I’ve been so busy, in fact, that it’s been over a week since the event I wanted to talk about here: my first monthy Story Days.

Story Days were my idea for carrying forward the optimism and go-hung attitude I acquired at Boot Camp.  Basically, the idea was that I’d give myself two days to reprise the two principle assignments from Boot Camp: coming up with five story seeds, and one full-length story.  Well, a couple of weekends ago, Mark and I decided to go for it.  I would do my two assignments, and he would get into the spirit of things by completing half a online course about iPhone development.

We got started bright and early on Saturday morning.  By about 4 P.M, I had my ideas, and I was happy with them.  Then began the process of choosing which one.  The first idea to hit the cutting floor was low-hanging fruit:  it was a cute enough idea, but it just wasn’t compelling enough.  The second had an ending that didn’t completely satisfy me.  The third idea I cut felt like it would be hard to deal with at short story length.  And then I was left with two ideas I really liked:  one a literary idea, and the other a mystery.  I decided it would be more useful to me to have something I could sell to a mystery magazine, so that’s what I went with.

And then I got started.  The first three pages went down easy, so easy.  That’s where I left it when I went to bed Saturday night.  On Sunday I got up again and got another five pages or so before things got difficult.  Real difficult.  But the story got done, at at 10:30 P.M. I was able to relax and bask in my victory.

I have to confess:  it wasn’t easy to attain the same level of pressure I had at Boot Camp.  There weren’t going to be fifteen people I respected reading this story immediately, so it just didn’t matter as much, you know?  I think the last scene or two suffered somewhat for this.  But, the story is done.

I think I’ll do this again around the 15th of September.  I would like to make it a monthly thing.  The next time around, though, I may work on revisions instead.  Because I am building up a backlog of things that need to get revised and sent out.

There also are not a ton of restrictions on acceptable subjects for YA.  Sex and violence are indeed up for grabs.  I was thinking at first that this was a relatively new development reflecting changing attitudes toward innocence — until I remembered the stuff I used to read as a teen, such as The Grounding of Group 6, a surprisingly delightful book about teens who survive a murder attempt by their own parents.

I wondered what it would be like to work on a YA novel myself.  “Ok,” said Kate, “let’s think of a super wild premise for you.”

“Well, if we were going to do this in a disciplined, Boot Camp sort of way, we would come up with five premises,” I said.  “And then pick the best one.”

And that is what we spent the rest of the day doing.  Idea #1 was ok.  Idea #2 was great.  Idea #3 was freakin’ awesome.  Idea #4 was back to ok again.  And Idea #5… ah, Idea #5.  It was completely epic, and it quickly spawned ideas for an entire series.

So now, I am a bit confused.  I have been working on a sequel to the novel I’m currently shopping, but in the wake of Boot Camp I’m more excited about the idea of turning out something new, something I can use whether or not The Big Life sells.  I have several good YA ideas, enough that I don’t know which I like best.  I also have two pretty great mystery ideas.

I am not quite sure how to tackle this decision.  Practically, by sticking with mystery, the genre I love best?  Cynically, by jumping to YA, a hugely marketable genre that I believe I could love?  Or emotionally, by laying out these stories and trying to figure out which one pulls most at my heart?

I don’t know.  I do know this is a wonderful problem to have.

Ok, so this is the last Boot Camp post.  Really this time.

Card took us Boot Campers out to dinner Thursday night, and we started the evening off with some general getting-to-know you conversation.  Someone asked me what I do.

“I write,” I said.  “No one pays me to do it, but I write.”

And this segued into me telling the table about my book, and Card offered to read the first pages for me.  I was, I guess I hardly need tell you, delighted.

The time came on Saturday afternoon, after we had finished up class and people were making their way out of the building.  Card read my pages and shredded them.

And, ho-ly crap!  Did they deserve it!

There were so many things that I knew about my first chapter that Card didn’t get at all.  I mean, important, establishing details like where Kitty’s coming to Chicago from and exactly what her purpose is there.  I know part of the problem was that this was a new first chapter, written to replace my original straight-into-flashback first chapter, which I loved but ultimately could not stand by.  And when I wrote the new one I did a bad job of imagining how much detail would be enough for my readers to understand the situation.  Moreover, the only one who read the new pages was Mark, who had already read a couple of versions of the entire novel — naturally he wasn’t confused.

