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Liveblogging Thursday: Pretty, Pretty Snowflakes

Thursday, July 8, 2010

I am still working on plans for The Big Life: The Sequel.  I thought today I’d try to work few a few steps of Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method, which is a sort of well-known novel-planning guide bandied about on the interwebs.  I definitely recommend clicking over and having a look, but essentially it is an outline for beginning with the large strokes of your plot and working your way down to finer and finer details until you have a complete design for a novel.

The Snowflake appeals to me deep in my soul.  All the organization, all the clarity!  And when he gets to the end and starts talking about three-ring  binders and red pens?  Oooh, bliss.  Seriously.  Whenever I think of the Snowflake Method, I see that three-ring binder in my head.  It would contain everything I needed to know about my novel, all the decisions I needed to make.  (I can write a scene in a couple of hours, but I can spend any amount of time making a decision about it.)

But despite that, I’ve never used it to entirely plan out a novel.  Sometimes I futz around with it for a while, and then I get excited about some idea or other and just start writing.  For the rest of the book I’ll write a little, plan a little, write a little plan a little, write.  Which is absolutely fine, but it does leave you with that dreadful moment at three quarters in, when you’re certain nothing can be done to reconcile your plot.

I would like to avoid that moment this time around, if I could.  So, hi-ho, Snowflake!

12:23 PM: The first step of the Snowflake Method is to write your plot in a single sentence.  I think I should be able to accomplish that relatively quickly.

12: 25 PM: Yup, that was easy.  So, here’s the dilemma I’m always stuck with on this blog.  Not giving details about what I’m working on is obviously a little boring for you, the reader.  But giving you details would, in an awful lot of cases, spoil the plots of the novels I’m hoping to publish.  So, ok, here’s what I’ll do: I’ll split the difference.

Kitty and Mr. Gallo are hired to locate a missing man, only to learn that ____________________________________________.

Ok, that probably wasn’t too satisfying either, was it?

12:30 PM: Next step: same material, one whole paragraph.

12:36 PM: Ok, done.  I think.  It doesn’t feel perfect, but I think that the whole purpose of this system is to sort of go back and forth a little, perfecting the earlier steps based on what you’ve learned in the later ones.

12: 47 PM: So, the next step.  Character outlines, just the broad strokes.

1:16 PM: One character down, seven (eight?) to go.

1:45 PM: Ok, still working on Character #2.  But this is definitely helping to generate new ideas, and illuminate the places where the storyline is weak.

2:02 PM: Ok, Character #2 done.  Perhaps slightly messy.

2:04 PM: So, one thing keeps bugging me, which is the name of my missing man, Amos Wayne.  Actually, his surname.  I wanted something that suggested a somewhat impoverished, working class character, and I guess it does.  But that twang in the middle of “Wayne” just keeps saying Southern to me.  Which he isn’t.  So, I need a new name and I’ve been putting it off because it seemed like something that could be done at any old time.  But I guess I want to go ahead and take care of it.

2:21 PM: Amos Black?  Amos Pitt?  Amos Hogan? Amos Hodge? Amos Skinner?  Amos Orr? Amos Sears? Amos Best? Amos Barry? Amos Horne? Amos Peck? Amos Sykes? Amos Haines? Amos Heeney? Amos Hewatt?

2:22 PM: Amos Heeney.

2:23 PM: Does that still sound Southern?

2:33 PM: Three characters done.  One important plot point changed and now infinitely more resonant.

2:34 PM: Ok, I need another name.  This one for a corrupt cop.  At first I was thinking McGinty, but I dunno… it’s begun to sound sort of half-hearted to me.

2:36 PM: Sort of too cute, I think that’s the problem with it.  Also possibly too common.

2:37 PM: I do sort of want something Irish though.  Kennedy?  Burke? Flynn? Nolan? Maguire?  Cullen…. no, wait, that’s reserved for vampires… Bell?  Boyle?  Cassidy?  Dolan?  Keating?  Kirwan?  Killoran?  O’Dea?  O’Dowd?  O’Hagan?  Prendergast?  Quigley?

2:48 PM: Ok, I know it has a humorous bent, but I am really drawn to Quigley.  Which would of course require me to give up Heeney.  Dangnabit.

3:18 PM: Ok, we have two corrupt cops: young, bright Matthew Keating and his older, balding errand boy, Patrick Quigley.  Which means Thelma and Amos Heeney are now Thelma and Amos Hodge.  Ain’t planning grand?

