Making the Beginning WORK

(Note: this post was composed about a month ago and lost in the deep dark depths of my harddrive.)

The beginning of anything is often the hardest: you have to overcome the intertia of not doing whatever it is you're about to start, and often you can be plagued by doubt or fear. What if I do it wrong? Can I actually do this? What will people think?

I've been writing for long enough now that beginning a new draft doesn't scare me so much any more. Where I used to prefer editing to drafting (my perfectionism was happy that it finally got a chance to make things RIGHT!), I now enjoy the freedom that drafting involves; it doesn't MATTER if I get it wrong, as long as I'm having fun :o)

That doesn't mean that beginnings are perfectly easy, though - they're just difficult in a different sense. As the Twitter peeps among you might have seen, I'm editing Sanctuary right now. Sanctuary is a YA fantasy, and I drafted a tentative blurb/query for it yesterday:

Moving halfway across Australia to Nowra, capital of nowhere, is the worst thing to ever happen to Edge. Three months on, she has no friends, the world’s most horrible bedroom, and no one to celebrate her fourteenth birthday with. Maybe that’s why she starts hallucinating that the butterfly is talking to her – though her dog seems to think the fairy is real enough.

Sure, finding out she’s a Traveller, able to cross between worlds to Sanctuary, home of the fairies, is a definite bonus. Making a new friend and realising that Sanctuary might be everything she misses from home is pretty great, too. But then the shadows appear, ominous and blacker than black. Edge is determined to find out where they’re coming from – until she’s dragged from Sanctuary into the land of death and almost killed by them. Now Edge must decide if her new home is something worth fighting for – or if, you know, running away to the circus might be the saner option.

But I'm editing! How does this relate to beginnings? Because it's in edits that beginnings are now brain-pretzeling difficult. The internet is full of really good advice about how to begin your story: begin in the middle of the action, show your character's voice, avoid excessive backstory, avoid shock-for-the-sake-of-shock lines, show your conflict, and so forth. However, while this advice is all great an necessary, it's not what I'm struggling with (though, granted, there is currently ALL THE BACKSTORY eating up my first page, which is not so good >.<). What I'm struggling with is something that not a lot of people seem to talk about: the themes.

See, the first draft of Sanctuary ended REALLY WELL. I'm completely in love with the last handful of lines, and they never fail to generate that 'Awww!' feeling, which is what I want. But in order for them to work, they have to be set up in the beginning.

The beginning has an epic amount of work to do: it has to hook the reader, establish the action, set the scene, introduce the plot conflict - and it also has to introduce the thematic conflict. It has to give a taste of what's going to matter in the story, what the MC's main drive is, what they're fighting for. And that, right now, is what I'm struggling with.

Q4U: Climbing Back On the Horse

So, it's been a while since I've written. About four weeks, in fact. It's not that I haven't thought about it - it's been plaguing me. The general need to write, stories in particular - heck, even my dreams have been writing related!

But the problem is, none of this adds up to actual writing - and I can't seem to make it. I'm tired, worn out by life and all its current woes, and when I pull up the page to write, it just doesn't seem to work.


Image from Stock Xchange

HNOT is staring at me. It only needs another 20k to be complete, which I could totally do in a month - if I could get myself started. I think I'm afraid to ruin the tone I've set up, and scared off by a lot of plot problems pointed out by a beta reader.

Borderlands also stares, as does the temporarily-titled Battersplotch world (this is the one that keeps popping up in dreams). But because HNOT is staring harder, I can't bring myself to start something completely new; too many partially completed drafts.

I have brain freeze, and it's getting seriously annoying.

So, my question for the day to you all is this: After a long break away from writing, how do you get back on the horse again? What do you do to ease yourself back into routine, to convince yourself once more that it does actually matter if you write or not? Any tips for me? Because this is seriously driving me nuts.

Thanks, in advance. You guys are awesome B-)

Month Two: Think Sideways

Sorry for the untimeliness of this post; this past weekend has been insane, and the insanity is set to continue as we gear up for a major family wedding next Monday. I'll do my best to keep the posts coming over the next ten days, but no promises. Thanks for understanding :)

Wow, it's that time again already! This month has gone so fast (thank goodness).