But Card was.  About a lot of stuff.  And though I knew how the mistake happened, it was hard to sit there next to one of the great contemporary fiction writers, listening to him ask question after question about my story, and realizing more with each moment that I had dropped a major ball.

When he finished reading, Card looked me in the eye and told me that despite all the problems he had pointed out, the thing he really wanted to tell me was that it was very good.  That I felt like a professional, and that the pages felt very commercial.  I have to admit, I blinked at that last bit.  Because I do still occasionally travel in circles where “commercial” would be the worst insult you could fling at a writer.  But that wasn’t how Card meant it, and after a half-second’s thought that wasn’t how I took it, either.  He meant that the thing felt salable.  It felt like a book.

So in the wake of that review I felt a little embarrassed, you know?  But mostly?  Mostly just grateful.

Not for the praise that came at the end, but for the fact that I feel I can see now what must be done.  I feel like I now have a road map to the last 5% of work I need to do to get this thing really sold.  That is huge.  That is a gift.

So I will never, absolutely never regret letting Orson Scott Card eviscerate my first chapter.

I only regret I didn’t ask him to sign the pages.

I’ve been thinking about the lessons I would take away from Boot Camp.  And I think they come down to three big ideas I am walking away with:

A book is not a precious thing

One thing I learned last week is that I can come up with five good story ideas like that. *snaps fingers*  And I can write a story like that.  Which probably means I can write a book like… well, I guess probably like thaaaat.  But you know, pretty quick.

I do not have to treat my book, or any other I write, as a precious artifact to be husbanded, honored, and shielded from all mistreatment.  If I screw it up somehow in my efforts to get it published?  Sucks, but I can write a new one.  If I never get it on the shelf?  Same deal.  I will treat my work with respect, but I will understand that there is always more where it came from.

I have a career

I have been treating myself like a person who hopes to join a profession.  But the fact is, I have joined it.  Getting published and making sales are obviously huge parts of my job, parts I have not mastered yet.  But they are not the things that make me a writer.

I will no longer be ashamed to call myself a writer or to answer questions about it.  I will no longer apologize, with my attitude or with little self-deprecating jokes, for not yet being published.

I am a writer.  I write.  That’s what I do.

I am not going back

I have returned to my home, of course, but I am not going back to the life I lived before Boot Camp.  A life where I fear my work, worry about it, and put it off.  I am going to do everything I must to stay in the Boot Camp mentality, where I work very hard and am exhausted and happy.

One idea I have is to designate the first and second of each month as “Story Days,” during which I’ll do a repeat of the Boot Camp assignments to construct five story seeds and write one story.  But I think the biggest thing that will keep me in this mentality is just the knowledge that I can exist there, and the memory of what it can give me.

*

So, maybe this is three ways of saying essentially the same thing.  Whatever.  Suffice it to say that I feel I have returned to Atlanta a changed woman..

Infodump vs. Expository Flow

Don’t infodump on us, writers always here.  Sprinkle in your backstory slowly, carefully, just a bit at a time.  This creates tension that pull us along and keep us reading; it also keeps us from being bogged down in a lot of exposition right up front.

Card doesn’t believe in being coy.  He believes in giving the reader all the relevant info the character has, as soon as it becomes relevant.  He doesn’t think the gradual revelation strategy does create tension, anyway.  He said that tension comes not from hidden information, but from known information.  You can let us wonder about the last 1% of information, but you must give us enough so that we can understand the story and care.

Having written one story trying to stay true to Card’s principles, I think I can say that this is not really an either/or proposition.  It is possible to get all the info in there without the “infodump,” the one or two paragraphs of pure exposition.  It is not easy, not in the slightest, but it is a problem that can be tackled.

And doing it made me realize how much I do get irritated when I don’t understand what is going on in a story, or when I think I understand, only to have the writer contradict my assumptions later.  You know what?  This withholding of information thing?  It’s annoying.

Agents vs. Editors

Every aspiring author knows that you get yourself published by acquiring an agent, who will then sell your work to an editor at a publishing house.  There are exceptions, maybe, but not a lot.  This is the path.

Card does not think so.  He believes editors are better at recognizing wonderful, unique books.  And he believes you should acquire an agent only after you have a contract offer in hand.  (You do still need one, because they make sure the contract doesn’t screw you and also aggressively sell the foreign rights to your books.)

