The Worst Timing In The World

It’s always when you’re ridiculously busy doing other stuff that the brain cylinders start firing. End of last term, winter holidays, and beginning of this term, I had time, but no motivation or inspiration. Cue Deathly Assessment Flurry #2, that last from about the beginning of September through to mid-November (as opposed to #1, which is April-May), and nearly every single freaking floodgate in my mind has opened, because I have no time to write.

Photo from Stock Xchange

I’m not even kidding; nearly every SINGLE story I’ve EVER written and actually want to fix has been unblocked in the last four weeks, from Jesscapades, the editing nightmare that it is, to Sanctuary, with its excellent plot but iffy worldbuilding, and from Dragon Tuesday (short story) with its lack of solid plot and character arc, to the untitled noir story with its multitudinous red herrings and lack of actual solution.

Oh. My. Gosh.

Seriously, brain. This is Very Poor Planning, and I do not approve.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; I approve very highly of the solutions to all the muck. I just wish you’d hand them to me when I could actually, you know, DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM.

On the other hand, it’s REALLY nice to be having ideas again (contrast my imagination drought from Easter 2010 to, well, recently), and I guess it’s proof that when you get really blocked, you just have to walk away and bore your brain into submission.

Brain says, Officially bored! Have ideas!

I say, Yay! And sigh. And Oh, My, Gosh. >.< :)

Habitually, Really

Can I just whinge for a moment about how hard it is to get back into a habit? I can? Oh. Great. Thanks. O:)

There’s this piece of folk wisdom I remember learning sometime in highschool about habits. It takes three months to make one, and only three days to break one, so the wisdom goes. Personally, I don’t know about that. Sometimes it only takes a day or two to break a habit – and some habits take far longer than three months to form.

Eating, for example. The diet I have to be on right now is complex and extremely limited, but can be broken down essentially to two things: 1) no added sugar in any form and nothing with more than about 10% natural sugars, and 2) no moulds of any kind, which includes fungi like mushrooms, ‘safe’ moulds found on cheeses and bruised fruit, anything brewed/fermented like vinegar or soy products, and anything with yeast. Like I said; pretty limiting.

I can’t really remember what I expected when I first started on it, how long I thought it might take until I got used to it, but now, six months in, I can tell you it still isn’t a habit. My first instinct is still to reach for the chocolate-coated sultanas on the bench leftover from Christmas for a snack, or to ponder a quick sandwich for lunch. I can feed myself now without stressing too much about what to eat, but it’s certainly not a habit.

Checking my email? That’s a habit. My first instinct when I switch on the computer is to open firefox and click on my gmail shortcut. Literally. I have to stop and think about it if I want to do something else. (Email addict? Me? Never...)

So, after not really writing for several months now, how do I go about getting back in the habit? I used to have a process that told my brain it was time to write, a way or a place I’d sit in, things I’d have open on the computer, a mindset. All of that is gone, faded into distant memory with disuse. And when I sit at the computer, I’m more likely to spend an hour or so thinking, “I should write”, than actually writing anything. (Besides, there are EMAILS to read! O:))

I googled ‘characteristics of a habit’, wondering if anything would useful would appear to solve my problem for me (which is either terribly lazy, or terribly postmodern – or perhaps both) and the only article that wasn’t about smoking or chemicals was this one. It suggests that there are three characteristics of a habit: 1) You feel weird not doing it. 2) It’s second nature. 3) Other people notice you doing it.

Well, 1) I already feel weird for not writing, and 2) I doubt I can magically make it second nature without just doing it already. Not much help there. But 3) might have something: other people notice.

Okay, so I’m not necessarily going to hang a big sign over my head to say “I’m writing!!1!!”, but what if I approach it the other way? What if I enlist someone to watch for me writing, so they can tell me when they notice I’m not doing it?

Really, all I’m talking about it accountability. Once upon a time, I used livejournal for that. And since finding one person committed enough to bug me every single day about whether I’ve written or not is a bit of an ask for that person, maybe the blog’s the way to do it.

