The Most Awesome Writer Resources Disappearing

Just a quick adminy kind of note to say that, as some of you may know, Holly Lisle is, after 30+ years of traditional publishing and 30+ novels published, going indie. What this means for you guys is that very soon, her products will be available through all the standard indie channels - Smashwords, Amazon, B&N, Apple iStore, etc - BUT NOT through the HollyShop on her own website. Why should you care?


Because I will no longer be able to offer you the No-Questions-Asked 20% Rebate on her products.


So if there were any resources of hers that you were thinking of snaffling, I'd really recommend doing so asap so you can email me your receipt and I can refund you your 20% of the total cost. I really, really, REALLY highly recommend her Create-a-Plot Clinic and her How To Write Page Turning Scenes in particular (review of HTWPTS here). The 33 Worst Mistakes Writers Make About Horses is pretty good, too.

PS: note that this DOESN'T include her two big courses, How To Think Sideways and How To Revise Your Novel (links in sidebar). I can still offer the 20% discount on those :)

Story Dandruff: How Outlines Can Kill Creativity

I'm going to spend the next few posts discussing outlines; appropriate since I'm in the throes thereof. Tune in later for parts two and three.

Hands up who out there is a pantser, who trembles at the very hint of an outline, who cries at being asked to structure their first draft, and who would rather die than write a story that's already been written (in outline form)?

Yes? Well, you'll sympathise with my topic today.

There are, of course, as many ways to write as there are people who write (and probably more, since all my novels so far have demanded that they be written differently), and outlines are one of the more fraught topics of conversation. To love them, or hate them? To use them or abuse them? To write them all out and then conveniently ignore them while you write, making you wonder why you bothered in the first place?

I've had experiences at all ends of the spectrum (yes, all; this is more than a linear scale!), and today I'm going to talk about my worst outlining experience ever. It was a play, not a novel, but the essential principles remain the same. This play was written for a specific purpose, to be performed at a specific time to a specific audience - and things just keep getting more specific. Initially, I was told the topic of the play. Then I was told the basic story line it would follow (a retelling of a well-known (in those circles) story).

All good, all fine thus far. I could work with a general plot, and still interpret and embellish and dramatise, and all would be well.

Except. Specific. The commissioner of the play is a very specific fellow, and soon I not only had a rough plotline I had to follow, but a schedule that involved certain events happening on certain nights, bits of dialogue that needed to be included, set ideas that had to be worked in, and a particular number of characters.

I reeled. I floundered. I wrote the play, and every single person who worked in it (who have all performed plays of mine in similar contexts before) unanimously agreed it was the worst play I'd ever written. I pretty much refused to put my name to it.

Now, I firmly believe that outlining is a Good Thing, that it's *le gasp* necessary and can save a whole bunch of headaches (see forthcoming post!). So what went wrong here?

Easy: too much outlining, and from an externally imposed source. Now, it might be really tempting for you to sit back and say - well, that's fine! I'm never going to write on request like that, and I'll decide what I want to write, and everthing will be great! So I'm sorry about your problems, but they don't apply to me.

Except, they do.

Externally imposed outlining doesn't just happen when other people impose things on you; on the whole, we're pretty good at doing it to ourselves. Fantasy and sci fi writers are particularly notorious for this, mostly because we're the ones who tend to go overboard on the whole worldbuilding thing. We spend days/weeks/months/years building our world before we ever put pen to paper for the actual story, which means that by the time we come to write, there are a whole bunch of 'external' factors dictating how the story should go.

Forced-march plotting, I believe it's called. It's where the plot happens for no reason other than that it must, and I'm guilty as heck of it even in writing that I do for myself. I've decided how I want the story to end up, what the steps ought to be to get the characters from A to Z, and by hook or by crook, those are the steps they'll take, character veracity be hanged.

It leads to a story that's dry and often illogical - and it's all to easy to fall into the forced-march trap. I did, in January, with the first version of the rewritten Act One of Jesscapades. Characters come across as stupid and unmotivated, plot events happen by coincedence and seem too convenient, and the whole story feels dry and flaky. Story dandruff? Don't let it happen to you!

Combat FMP (forced-march plotting) by taking a long hard look at your characters. Is x plot point something they would really do in that situation? If not, can you switch out the plot point for something else? Can you give them a plausible excuse for doing something out of character? Or even better, can you build up to this and motivate them so Plot Point X comes across not as an anomaly, but as a new and exciting facet of the character, making them a deeper, rounder, more real character?

So, Planners beware: outlines are tricksy little beasts that will turn on you as soon as look at you. Don't let them take control.

Pansters of the world unite!

Anyone else have outlining horror stories to share? O:) :D

The Unravelling

Three reasons why writing is like sewing:


1) You create something from nothing, building and shaping raw material into something beautiful and useable.

2) You have to have experience working from the pattern before you can create your own patterns. You need to know how a pattern is actually supposed to go together before you can branch out and make a different, new one.

3) You can be creating along, thinking everything is going swimmingly, and all of a sudden realise: Things Aren't Right.


There are four key types of 'As in Sewing, So In Writing' mistakes.



A. The Birdsnest Bobbin. This is where you are sewing along and it looksl ike everying is going fine, but then everything comes to a crashing halt. The machine seizes up, and if you try to go any further you'll snap the thread. Everything looks okay on top, but when you look underneath, there's a whole birdsnest of thread. This usually happens because you didn't thread the machine properly (or because it unthreaded itself when you weren't looking; sewing machines are pains in the butt for that).