And although most editors say that they do not accept unagented queries, Card says this is not so.  He says of course the good editors accept queries, and always have.  They just say they don’t to weed out the faint of heart, like that scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt slaps down his first Project Mayhem recruits.

I am struggling with this one.  If Card is right about how editors operate, then the conventional wisdom is based on incomplete information and cannot possibly be trusted.  And yet, I am terrified (terrified!) of querying the ten or fifteen editors who might publish my novel and having them turn me down.  Because what could I offer an agent then?  The chance to represent a book that’s already been rejected all over town?

And yet there’s no question that what Card knows about the publishing industry greatly outweighs what I know about the publishing industry.  I will definitely have to give this one some thought.

Revisions vs. First Drafts

Revise, revise, revise is what I have learned.  Get down a crappy first draft, but for heaven’s sake, get it down.  You can always fix it later.

Card: “The first draft is the only living draft.”  He doesn’t mean that you can never fix things or edit.  But he does think that the first draft matters.  It’s where you get down what matters to you, where you do the invention that makes your story live.

As I look at those two views, I realize that there’s a touch of desperation to the first one.  As though you cannot possibly be expected to make something good on the first try, and might in fact lose the opportunity to create anything at all if you don’t get it done now! Card’s view assumes that you are a professional, with the ability to make your vision a reality.  You can take your time with it, because your ability to work is not a precious thing.

I don’t completely know where I stand on first drafts vs. seconds, but I know Card’s view holds a world of appeal for me.  I will be making every effort in the future to make sure that my first draft is a living draft, not just a skeletal one.

It was such an amazing week. I did not a full night’s sleep the entire time I was there, but I would have happily stayed for another week of the same.

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, we workshopped the stories we wrote in that marathon session from Tuesday to Wednesday. Here is the most true thing I can say about Orson Scott Card: he is not shy. If he thinks your story needs evisceration, he will cheerfully provide it. He is as free with his political opinions as with his professional ones. And he even shared episodes from his personal history with us, often things of deep intimacy and significance.

I know some people would find Card’s bluntness offensive. But here is my take on it: Card is overwhelmingly generous in his honesty.

He gave us his true opinions, whether he thought they would please us or not, without (I’m pretty sure) holding anything back. Let’s just take a moment and acknowledge that not everyone would be willing to do that, or even can.

Card’s workshops run very differently from the ones I have been in before. The foundation we were given to work from, as critiquers, was composed of Card’s three Wise Reader questions:

• Huh?— For use when you’re confused about what’s happening in the story
• Oh, yeah?— For use when you don’t believe the story
• So what?— For use when the story fails to hold your attention

For example, my story got a good number of “Oh, yeahs?” because it was I didn’t have time to do any research into the building of cathedrals during 16th century Germany; the details I faked simply weren’t believable enough.

But here’s the question I want to talk about: So What? I think I can say without reservation that if I had uttered those words in any other workshop I’ve been in, I’d have received one or two dirty looks, and possibly an invitation to leave the room. We just don’t tell each other we’re bored with one another’s stories. We dance around it: “I think the scene where he makes the moccasins maybe isn’t quite as strong as the other scenes.” But we don’t say, “Hey, dude? The moccasins? Boooo-rrrrring!” We don’t say anything like it. And that may be the exact problem the author needs to know about.

I mean, this was kind of a revelation to me: you should tell people when they bore you. So, regular writing group? Beware.

Another revelation was that thirteen people could have such different takes on a story. The workshop tables were set up in a big circle. Starting with the person next to the writer, we would each go around and give our comments in an orderly fashion, except for Card, who always went last. Card has a rule that once a comment has been made, it’s been made: we don’t all have to go around and say “I agree about the dialogue.” If you don’t have anything new to say, you simply confess it and we move along.

I assumed that this would be happening a lot. It didn’t. Once or twice, yes, but generally speaking, people had stuff to say. Often another camper would say something I almost thought but didn’t: something that irked me in the story but never quite got processed on the level of conscious thought.

Over the course of three days, I felt like I was able to build up a very germinal picture of the minds of my fellow campers. So often the inner life of another person is completely invisible to you; so much so that you almost forget it’s there. And yet over the week I felt like I was able to understand these people, just a little, from the inside: what they care about, what they notice, who they are when they’re alone with a story. It was a wonderful thing.

The stories were incredible: inventive and surprising and satisfying. If I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t have believed they could have been conceived and written so fast.