So I’m going to revive the livejournal again. Feel free to cheer me on or just laugh at my pathetic attempts (either works), and if you’d like to join me in reforming a habit – or even just forming a new one – let us all know in the comments here, or you can comment along with me every day on the livejournal blog :)

Any other handy tips for forming habits?

It's Time

Wow. Hi everyone! It's been so long, it feels kind of crazy to be back. It feels even crazier to like being back, if that makes sense. (It does. Honest.)

See, there was a time a couple of months ago where I actually thought about shutting this blog down. Life had gotten too much, writing wasn't happening, and I felt like a total phony blogging about writing when I wasn't actually writing. It's like the cliche of those people who wander around wearing tweed jackets with patched elbows moaning about their writers' block; we all know they're not really writers.

And for quite a while, I didn't really feel like one.

So. What's changed? To be honest, nothing much - except my perspective. Last year was full of crazy; new job, new house, new addition to the family (the four-footed variety), new having-to-deal-with-long-term-illness (not serious, but annoying). Lots of new, lots of crazy. And in the midst of all that, writing became just one more thing I had to do, one more thing that had to be checked off a very long and exhausting list.

Long-time reader will know that I've been keeping monthly writing statistics for a while now. For ages, this really worked for me. I could count off the days by the words, and see that I was making progress, and prove to myself that I could write as much in a year as a pro author could.

But last year, I fell prey to the numbers. I had a few months in a row that were very nearly my lowest months ever, well below half what I usually expect as my minimum. The numbers started going down, and so did my writerly self esteem. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this, I'd think. Maybe I'm just a hobby writer. Maybe I'm not tough enough to be pro; maybe I'm just not supposed to do it all.

Throughout all this, I was getting some excellent advice from friends and you guys, my awesome readers. The one thing that remained consistent about all the advice was that I needed to take a break, have some fun - only I kept protesting to everyone, I AM taking a break! What do you think three months straight below HALF my minimum is if it isn't a break?!

Yeah. It was me protesting and complaining and beating myself up about having a break, which, as any of you who have done this will know, isn't really a break. So in December, I had a real break. I still wrote when I felt like it, but I did something really, really scary. I put away the spreadsheet.

Eeep!!

Yes, it's true. I have NO IDEA how much I wrote in December. I have no record of what I worked on, or even when I worked, or how much. So! Terrifying!! In years to come my descendants will have no way to see that on the ninety-second of Thentember I wrote sixty-two words on "The Most Brilliant Story"! *swoon*

But (of course), it worked. I feel less stressed about the whole writing thing than I have in a long time, and although I'm still not talking to myself about going pro (even though I'm secretly plotting it where my head can't hear me O:) :D), I'm enjoying writing. And for the first time in a long time, I have The Itch.

It's a great feeling. And to celebrate, I'm going to dig out the edits I've been avoiding for the last three months and kick some draft.

How are YOU going to start your new year? :D

In Which My Revelation is Revealed to Me, Yet Again

I've been wavering for about two weeks now on whether or not to do NaNo - and then today I work up and realised that whatthefreakingCRAP, November is Monday. MON-DAY, people!! I was going to be super organised this year and at the very least, even if I didn't do it myself, I was going to enquire about running the Young Writers Program at school, since I know a whole bunch of students that would be interested.

Alack, 'twas not to be. Next year.

But, back to me, and whether or not I'll be participating. My answer (at the moment) is a tentative yes. Tentative, because I have no idea what I'll work on. Tentative, because my word count for the last two months combined is less than 5500 words. Tentative, because exams and report writing and final assessments all occur in November. Tentative, because my main WIP at the moment has been dead in the water for the last several months.

Only, I just unstuck the WIP last night. I finally figured out/remembered/restarted the useless lump of grey I call a brain that when I get blocked this badly for this long, it's usually not a life thing; it's a story thing.

And oh look, hey presto, muse wakes up from snoring in her little corner and goes - well DUH. Here are the problems, and this is how to fix them.

And I go:

**FACEPALM**


Ahem.