So, Month Two, the month of Planning. (If you want to read up on month one, by the way, it's here).


Week Five

This was a week that a lot of people taking the Think Sideways course had trouble with. Mostly, I think, because we like things in neat boxes - and sometimes planning a novel doesn't fall into a neat box. In this lesson Holly introduced the concept of the Dot and the Line (see my post here); and as a way of kickstarting story-brainstorming, I'm in love. The main point of this conceptual way of looking at things is learning to narrow down your focus, to concentrate only on what matters, what is different, what is special about your character and conflict and story, and put your effort into building that, rather than getting caught up in the million-and-one other pits the avid world-builder can fall into.

The Dot: Stop. Look. Something happens here. That something is small, it is contained, and it is different from everything around it. It is the one or two or three aspects of a character or conflict or twist or setting that make it stand out from the others around it; the reason why it is that character's story, or why the story starts here.

The Line: Difference. Things on one side are not the same as things on the other. The simplest way to work this is to juxtapose dots: antagonist versus protagonist, protag versus the setting, past versus present versus future... etc. Keep it small, keep it limited: Where are the differences that will cause conflict? What changes?

Week Six

This is the genre week. While it might not seem like much of topic for a lesson, I actually got quite a lot out of this - especially the 'Technique' section, entitled Amazon River %-) This lesson is a perfect example of the things you don't even know you need to ask. Writing careers change, books go bust, and sometimes, you have to do a genre jump. This lesson explains in great detail exactly how you go about learning a new genre in a matter of days, giving techniques for dissecting books in the genre, techniques for finding not just good books, but books that YOU will like in the new genre, and all importantly, techniques for switching genres mid-book.

Week Seven

Worldbuilding. How to do it, and do it right. By which I mean NOT spending years and years and forests of trees planning out every single detail before you write the first word of the story. There's one really simple way to figure out if you need to build a piece of information or not, and it all hinges on the one question that I would certainly never have thought to ask, and that it's taken Holly 17 years to think of asking:

Why do writers worldbuild?

Have a good think about that for a moment, write down some answers if you have a pen. Why?

There are, of course, many answers to this. But there is ultimately only one important answer: To create conflict.

Therefore, if the thing you're looking at building before you start writing doesn't induce a change in your character/s, or in some way create a conflict, don't bother. It's something you can invent as you go along, because it won't change the direction, or the heart and soul of your story.

There are eight extra modules in this huge lesson which deal with the specific areas of conflict, character, culture, scenes, language, maps, time and maths, and come with great worksheets and so forth that will help you build what you need without going over the top. Remember the principle of the dot and the line: small, contained, different.

Week Eight

The final lesson for the month is aptly titled "How to Plan Your Project Without Killing Your Story", and teaches you how to make an outline that will neither make you its slave, nor leave you in a funk when you hit that nasty muddley middle :D The basic premise is the line for scene method, but Holly also covers how to use this method to fix boring spots in your novel before they happen - and before you waste valuable time and words on them.


Conclusions

I am absolutely in love with the techniques I'm learning here. And writing from the middle of month three, I can tell you, they just keep coming. The Dot and Line principle, the Amazon River technique for finding alternative genres for your work (SO useful for remarketing short stories), how to prevent boring or messy bits... these techniques have changed the way I approach my writing, and have made my pre-writing stage so much more efficient and streamlined. Approaching planning in this way is also great for when you're putting together your submission package (week 11, which I'm reading now). Having nutted out the themes and concepts of your story early on, you're in the best position possible to create a winner of a query letter, and a sound synopsis.

So, Think Sideways sounds like something you might be interested in? Previously, to sign up for this course, you had to wait for the next designated sign-up week (which happen about once every two months, from the looks of it), and hope that you got in early enough, since they're all limited-intake.

However.

However. Holly's top 25 affiliates now have access to passwords which mean you can sign up at any time. Given I've sold less than ten items through my affliate link like, ever, imagine my shock when I was included in that email! :D

So, anyway. The long and the short of it is that if you sign up through my link, you can get in at any time, and be guaranteed a place. Skip the sales hype and go to the bottom of this page. If you want to do the six-month course at $47/month, the password is checkin. If you'd prefer the 12-month version (same lessons, just once per fortnight instead of once per week) for $25/month, the password is taketime. Hehe.