People had a lot of nice things to say about my story, and also some really good criticisms. In addition to criticism, Card gave me a history lecture (and I wasn’t the only one who got one, either; Card is the most well-read person I know). I feel like I have some great ideas of what to do with the story… but I also know that it needs a good bit of research.

I have so much more the say about Boot Camp, but this post is plenty long enough. Back soon!

Early in the morning on Tuesday, Card did a verbal critique of the original submissions from the Boot Campers.  Here’s what I sent again (or, rather, just the portion we read in class):

*

Harold Forbes sat in the common room at Oaklawn Retirement Home and listened to his fellow residents hash over the death of Marian Billford.  He had already decided to investigate.  Even if he didn’t succeed in solving the murder, Harold thought, at least he might succeed in getting himself killed.

He thought it, but he didn’t say it, and not just because no one would understand.  Harold had no way to express a thought even half that complex.  Full sentences had been lost to him since the stroke, and with them so many things he had once taken for granted:  humor, sarcasm, wordplay.  For Harold speech had been reduced to a word here and there, which came out soft and slurred and occasionally unrelated to the word he’d intended.  Also gone was the ability to communicate without speech, with just a narrowing of his eyes or a twist of his lips.  Though really, that had died with Rose.

He had learned of Marian’s death from Gina, his favorite therapist, while she had him helpless on the exercise mat that morning.  “It seems she died in her sleep,” Gina told him.

Harold, lying on his back, managed a sloppy “Sorry.”

“For her, or for yourself?”  Gina arched an eyebrow, along with all the hardware attached to it.  Harold knew the two rings through each brow were meant to make Gina look tough.  But to him, they merely made her look young.  Still, Gina was perceptive, and she pulled no punches.  That was why Harold liked her.

*

Card, who evidently read the stories blind and didn’t know whose was whose, said, that it was quite a challenge I had set for myself, that of the mystery-solving stroke victim.  “I read this and I thought, this guy is the bravest idiot I have ever seen.”

And I sat in the front row trying not to beam.

Later in the day, several people read aloud the story ideas we came up with on Monday night.  I was one of the people who got to go up on stage and read from my card.  It went something like this:

“A glass maker is building the stained glass windows for a new cathedral.  While working, he hears a woman moaning and concludes there must be a ghost on the premises—perhaps the ghost of his daughter, for whose death he feels responsible.  Eventually he finds a girl who the priest has buried alive in the foundation.  The priest entombed her there because she was pregnant with his child, and she threatened to expose him as unchaste.”

I stopped reading, and about three people said, “And then?”

And I realized that, yes, I had forgotten to include one last, hugely important sentence:  “He rescues her.”

(I forgot to put it on the card, too, so please understand that I am not saying that I am merely guilty of stage fright.  I am also guilty of being a moron.)

And then the audience happily shredded the story idea and picked it apart bit by bit.  I was hugely grateful to be one of the people who got to do this in front of Card, who is just incredibly well-informed and had a lot of valuable stuff to say.  So did many members of the audience.  All in all, it was kinda embarrassing, but thoroughly great.

After six or seven of us went through this process, we broke into small groups and did the same thing to each others’ stories.  I was really impressed by the quality of the story seeds my peers had come up with.  If other groups had material that good, there should be a staggering number of excellent stories written in the next couple of months.

Then we went back to the lecture hall for more lecturing, this time on the business of being a writer.  After this, Card gave us Boot Campers our assignment for the next day:  we would each write a complete story based on one of our five story seeds.  In truth, we had known this was coming, so no one was exactly surprised.  Perhaps we were a little dismayed.  The stories would be due at 4:00 the next afternoon, just shy of twenty-four hours from the time the assignment was given.  After that the Writing Class students went back for more of the business lecture, but most if not all of us Boot Campers headed back to the dorms to contemplate our doom.

The story I wound up writing was the same one I had critiqued by the workshop at large.  Or, a version of it.  All of the elements are still there:  the daughter, the cathedral, the murder.  But they are very, well, different from what I originally wrote down.  Twisted.  Better.

I worked on that story until midnight, then again from five in the morning until 2:30 P.M.  I am very possibly in love with it.  It is nothing like what I have written before, and I have nary a clue about where to sell it.  But it is whole, it is complete, and it might be very nearly as good as I meant it to be.  And though I’m not sure I can say in a sentence exactly what the moral is, I know that it speaks about things that mean something to me.  The characters are very unlike me, but they strike close to the place where I live.