So. NaNo: a tentative yes. Whether or not I'll actually work on the WIP remains to be seen. Probably I'll do what I've always intended to do in other years, and just shoot for word count, without worrying what it's on. We can already see I'm intending to cheat - er, bend the rules, since WIP is in progress already. And there are a cycle of stories (one of which is Forget, currently in print over at Allegory) that have been bugging me a lot lately, and that I want to work some more on.

Just call me the Wafflenator.

Anyway. All you infinitely more sensible people - Nano: in or out?

Wait, This Was Supposed to be FUN?

Yeah. The title pretty much sums up writing at the moment. I realised yesterday as I was brainstorming post ideas - which, by the way, always come to me fully formed whenever I am away from paper, and then by the time I have paper brain has decided that no, post was written, did not need to remember it, and I procrastinate for hours/days/weeks from blogging trying to recall The Great Post That Was - hang on, I started a sentence way back up there.

*ahem*

Right. I realised yesterday that writing hasn't felt like fun - at all, not the tiniest bit - since I finished Sanctuary waaay back at Easter. This, ladies, gentlemen and alternatives, is Not a Good Thing. Not At All. In fact, it is So Bad, it makes me Resort To Capitals for Unimportant Things. See? Bad.

There's an easy solution, though: write something for the fun of it! Because we all know it's important to have fun! Only, problem. The brain, she has been 'working' at writing for so long, the Muse is literally curled up asleep on a train to Mexico, bored out of my brain. Ah ha.

How do I know this? She left a postcard for me on her bed.

Yes, my Muse has a bed. Her name is Sarah, she likes pink and has brown pigtails, and mostly appears as a six year old girl. When she's pissed off at me, she's a 32-year-old woman in an emerald green evening gown with glossy, dark brown curls.

Yeah. Me, weird. But we knew that.

ANYway. Problem = muse gone. Something is lacking. I can't kickstart myself into doing something for fun. It seems... pointless. And hey, I know it isn't - but try telling the empty bedroom Sarah usually occupies that.

So I need to have fun with writing again. But I don't know how.

Anyone out there able to remind me??

PS This post by Natalie Whipple strikes me as relevant.

Why Do We Care?

Feedback: it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, writers generally long for feedback on their work - some sense of encouragement, an external recognition of progress. On the other, we dread it; what if someone hates it? What if we've just wasted two thousand words? Ten thousand?

Actually, I've done that before. I wrote the 'first' 10k of a novel called Logan's Prize, and realised that really, the interesting stuff happened in chapter eleven. I had a friend read over it, and they agreed; the first ten chapters were filler, backstory, uninteresting and unimportant. Ouch. So I dropped the story.

(Of course, being as tenacious as I am, I refuse to ever really give up on a story; I still have Plans for that one, bwa ha, and yes, they do include using some of that 10k that I've written).

But back to the point. Although one of the things that determines how quick a story will be written is me (surprise surprise), an unfortunately large amount also rests on the shoulders of my alpha readers. You see, I don't like first drafts. Not really. Sanctuary was, sadly, an exception that proved the rule. First drafts are ugly, and messy, and broken, and even when you finish them you just know you have so much more work to do. And invariably, there are Teh Hatez that happen somewhere around the middle, where you realise the beginning was all wrong and the story would be so much stonger if only THAT had happened instead, and while you could just keep writing and pretent that THAT had happened, wouldn't it be so much nicer to go back and fix it while you still remember what you want to fix?

And so you stop, meaning to go back, but you never do. Yup, done that too.

It seems I need readers to carry me through that phase, to remind me that progress is progress no matter how small, that finishing is a worthy goal in and of itself, quality aside. NaNoWriMo's great for that. So are alpha readers.

So what do you do when, for one reason or another, you can't have alphas? More to the point, what do I do?

That's not a rhetorical question; it's something I'm up against right now. Borderlands refuses to be written linearly. It has two timelines, one of which isn't chronological, and the scenes are all over the place. I know I need to let go of my need to write things In Order and just let the book be written - but doing that means sacrificing the ability to post to my alpha reader/s every time I finish a scene, because I do want them to read it in order after all.