Don't forget, payments are monthly via paypal, and you can opt out at any time and get a full refund for any lessons you haven't yet recieved :)

So, that's me for the day! Have a great week, and hopefully the rest of this week's post will be more or less (hopefully more!) on time! :)

Think Sideways: The Dot and The Line

I was supposed to write this last week, but I realised as I was looking at it that, in a way, the dot and the line is Holly's way of looking at significance. So I decided to write the article on significance first. If you haven't read it yet, it's here.

So, first of all, what is the dot and the line? What on earth am I talking about? :)

This principle comes from week five of the Think Sideways course. By this point, I have my basic idea, I have my Sentence (logline) with the MC and their major problem, in an interesting setting, with a twist - and I'm ready to continue. What do I do next? The dot. And the line.

The Dot

The basic principle of the dot is that it's small, defined, and contained. It's different (and in some ways opposite) to the blank space around it; it's special. Extraordinary. Stop, it says. Look. Something important happens here.

The most obvious application of this is in maps - you draw a rough sketch, and you let your subconscious pepper it with dots. Then you ask the questions - why there? What happened? What's extraordinary about that place?

Extraordinary is the key word here; an important principle of pre-planning that helps you avoid over-planning is to let the ordinary speak for itself. You only need to define the extraordinary. This is where the concept relates to what I said about significance: you only need to worry about things that are significant to your story. For now, nothing else matters.

This can apply equally well to characters as to settings: For Neighbourhood Watch I shoved a metaphorical dot on my MC and asked the question. Why him? What happened? What's extraordinary about this boy?

For this story, the MC's defining trait is his jealousy for his younger brother, who is cool, confident, and rules the neighbourhood. This is the trait that kicks the story into motion; this is the trait that provides the MC with all the motivation and tenacity he needs to get himself into Really Big Trouble - from whence he will have to find his way out.

Dots can also apply to conflicts: Why this conflict? What happens? What's so special about it? In my Evil Tree Story, the one I'm developing for the Think Sideways course, the major initial conflict is that my MC Jake has to decide between helping out his girlfriend, who gets into serious, life-threatening trouble, and preserving his reputation - no too-cool teenager wants his friends to know he's out hugging trees ;) Why this conflict? Because Jake has always struggled to fit in. Because it's something he's only acheived recently, and it's something he'll fight tooth and claw to hold onto.

Because he adores his girlfriend, and would sacrifice his life for her if he had to.

Thus the dot: Stop. Look. Something important happens here.

The Line

The line has a different power to the dot. The line shows not importance, but difference. Things on one side of the line are not the same as on the other. For me, this was an easier concept to grasp - lines, difference, makes sense :) And it applies to things other than setting much more intuitively, for me.

Setting is easy. Tomorrow, when I post my maps, I'll show you my primary setting 'lines', and give a quick explanation of them. Essentially, the world on one side of the line is different to things on the other side (big surprise there, huh).

So, characters. My MC in Neighbourhood Watch was easy: his line is the line that he draws between himself and his family. He is at once ashamed of them, their poverty and low-class mannerisms, and wishes nothing more than to be disassociated from them forever, and at the same time intensely jealous of his brother's ability to lead and blend in at will. But he would never, ever admit this - his line between his family and himself is (currently) absolute. They are not his, he is not theirs; they just happen to share a house because he has no other choice.

Applying the line to conflict is a bit different: rather than saying what is different on one side of the conflict to the other (although writing this I realise that that would be a perfectly valid approach, too; what is different before the conflict as opposed to after it? What changes?), I looked at what are the lines that cause conflict.

Lines between people are an easy place to start, because often it's the person's dot - the thing that makes them special is the thing that makes them different, which causes conflict, because difference = conflict...

Take Jake for example. On the one hand, he wants to rescue his girlfriend. On the other hand, his mates don't think he ought to have anything to do with tree-hugging hippies in the first place, let alone rescue them when they 'get themselves into trouble'.