How is this like writing? Because if your story is not threaded properly, if it's not set up right to begin with, things can very rapidly come to a crashing halt, and if you try to write any further, you'll just break something and make it worse.



B. Running Out of Thread. I don't know if any of you out there are sewers (! seamstresses? O:)), but if you are, I'm quite sure you'll have had the experience at some point of sewing along, probably down a very long seam, thinking everything is going well, only to find at the end that you only actually sewed the first third of the seam because the bobbin ran out of thread. o.O All the stitches you've done that look neat on top have nothing to hold them in, and they unravel almost straight away.


In writing, this is when things are going along swimmingly and think it's all fantastic, until you get to an endpoint and you stop and reassess, and realise that you've just written 30 pages of fluff. None of it's actually relevant to your story, to your plot or direction - it's all tangentenal, and there's nothing to anchor down those threads that look pretty, but will never be able to hold any weight.



C. Catching the Fabric in the Seam. This often happens when you have a tricky seam to sew (like the circular seam on those jolly hats). Things are going fine, you finish the seam off, it holds together nicely, but then you take it off the machine and have a close look and realise that the wrong part of the fabric has gotten caught up in the seam. The only solution here is to unpick that part of the seam and sew it again.


In a story, maybe you put a scene in the wrong place. Maybe some dialogue got caught up somewhere and actually needs to come later. Maybe a subplot was introduced at the wrong point, or a key plot point happens too early or too late.



D. Sewing the Wrong Seam. This is probably the most frustrating mistake. Maybe you read the pattern wrong - or maybe you read it right, but you just picked up the wrong piece of fabric at the last minute. You sew the seam and it looks fantastic; it's the neatest seam you've ever sewn in your entire life! And then you realise: you just stitched the left sleeve with perfect precision into the neck hole. o.O Not so helpful.


This is when you have perhaps stitched the wrong back half onto the front half of a novel. Or maybe a character has had a personality transplant and become someone you loathe. Or when you realise the entire point of your novel as it stands is, just by way of example and not at all stealing examples from my own experience *coughcough*, Revenge Is Good, Please Take It. Urgh.



In Jesscapades at the moment I haven't been progressing terribly quickly. It occurred to me recently that I have managed to make most of these mistakes. The writing came to a crashing halt and I knew if I continued I'd break more things than I fixed. So I went back to the last place the seams were holding together, and had a good look around. I realised that the steps I had the characters taking from that point onwards were not logical at all; they were stupid and plot-serving and not all all in character.

So this week, I'm unravelling. I'm unpicking the seams of my story to uncatch all that fabric that got caught up where it shouldn't be; unstitching things that were stitched together in the wrong place, and rethreading the story so it has a stronger foundation to build on - because once I get these first few chapters right, I know the middle is going to be so much stronger :o)

And yes, as those of you following the insanity on twitter know, I made ten of those witches hats over two nights. And I mean nights: 11pm - 3am on puppy watching duty o.O They were, believe it or not, for the school swimming carnival O:) :D

Just Plain 'Break'

Not a hour after I penned yesterday's post on Monday afternoon, I slammed headfirst into a large and very painful brick wall. Okay, I had an ending to my book, I had large portions of the plot worked out, things came to a conclusion...

But it was a conclusion I hated. Somehow, the entire moral of the story morphed to: Don't kill innocents, but please do commit murder for revenge.

Don't know about you, but that's not exactly what I wanted out of this story. Not quite o.O And because of this now-twisted moral, the MC became someone I hated. How could she do this? All those morals she stood up for, all the right she fought for - she's just going to let it all go at the end and ignore everything? Um, excuse me?

I hated her. I fell into a bitter pit of despair, and was quite literally ready to rip the plot cards that lay on the floor in front of me up into little tiny shreds.

I didn't. See me be good.

See, this exact thing happened with the last novel: I had an idea of where I wanted to go with the novel, but the story became such that in order to get there, my protag had to turn into a Not Nice PersonTM. So I scrapped The Project, because with that story, I couldn't see my way out of it, and there wasn't enough else that was compelling about the story to make me want to try.

This time was different. This time it's Jess. I loved this story. And somewhere in there still was a kernel of the story I'd wanted to write - and I was determined to find it.

I spent the whole day being miserable, which was a great end to my long weekend, and didn't sleep much at all on Monday night. But sometime during my tossing and turnings, an answer came to me. I'm not going to plot-spoilerise here, but besides the fact that Jess's motivation for her 'final attack' at the climax has changed (yay, no more revenge attacks!), I can show you this.

This is what my novel currently looks like, as plotted out to the end:



The red and blue are the two MCs, and the pink and orange are the two subplots. As you can see, it's quite a mess - unbalanced, messy, and random.

Here's what I've realised (in a *facepalm* moment) what it ought to look like:



Doesn't that look much better?

So, after several heart-stopping, heart-wrenching, sleep-depriving hours on Monday afternoon, I think I can say I'm back on track, and raring to go again. I still need to finish the darn draft, which is as messy as the first diagram, which makes me want to tear my hair out, but I can at least now look forward to the pleasure of knowing what I need to fix in revision - and that nagging sense that something was wrong has finally left me, and I'm free to write. :)