So I'm stuck, right at this minute, between doing what I know I need to do and not being able to share it with my support team, and forcing myself to do it the wrong way just so I can feel better about myself.

We know which way I'll go, of course; I need the book written as well as it can be, not just written for the sake thereof.

But it's going to be a tough slog.

So tell me: how do you keep yourself motivated to write when no one else can do it for you?

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-)

Life or Something Else?

Insert a deep sigh of relief here.

The week is over. I survived. 10 points to me. The wedding was amazingly fantastic (anyone interested in photos??), and the new job is great. Admittedly, the kids haven't arrived yet, so I reserve the right to alter my judgement after Tuesday O:)

Last Monday I posted about giving yourself permission to have time off, and about knowing your own limits. This past week I've had a perfect opportunity to put that into practice :D

I didn't write Monday, because it was the wedding. I didn't write Tuesday, even though it was a public holiday, because we spent all day looking at/editing photos from the wedding, talking to all the relatives, and then collapsing into a heapy heap to recover afterwards.

Then Wednesday I started my new full time job.

For a while, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to write again for weeks; my brain just seemed to full of everything else, and whenever I opened the document to write, it just wouldn't work.

But then on Thursday I had a revelation. I was in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and was vaguely pondering Sanctuary. I knew I needed another scene with the MC at school to set things up properly. I'd gotten the MC into the classroom, and into her seat... And then nothing. Not. A. Thing.

I had kind of just assumed that it was because I was tired/busy/stressed/preoccupied, so my creative brain wasn't working.

But on Thursday night, it hit me: I'd been trying to take the story in the wrong direction. I'd had a loose idea of what needed to happen in the scene - but it was all wrong! My MC was being too passive! Will all that anger and irritation and frustration building up inside, I still had her sitting around in class being passive!

Bah!

So I stopped for literally about ten seconds, closed my eyes, and said to my MC, "Fine. You tell me what's happening in the scene."

And guess what? She did. And on Friday after work, I wrote it all out straight in about ten or fifteen minutes, and squiggled in glee. It's a fun scene with no less than three occurrences that have given me the basis for main plot points, and the MC attacks a boy in the class, and things are just generally FUN.

My round-about-way point is this:

Next time you think it's life getting in the way, take ten seconds out to make sure it isn't you getting in the way. I'm really good at telling my characters what to do. I need to remember to let them talk too ;)

PS Vote for my cupcakes! Liana & my blog is Heart of the Home ;)

Applying Hot Iron: Recalcitrant Characters

So, those of you who follow me on twitter will know that for the last week or so, I've been working pretty hard on Sanctuary. I got nearly 5k yesterday, huzzah!! But really, I don't feel like this is a really major achievement, because it's been easy. The MC, Edge (real name Emma), is a chatterbox. She wants to stop and talk about everything, everyone. She's guaranteed to always have a comment or an aside, and her voice just flows, because she Doesn't. Stop. Talking.

This is a good thing. Really, it is. It's just frustrating that I won't have much writing time in the next week due to family weddings and a new job! :D But on the other hand, it gives me confidence that I can drop the story for a week and come back to it without missing a beat - Edge will still be there, ready to chatter away the instant I put fingers to keyboard.

In complete contrast, let me introduce you to Deviran. He's a co-MC of my Magic Eyes Universe books, the sensible and silent to Mercury's loud and silly. I adore Deviran. He's gorgeous, he's smart, he's sensible, dependable, reliable... And silent. Oh. So. Silent.

Okay, I can deal with having a character who's the strong silent type. I can deal with having a character who doesn't have much to say. I can...

*implodes*

See, what's really frustrating about Dev is that he's not only the silent type in-story, he's also silent out of story. Which makes it near impossible to find out anything about him. I love him, I adore him - but who the heck is he??

So. Today, let's look at some techniques you can use on recalcitrant characters - and if you have any others, leave them in the comments. Trust me, I need all the ammunition I can get.

