you out there? Anyone else feeling twitchy???

*For those who don't get it right away, I think the idea behind the name is something like this: Twitter + Pitch = Twitch

Working Vacation

As I write this blog post, I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a car speeding toward the Port of Miami. In just a few short hours, I will be boarding the Majesty of the Seas for a four night cruise to the Bahamas. Commence jealous muttering now. I'll worry over it while I'm having a pina colada on the pool deck on your behalf.

Vacationing is something everybody does, but I find my vacations to be different from "normal" people's vacations in that I actually work more on vacation than I do at home. I can't speak for other writers, but a tour of an exotic destination, a brief immersion in a new place, or even just a little change of scenery does wonders for my creativity.

It's more than just a chance to relax my mind and recharge my batteries. Whenever I go somewhere new, I instantly become more aware of my surroundings. I look at everything with, as Jimmy Buffet might say, "a novelist's eye".

I find myself looking out at the view or catching the scent of a new flower or tasting a new food and trying to describe it in my head the way I would in a novel. The ocean isn't just blue, it's liquid sapphire swirling around silver and diamonds.

I pick up the quirks of strangers I meet and assign them to my characters. The guy at the table next to me isn't just sitting there. His eyes dart around the dining room, completely unaware of the obnoxious gurgling sound the straw his empty cup is making.

I steal conversations I overhear, tweaking them into appropriate dialogue. Random bystanders don't gossip; they chatter like magpies about the extramarital affair they suspect a coworker is having, not even thinking about that fact that they're subjecting everyone within earshot to their lurid speculations.

If we strive to write what we know, and to inject reality -- rather than just a sense of realism -- into our fiction, then a vacation, abounding with opportunities to increase our body of knowledge, can be better sometimes than an intensive master class.

And, of course, there's still something to be said for recharging the batteries and relaxing the mind. Now about that pina colada. . .

Showing, Not Telling, and Not Trusting

Any writer who has serious ambitions about writing wants feedback on their work. I have never heard of anyone who wrote a perfect manuscript and sold it without ever showing it to anyone for some kind of critique. It's just a part of the process; as writers, it is impossible for us to read our work the way a normal reader is going to. We're too close to the story and we know too much about the characters and the background. We don't spot inconsistencies, we miss gaps in logic, darlings wink at us and bat their eyelashes and we follow them wherever they might lead, even if they do run the plot right off the rails. Constructive criticism and feedback do not indicate that you failed as a writer, just that you are human.

But constructive feedback, though very necessary, can be hard to take. We all have certain things that we hate hearing. Perhaps my least favorite piece of feedback to receive is "show; don't tell". I hate that little phrase, probably more than any other phrase in the English language. And not just because I hear it so often I feel I should know better by now. For a long time I hated it because I simply didn't understand what it meant. Now I hate it because hearing it means that I have, on some level, failed my potential readers by not trusting them.

Most of the time when I slip up and start telling rather than showing, I can usually track the cause back to my not trusting the reader. There is an emotion or feeling or thought that the reader simple MUST understand, but I don't trust them to puzzle it out on their own. So instead of saying "Nikki slumped in her chair at the computer and sighed, one hand massaging the back of her neck as she glared at the blinking cursor until the page of text faded to black and random ribbons of color prevented the image from burning into the screen", I say "Nikki was frustrated because she couldn't think of a good example for showing instead of telling".

Now somewhere in the back of my mind, the lessons of Strunk and White that were beaten into me in high school cry out "OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!" and insist that the second sentence, conveying the same idea in far fewer words, must be better. But the key word in that sage pearl of wisdom is needless. You should almost always omit needless words (and I threw that example out there pretty quickly and tend to over-write, so I'm sure both sentences are full to bursting with needless words), but that doesn't mean shorter is better. If it did, I have no doubt that the rule I remember from Elements of Style would be "Shorter is better" rather than "Omit needless words". The second sentence is shorter, but the first sentence shows what's really going on. The second sentence is just me yanking the reader out of the story and telling them what's happening.

("Omit needless words", incidentally, is one of only two things I remember from my study of Elements of Style. The other is the proper usage of the words "nauseous" and "nauseated" because I thought the advice "unless you truly feel you have that effect on people, you should not say you're 'nauseous'" was amusing.)

Worthless Excuse #487: I Simply Cannot Write When I Feel This Way

Any writer worth their words knows that there is never a perfect time to write. There will always be something else competing for your attention. Sometimes it's something very real and important competing with your glorious pages. Like children or day jobs or curing cancer. (This is not to say I expect everyone is secretly working on a cure for cancer in their cubicle at the office. I more meant that last one for those writers who are also, you know, oncologists and researchers and stuff.)

But other times silly things compete with your muse. In my experience, muses do not react well to being put on the back burner because it's a beautiful spring day and you just want to laze about in the backyard working on your tan. "Laptop lines and novelist's tans are all the rage these days!" she'd suggest sneakily. And you really don't want your laziness to be responsible for that kind of fashion trend, do you?

And still other times, emotional problems will compete with your writing. As novelists, we spend most of our time crafting and commenting on the human condition, but what we often forget is that we're doing that while having to be human ourselves. We have personal lives; we experience things. We would, realistically, be very poor artists did we not do those things, but sometimes it can feel like more of a hindrance than anything else. We like to be in the mood to write, and sometimes "the mood" has about as much chance of magically manifesting itself as my kittens have of sprouting wings so they can really chase those birds that have decided to nest in the hanging plant on my balcony.