Or Heather, my MC from The Project. On the left, we have Heather, who is going to do whatever it takes - whatEVER - to save that little girl, because of her own past. On the right, we have everyone else, who thinks she's getting way too involved, and ought to a) mind her own business, b) leave it to the police, or c) at the very least not make so much trouble over it.

Conflict. Differences. The line.

Remember, this is not the be-all and the end-all of planning. This is just a neat way to kick things off, to figure out what your focus should be, to understand what it is that makes this your story, an extraordinary story, something different and special and you. It's flexible, and I don't think there's any need to feel constrained by its boundaries: if one area isn't working for you, skip it. It's okay to not know every single detail going into a story :)

Tomorrow, when I figure out how to turn my PDF scans into postable images, I'll throw up my initial workings for the Evil Tree Story, and if you can decode my writing you'll see how a couple of sketchy maps sparked the entire conflict and gave me a name for my MC :)

How To Think Sideways

Just a reminder that the How to Think Sideways course (see my review here) is on sale only through this link for this week. There's a new option, too -

You can sign up for the 6-month course, which is US$47 per month.

OR

You can now sign for the course extended over 12 months, which means you're only paying US$23.50 per month.

Obviously it's the same amount total, but as a student I can appreciate that $23.50 makes a much smaller dent in your monthly budget. And don't forget, you can drop out at any time and you will be fully refunded for any lessons in the month that you haven't received yet - meaning that it will cost you $11.75 to test out the course, download lesson one, and see you think it's for you.

Sales go live at 9am Eastern Daylight Time, through this link, and will be open for 7 days. Remember that if you buy through my link, I can offer you a %25 refund once it clears at the end of each month.

If you're wondering what the course covers, this is the curriculum:

Sideways Thinking: Ideas
Week 1: How to Break the Four "Thinking" Barriers to Your Success
Week 2: How to Discover Your Writing "Sweet Spot"
Week 3: How to Generate Ideas On a Deadline
Week 4: How to Recognize and Build On Good Ideas

Sideways Thinking: Project Planning
Week 5: How to Define Your Project's Needs
Week 6: How to Discover (or Create) Your Project's Market
Week 7: How to Develop Your Personal Project System
Week 8: How to Plan Your Project While NOT Killing Your Story

Sideways Thinking: First Chapters
Week 9: How to Write From Inside Your Story
Week 10: How to "Plan" Surprises that Surprise Even You
Week 11: How to Design Compelling Queries, Proposals, and Sample Chapters
Week 12: How to Create, Complicate, and Solve Problems

Sideways Thinking: Middles
Week 13: "Can't I Just Kill Them All?" How to Fall In Love With Your Project A Second Time
Week 14: How to Find and Use Your "Planned" Surprises
Week 15: How to "Hire" Spies, and Why Your Project Needs Them
Week 16: How to Assess Your Progress and Make Mid-Course Corrections

Sideways Thinking: Endings
Week 17: How to Work With Editors, Agents, Marketing Departments, and Artists, and Not Wreck Your Project.
Week 18: How to Find the RIGHT Ending
Week 19: How to Bend Your Plan Without Breaking It
Week 20: How to Write the Ending That Sells the Next Book

Sidways Thinking: Wrap Up/Start Again
Week 21: How to Plan Your Revision
Week 22: How to NOT Fix What Ain't Broken (While Still Fixing What Is)
Week 23v How to Deliver What You Promised and What They Want On Deadline
Week 24: How to NOT Be a One-Book Wonder---Learn to Produce Repeatable Results

How to Think Sideways: Career Survival Training for Writers.

I Hate Writing?

So. It's the 5th of February, and my writing count for the month stands at a big fat zero. Not fun.

I sat down today to think about writing the beginning... And thought to myself - I hate beginnings. Somehow, they seem like they need to be more perfect than any other part of the story - it's what's going to hook people in, after all.

And then I remembered the trouble I had throughout January trying to finish TBAEO. I hate endings, remember?

All okay. Endings (including the climax) are hard too. So, I hate beginnings and endings... But I can do the middle.

Um, no.

Remember Nano, anyone?

So, I hate the beginning, the ending, and the middles...

Does this mean I hate writing? *grin* No. It just means that the process of writing a novel is a long and difficult one, and my brain is just a little bit lazy.


On that note, off to find a beginning...