1) Interviews. These work best for chatty characters, but a few well-leveraged questions can often open up the silent characters too. If you're really having trouble, consider asking a friend to play the role of interviewer while you respond in-character. That way, you won't be able to anticipate the answer because you won't know the question.

2) Role Playing. For your character, that is. Tear them out of their own story/universe, and make them uncomfortable. Throw them to the sharks, have them fight a tiger, expose them to any nasties your other worlds might be harbouring. Anything and everything - throw them at your character, and watch and see how they respond. Liana Brooks calls this one the Reaction Chamber.

3) Kill them. Again, and again, and again. As creatively and painfully as you can, on paper for the world - and your character - to see. Have a competition with a friend to see how many deaths it takes before the character is willing to crack and give you information.

4) Find the Detail. Often, there is one particular detail about a character that triggers off a whole ranges of questions and answers, like a chain reaction. It's just a matter of finding the right detail. Go through everything you know about your character, piece by piece, and threaten you character with either the destruction of this detail, or the reversal of it. Threaten to make the guy a girl, the mother a teen - or in my case, threaten to give the only guy in the entire Academy without a familiar a new one. o.O

5) Ask Someone Else. Like everything in life, it really is possible to get too close to the situation. Sometimes it's hard to see the character for the characteristics - or vice versa. Ask a friend (preferably a writer, or at least someone like an actor who is used to the business of characterisation) to read over what you've got written down with your character (including any or all of the above suggestions) and tell you what they think of your character. You might be surprised at how clear the character is to someone who isn't you.

With Deviran, 4 and 5 were most successful. I found out a whole bunch about his past and now all of a sudden who he is in the present makes sense.

Have you ever used any of these tactics with success? What other suggestions do you have for dealing with recalcitrant characters?

The Difficult Decisions

This post is more of a random musing than anything else. I'm stuck, and I need to think out loud; and lacking any more inspiring ideas for a blog post, I thought I might as well muse here and see if any of you want to offer opinions :)

So, on Monday I signed up for Holly Lisle's revision course. Although I've 'done' the first month already, the lessons I saw were the original drafts; I'm now working from the beginning again with the 'proper' lessons.

Lesson one got me thinking when I first read it a month ago, and it's blistering in my brain again now - and I don't know how to answer it. It's all about goals, about knowing what you wanted your book to be when you started writing, about knowing what it actually is now that you've written it, and about knowing what you want it to be.

You can't hit a target you can't see, after all.

I'm using Jesscapades for this course, obviously, since it's the finished draft that I want to edit. I love this story, always have - but I am really struggling to know what I want to do with it, which is, I think, why I've stalled in edits for it so many times.

I know what I originally wanted it to be; I still have my notes on scrappy bits of paper and in random books and on random blogs and websites, talking about my plans for the book. It was to be the story of Jessana, called Jess, who is about to graduate from the Shard Academy. Shards are assassins who kill at the direction of Fate, assumedly to protect the world from people who are Better Off Dead. Only in order to graduate, she is told that she must kill John, her best friend, whom she 'knows' is innocent. So she lashes out against what she's been told, uncovers a conspiracy in the process, and More Stuff Happens.

That's what it was to be, with fights and shiny technology and intrigue.

What it is (other than a mess of a first draft O:)) is altogether less spy and more magic than I'd intended. Jess is quieter, less certain about life and death. There's virtually no technology and only one real fight. She's still told to kill John, but that's only the catalyst for the real conflict, which is the conspiracy she uncovers. But the story doesn't really end; it's blatantly a Book One - which it is, but I wish it weren't so obvious about the whole thing. I'm a big believer that each individual book in a series ought to be able to at least mostly stand alone; and Jesscapades at present does not.

So. What do I want it to be? This is the confusing part. A lot of the problem in the draft stems from the fact that my central conflict, my main story arc is confused and unclear: is it the having to kill John, or is it the fall-out from uncovering the conspiracy? Of course, it can be both, but one or the other needs to dominate so that it can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion at the end.