And I realized after finishing it that this is what I want my life to be.  I want to wake up early, write a kick-ass story, and then, I dunno, have a nap or something.  The point is, I want to write like this, and not just for one week.  While I was writing that story I was tired, hungry, sometimes frustrated, and frequently anxious about time.  But I was never, not for one minute, unhappy.

I am often unhappy when I work.  And now I see that the thing that makes me unhappy is not the work at all, but the idea that keeps flitting through my head of not working.  The questioning of my ability to finish.  The wondering about what else I might be doing, or whether it might be ok to take a break.

If I could, I would arrange to have OSC require a story from me every week, so that I would have the same pressure put upon me that I have had here.  But I honestly cannot see what would be in it for him, so I will have to find another way of replicating this environment.  Whatever happens, I don’t want to lose the memory of today and what it felt like.  I want today to be my life.

OSC is a tremendous lecturer.  I feel like a little girl with a crush.  Not a normal crush, you know, but one of those teacher crushes, where you want to answer every question with, “Well, Orson Scott Card thinks…”  We don’t agree on everything, but that is just because we are both thinking human beings.  I respect the man enormously.

He had several genius things to say, and frankly I wish I had a transcript of the entire day.  A paraphrase of one pearl of wisdom: “Antagonists are dangerous.  If you make them powerful, they can take over the story.  Then suddenly, they’re the protagonist.  Who’s the protagonist of the first three Star Wars films?  Darth Vader.  He’s the one who makes things happen.  Everyone else acts in response to him.”

And I sat there thinking,  Could Fiore be the protagonist of Book 2?  Ooooohhh. Dang.

I am also kicking myself for the moment when he asked, “When a story is told in present tense, what do you know about it immediately?”

It’s literary? I thought.  No, that’s a smart aleck answer.

“It’s literary.”  Sigh.

We had several minor assignments during the day, and tonight we got hit with the big one.  We had to write five story synopses: two from research, two from observations around town, and one from an interview of a stranger.

I knew that last one was coming, because I read Jamie Ford’s blog about his boot camp adventures.  I was Dreading it.  And it was, uh, awkward.  Remember yesterday when I said that writers were awkward?  Well, maybe that was just me.  Anyway, I got through it, and my interview subject was very gracious and informative.

The whole five-story-extravaganza was a very fun exercise, and one I think I’ll do again the next time I’m feeling dry.  It’s kind of a revelation, you know?  You can come up with five decent story ideas on any givin evening.  All you need is someone telling you you have to.

My dorm room is huge, and I have it all to myself, complete with in-suite bathroom.  Notice that its enormous breadth did not keep me from spreading out my belongings all over it.  I was afraid the largesse of Southern Virginia University’s housing department would leave me with nothing to connect this experience to my old college days, but I was pleased to discover several pleasantly dormy quixotic touches, from the European style shower, to the exposed hardware on the beds, to the fact that the bathroom is the best-lit space.  These definitely made me feel more at home, though I suppose nothing can really replicate my original dorm experience.  I suspect there will be no one begging to crawl through my window to retrieve their volleyball from the roof.

I haven’t met The Man yet, but I did meet several of my co-campers.  So, here’s a little secret.  We writers?  We’re awkward people.  The first hour or so was definitely touch-and-go, conversation wise.  But after a few rounds of “What’s Your Genre?” we settled into a spirited discussion that ranged over such topics as Books With Endings That Totally Blew, Series vs. Standalone, and Twilight: Hot or Not?

I had an awful lot of fun, and am looking forward to getting to know these people better over the next week.  And getting to know their writing.

P.S. If anyone knows how to use a European style shower without creating a small lake on the bathroom floor?  I could use that information.

The following week, I’ll be home, but I’ll have my entire family visiting.  Liveblogging?  Possible but uncertain.  And the two weeks after that, I’ll be in Portugal.  Probably not liveblogging from there.  So, the upshot of this is, no liveblogging for a while.

Which isn’t to say that you won’t be getting lots of juicy Boot Camp details.  I will try to check in on this blog every night and tell you how things are going in the land of intensive workshopping.

And I’ll be looking good as I do it, since I went to the salon today to get my hair all preened and polished.  Mark said I could put Orson Scott Card on my Celebrity Free Pass List.

I considered.  “Nope,” I said.  “It’s Alton Brown all the way down.”