Alas, at one time or another, we have all had that thought: I simply cannot write when I feel this way!

You're wrong!

I'm sorry, I wish I could sugarcoat it for you, but the plain and simple truth is that you're wrong. You can write when you feel that way. In fact, you must! And it doesn't matter, for the sake of my argument, what way you're even feeling. Because "write what you know" is the ultimate piece of writing advice and creating realistic emotions is one of the greatest challenges in writing. Writing emotions while you're right there in the thick of them is something of a match made in heaven then, isn't it?

The trick, of course, is finding a way to make those emotions make sense in context. I am not suggesting that, after learning your boss is a two-faced jerk, your bitchy demon-stalking heroine should start complaining to henchmen #3 about how underappreciated she feels. When you have a fight with your spouse, you should not have the hero of your romance novel start waxing poetic about how glad he is to wash dishes for his girlfriend every now and again and how wrong his mother really is about the course of his life. Remember, it’s the emotion you want to grab. Not necessarily the context.

Let me give you an example. Sunday, my husband got some rather bad news about something at work and, on his behalf, I was a bit angry about it. As in the kind angry that made the hour long drive back from the weekly TriMu critique meeting go by in just 45 minutes because anger increases the weight of my right foot for some reason. And once I got done shouting at the empty space in the car, my first thought was "I could write Serah a kick ass scene right now!" Serah is the somewhat emotionally-unstable assassin in my epic fantasy trilogy. The rest of my -- admittedly brief -- drive home was spent planning out a great new scene that will have to work its way into the story somewhere. Once that was done, I took out all my residual aggression on processing my notes from said critique meeting and killing off be-verbs.

The results: I feel better. I have a great new scene. My rewrites went much faster than usual. And my husband's boss -- though blissfully unaware of this fact -- has some poor unfortunate be-verb's blood on his hands.

So the next time you start getting all fussy about how you're not in the mood to write, sit down in your chair and force all that emotional baggage onto your characters instead. They might not necessarily thank you for it, but your eventual readers will.

Searching for a Truth

It is one of my fundamental beliefs about literature that at the core of every novel you read, there is a Truth. A message, usually complex and yet simple at the same time, that is the basic assumption the writer is proving with the story. I'm not talking about the plot here. If the Truth of a novel is related to anything, it's more like the moral of the story.

Sometimes this Truth is overt, a recurring line or even the title of the novel. It's out there, letting you know "Hey! This is what the story is really about!" Other times, it's more subtle, never said explicitly, but implied in a thousand different ways. Sometimes these more subtle Truths are ones that we take in as we read without noticing it; we accept them and learn them, but we don't actually become aware of them until we see them in a commentary or something.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.

On the explicit end of the spectrum, I just finished reading the Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. (Those are some marvelous books, by the way, if you're looking for something to read.) All throughout the story, there is one phrase repeated over and over again. "Everything has a price." It gets thrown back and forth throughout the dialogue. Characters think it with resigned sighs. It slips into the exposition. Every now and again, it appears as one of those single-line paragraphs, powerfully opening or closing a chapter. Over the course of those three novels, she must say "everything has a price" three or four thousand times.

Except that she doesn't say it three or four thousand times. She just weaves it into the story often enough that you begin hear it behind every thought, every feeling, every action of the story. Your brain starts automatically translating every single word -- even the mundane words like "a", "and", and "the" -- into "everything has a price" until it's running on a loop in your head. Everything has a price. Everything has a price. Everything has a price. You leave the Black Jewels world with that one phrase pounded into your head, a Truth, undisputed.

If you're looking for something a bit more subtle than that, let's take another fantasy trilogy: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. (I really never expected to use LOTR as an example for subtlety!) The Truth we learn from journeying through Middle Earth is that everything, once touched by evil, diminishes. I don't think he ever explicitly states this, but you can't find a single character in the entire trilogy -- and there are a lot of them, aren't there? -- who, once touched by evil, hasn't lost something. Oh, they might be better off -- we would, in fact, hope that most of them would be better off, because otherwise why work so hard to defeat evil in the first place? -- but they all lose something. Nothing can ever be the same for them; they can never be as great, as beautiful, or as innocent as they once were. Everything, once touched by evil, diminishes.

When I wrote my Aundroma trilogy, I knew my Truth from the outset. And that helped me with my story building. I used that idea to set up everything, because I wanted it to be one of those subtle Truths, one that I never came out and said, but that was there, present in everything. The same idea applies to every aspect of the story, from the design of the binary star system, to the social structure of the races, to the relationship between my main character and his love interest, all the way down to the internal battles of my main character. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about that Truth, and so I did, though I never actually wrote it down (not even here).

But with my new project, I'm not sure what Truth I'm writing about. The idea came upon me rather suddenly and I've just been writing it in true pantser style, with almost no planning or thinking beyond the scene I'm working on. But I'm getting to that point in the story where I should be coming up on turning points, where the plot should be taking shape, and I'm wondering to myself "what am I really writing about here?" I throw Truths that I already know into the room with my characters and see if they react to them, but nothing happens. So far, that's not stopped me writing -- I'm still pounding out about 1,000 words a day -- so I'm not too terribly concerned about it, but it still makes me wonder.

For the first time, I'm thinking that I might need to learn a new Truth myself, that my characters might have to throw one out at me.