As it stands, the kill-John arc is concluded about 2/3rds of the way through, and the conspiracy arc isn't really concluded (because that's part of book two) - so there's nothing left to conclude at the end. I suppose, based on this, it's most sensible to draw out the kill-John arc to the end, isn't it? :)

But my major dilemma is this: Originally, the catalyst for Jess running off to join the Shards, the reason that she uncovers the conspiracy (because the conspirators have been shadowing her ever since), is the death of her sister, apparently murdered by the conspirators.

Fine and good, but for that line to work, Jess needs to step up to the plate in terms of character. She needs to become more of who she was supposed to be - a sassy, confident assassin - and less of who she became - a concerned, caring individual who wants to save everyone, and whom I'm not convinced (and neither are my beta-readers) could actually kill someone. Fight and maim, sure, but kill? Not so much.

In essence, Jess needs to be.... Tara. This is where it gets confusing. Tara is Jess's sister that was murdered - only in one lot of revisions that I started in the middle of the year, somehow, Tara didn't get murdered. Somehow, Tara ended up being the one at the Shard Academy, the one training to be an assassin, then one told to kill John. And Jess was her older sister, stuck on the outside, jealous at the attention and schooling and abilities Tara got but wary of the Shards, of their morals, of their attitudes. In this version, Tara gets in over her head when she discovers the conspiracy, and Jess has to save her.

My dilemma: at present, both stories have equal weight. Both sound like stories I want to write, and I'm in a complete deadlock over which I should write. Do I leave the original story and change Jess's character to fit? This is tricky because in my mind, Tara now has that personality. Or do I change the story to fit Jess's character, which is tricky because in a way, she's no longer the 'main' character; Tara is the one in the thick of the actual action and intrigue.

*sigh* Like I said: deadlock.

So I throw it open to you: Have you ever been in this situation? What did you do? If you were in this situation (imagination, here), what would you do? Which story sounds more appealing to you? Can you help me at all????

Thanks. :)

Look Ma, I Aten't Ded!

A thought has struck me - as thoughts are wont to do.

Motivated by said thought, I re-examined my writing stats spreadsheet; and the thought was affirmed.

It's a curious one, somewhat paradoxical. Un-intuitive. And it might not work for everyone.

But wow! It works for me, and I'm glad: it's made things much less stressful, now the pressure's off.

So what's the thought, I hear you wonder.

It's something that I was, for a long time, afraid of. You see, although I called myself a writer - I wasn't really sure. I didn't know that I could do it, not in my heart of hearts. And I wasn't sure it was what I wanted; and I couldn't be certain about why I did it.

And so, for a long, long time, I laboured under the fallacy that if I admitted that it didn't actually matter when I got published, the motivation to write would vanish - zip! - like that.

But here's the thought:

It doesn't actually matter when I get published. No one else in the world cares if I get published or not. And not being published isn't going to kill me, or make me a Bad Person, or worse, a Failure.

And here's the stunning part: I've admitted this, at long last, and I'm not actually dead. And neither is my writing. And neither is my motivation to write.

Wow.

Even more than this, I have statistics to support the conclusion that when the pressure's off - the pressure to polish, to get the novel ready to submit, to work to a deadline, to force myself to write when I don't feel like it because that's what writers do - my productivity actually goes up (an expected 30% this month over the previous two Septembers).

Who knew? :P

I've been having a tremendous amount of fun with writing lately, not forcing myself to commit to any one project, but letting the Muse wander spontaneously. I've got more ideas brewing than ever, I've worked through some major plot problems in a few stories, and I've written no less than three flash fictions in a week - when I'd written a total of one in my life before. I have - for me - a record number of things out on submission, and I'm not feeling stressed about my writing. It's fun.

I'm not feeling blocked - or when I am, there's no pressure on me to break the block and solve the problem now; I just hop over and work on something else, and every time thus far a solution has arrived of its own volition within a week. I'm not stressing, I'm not panicking, and I'm not beating myself up because I haven't met my word count goals for the day.

And, contrary to my expectations, all of this hasn't made me less determined to write: in fact, just the opposite. I'm more determined than ever that I will one day publish novels, in the plural. But I'm also more willing to wait for that time to come.

So I can't work from home next year. Big deal? I will, believe it or not, live. Things will work out; they always do. And in the meantime, so long as I keep doing something, I'll win out in the end: sometimes quantity trumps quality after all.

It's long been known that fear is a barrier both to creativity and success.

So join me in being radical: what do you fear? Why does it matter? How can you change your approach - your attitude, your practices, whatever - so relieve some of that pressure that we as writers inevitably put on ourselves?

Go on. Change something. Be daring.

You just never know what the results will be :)

Smarter Than I Thought Week

Two weeks ago, I was in a bit of a funk. I was chatting online with a friend. She asked me for some photos that I knew I had in an old post on this blog, and I started browsing through my own archives. And you know what?

I'm smarter than I thought :)

So many things I've learned, so many things I've explained - and I'd forgotten all about them. So this week, to celebrate the things I've learned, the lessons I've discovered, I'm going to revisit some older posts.

Today, something I really needed to hear that day when I was poking through my archives - and something I constantly need to remind myself: Always Do Something.

PS Never fear: The series on Editing Jesscapades will continue next week ;)

If you're looking for one more reason to do Nano, here it is. In their book Art and Fear, Bayles and Orland discuss the principle of quantity over quality. The relevant bit is quoted on the webpage, and goes like this:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. "

Right now, I'm struggling through a first draft. I HATE first drafts with a passion that sometimes makes me wonder why I'm doing this whole writing thing. First drafts SUCK because they are never, ever, EVER perfect - and I'm a perfectionist.

When we're stuck in the quagmire of an imperfect first draft - or caught in the death grips of editing, for those of you that hate that bit of the process - it's so easy to lose sight of what we love about writing. It's so easy to fall back into the default position - everything I write is terrible, I'm no good at this, I think I'll quit.

Don't. Quit.

Every word you write, every sentence you think, every scene you bash your head against the desk over - everything you read over later and wonder what you were on at the time... It's Something. It's Practice. You're Learning.

Quantity. To improve, you must practice. And practice means volume.

Go. Write. Do something.

Voices and Lack Thereof

...Also subtitled, 'Troublesome Characters'.

So.

I'm writing a novel called Jesscapades at the moment, right? The one-liner is 'A dedicated student assassin gets her final assignment: kill her best friend, or be killed by him.' It's not a brilliant tag-line, but it's not too shabby either. I think. The story itself has potential, and bits of world that just make me shiver and go 'Squee!'

The glass, for instance, which goes with the story behind the name of the assassin organisation. They're called Shards, and they kill at the direction of Fate. They get Fate's directions in the Glass Room, a large dome on the top of a tower filled to the brim with glass objects, all hanging from the glass ceiling, all twirling and twining in the dazzling sunlight so the room looks like gold.

When it's time for a person to be killed, their glass falls, and shatters. Shards, right?

Much squee, much happiness.

But here's the thing: right now, I'm a breath away from 60k. The first draft of the novel will be complete somewhere between 70k and 75k, and I expect that to increase by as much as 20k in edits. So the length is good.

The idea is good, the length is good.

Tension, yup, plenty of that. Twist? Oh yeah. Big twists. Conflict? Plenty. Subplots? Lots.

It works. It fits.

But.

Tonight I stumbled upon a review of Lisa Shearin's Magic Lost, Trouble Found, which is one of my all-time favouritest books evah. If, one day, I can write a character as amusing and enjoyable and entertaining as Raine, I shall die happy.

And that's precisely the thing. There's one thing missing from my list of the things that are right with my novel: characters.

Oh, sure, I have the characters. They all do their job. They drive the plot, they have needs and wants and motivations....

But right now, I simply can't convince myself to care about them. And it's not because I'm sick of the story, because I'm not. It's because they feel flat. It's because when I compare them to a kick-ass character like Raine Benares, they're weighed and found wanting.

And mostly, it's because of one thing: voice.

Recently Liana wrote a great post on finding your voice. I read it and knew it was important - but it wasn't until tonight after reading the Lisa Shearin interview as well that it all clicked.

See, my characters all sound the same. I'm teaching this great novel at school which is told through three different points of view, and the technique is fabulous: you can tell just by looking at the page - not even reading, just looking - which of the three characters is speaking.

My story has two main POV characters, and a small host of minor ones (about 6 in total, I think??) - and every single one of them sounds exactly the same. Even their dialogue sounds the same.

And right now, at this point in my writing career, I have to admit a scary thing - I'm not actually sure how to fix it. In my head, I have nothing; the characters aren't really speaking to me, I'm not hearing distinct voices for them like I have some of my other characters - and I don't really know what to do. And I have this feeling even character chats won't work.

For now, I'll plug on, and finish the draft as per plan - but if anyone has a suggestion, be it original or directing me to an article, I'm be so grateful for the help. I'm stuck, and my brain isn't offering me any answers.

Oh characters, where art thou??

Blocked

Writer's Block. For those of us that depend daily upon our 'muses' to provide us with fresh content, it's a pretty scary term.

But here's the thing: I don't actually believe in it. Oh, sure, I believe in being blocked - but I don't believe the reason is ever that vague, nebulous idea of "writers' block". I don't know about you, but usually when I'm blocked, it's because my brain is trying to tell me something about what I'm writing - trying to tell me that Something Is Wrong.

Most recently, I've been suffering a month-long block on my wip, Jesscapades (an urban-fantasy suspense novel, whee!). And two days ago, I figured out why.

As regular readers will know, I spend a hair-tearing weekend back in February replotting the storyline for this novel; I plotted to the end only to discover the MC became someone I hated - which happened with The Project, too. But unlike The Project, this was a story I wasn't willing to give up on. I'm pretty determined to make Jesscapades work.

So I replotted, and after much frustration, figured out how to make my MC less morally reprehensible, and realised what was causing the unbalance in my storyline (you can see pictures here).

But I was still blocked. No matter how much I tried to convince myself, I just couldn't start working on it again.

And then two days ago, I figured it out. The scene I was up to was a very crucial scene for the entire novel - in fact, it's the inciting incident - and I'd started it wrong. This totally stalled me out, because it caught me in a deadlock: did I push through and keep writing, knowing the scene was wrong, knowing I'd have to scrap most of it in edits? Or did I restart it, and lose several hundred words from my precious word count?

The idea of cutting words was terrifying; the thought of writing something I knew I'd cut was heartbreaking. So I ignored it all. For several weeks. Without even knowing that this was what the problem was.

But once I realised what the problem was, I had a *facepalm* moment: it's a first draft. You're allowed to write it like NaNoWriMo. That means you don't cut anything, even if you know it's rubbish, and it's allowed to count in the word count. Instead of cutting, you just cross it out and start again.

And so I did.

Such a simple, simple solution to a month-long, frustrating block. Aren't I a clever bunny? *rolls eyes*

So. Wanna know how the scene was supposed to start? Kind of sort of something like this. :)


The rushes of adrenalin every time she’d caught a glimpse of someone turning a corner had faded; the unknown faces in the street no longer all looked like Tara. But still, it had only been four days. She might still be alive.

Jess leaned against the stone-block wall of an alley and tilted her head up to see the sky. Blue, bright, clear. It ought to be raining. At least then there would be some way for Jess to express the pain and anger burning in her chest, and the clouds could cry for her, since she couldn’t.

With a sigh, she closed her eyes, and slumped to the ground, resting her head on her knees. Why Tara? Why? And what on earth had happened?

People go missing, thought Jess. I know that. But not Tara. Not one of us. Realising the illogicality of her thoughts, she added, Not someone who knows the streets so well, anyway. Not by accident.

And there was the key factor, the one that scared her more than anything else: not by accident.

What had Tara done? What had she been involved in that had caused her to go missing for four days without a trace?

Jess squeezed her arms around her legs, knowing that the answers weren’t going to come, and determined just for a few minutes to put the whole matter out of mind.

I should have watched her more closely. It’s my fault.