3:33 PM: Four characters down.  One thing I really like about the Snowflake’s character sketches is that they ask you to find an epiphany for each character–AKA, what that character learns.  And while it’s easy to have your antagonist, or at least your secondary or tertiary antagonist learn nothing in a novel, I think it’s worthwhile to push yourself to write down an epiphany for every character.  You can always discard it later if it feels out of character or two touchy-feely.  But so far, coming up with characters’ epiphanies has been an excellent prompt for discovering new aspects of the novel.

3:36 PM: If you include Quigley, I actually have not just a secondary and tertiary antagonist, but also a quaternary antagonist in this book.

3:37 PM: Internet awesomeness: you can just type “what comes after tertiary” into Google.  Life is good.

3:49 PM: Five characters down.  Boom!

3:50 PM: Ok, Character #6.  Primary antagonist.  I have left him this long because I do NOT know what his goal is.  I mean, I know what he does, and what that action accomplishes for him.  But there’s a missing piece in his motivation:  what he does also significantly helps a rival.  That’s the part that doesn’t make sense.  That’s what I need to unravel.  That’s what’s been messing up all my plans for this novel thus far.

5:03 PM: All right, still not done with Fiore, but I’ve got to sign off.  A couple of guys are coming over here to whup my butt at bridge tonight, and I need to make up some of my famous chili so that I can still feel good about myself after I’m down 30 IMPs.

Filed in Snowflake Method, Story Planning, liveblogging | | Comments (0)

Saturday Funnies

Saturday, July 3, 2010

If you need a laugh, check out the truly awful sentences showcased in The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

My personal favorite?

Cynthia had washed her hands of Philip McIntyre – not like you wash your hands in a public restroom when everyone is watching you to see if you washed your hands but like washing your hands after you have been working in the garden and there is dirt under your fingernails — dirt like Philip McIntyre.

And a highlight from 2009:

As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.

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Liveblogging Thursday: Let’s Talk About Sex

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Today I thought I would work on plans for my second novel, the sequel to the Big Life.  I have a few scenes written for it, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that I need a firmer plan.

Two nights ago my writing group workshopped the first couple of scenes.  And we wound up having a long conversation about sex.

I have known for a long time that the chronic issue in Book 2 will be the resolution of Kitty and Gallo’s relationship.  It will be about them coming together in that final way that people do.  It will be about the transition from that youthful love that says “I want you” to that more mature love that says “I want you to be happy.”  It will be partially, but certainly not entirely, about sex.

As Book 2 opens, they have been dating for a year.  And they are not yet doing the nasty.  My writing group found this sort of implausible.    They thought it would be torture for my male lead, and just not reasonable.  They’re a great bunch, and I don’t intend to discount their collective opinion lightly.  But there’s a certain piling on that can take place in a workshop, where Reader A says something bothered him, and that sounds like a reasonable complaint to Reader B, who echoes it even though it didn’t actually bother him during his read-through.  And regardless of whether that happened in this case, it’s my name on the book.  And I’m just not sure I agree.

Here are my points:Point #1: We’re talking about 1929.  I’m sure people had normal sexual desires in the twenties, but I’m not entirely persuaded that their sexual expectations were similar to today’s.  I think women found sexual advances more threatening once upon a time.  Because they were more threatening.  Condoms weren’t really in popular use until WWII (they were widely distributed in an effort to keep down V.D. among the troops).  And yes, people always had ways of preventing pregnancy, but they weren’t necessarily as safe and reliable as today’s.

And Point #2: There’s real time, and then there’s story time, and the same rules don’t necessarily apply to both.  My readers will be aware, when they pick up Book 2, that a year has passed since Book 1.  But they won’t have felt it pass.  I think this makes a difference.  I don’t think the first three or four years of Ross and Rachel putting each other through the ringer on Friends bothered me, even though I found their inability to communicate maturely about their relationship at least as bizarre as my group found my characters’ sexual abstinence (and yes, after five or six years, it did get old).  The way I see it, it’s a story.  It really only exists when we’re observing it.  You can say that those first seasons of Friends took three years, or you can say that they took thirty-six hours.  The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

All of this is to say that I am not quite sure whether to follow my writing group’s advice and either (1) compress the timeline between books, or (2) move my characters into a sexual relationship before the start of Book 2.  Currently I am leaning toward No, but I would welcome any opinions on the matter.

4:41 PM: What I need, I think, is a good overview of Book 2.  I have 3 ideas for significant storylines, and bandwidth for about two.  Which means it’s time to flesh them all out and see which one to cut.

5:37 PM: A lot of what I do when I’m planning, or trying to work out problems in a story, is a kind of stream of consciousness writing.  It’s all stuff like, “Ok, so I no longer like the ending where she kills her husband, I need another twist.”  Basically, this is my way of forcing myself to think.  I try to keep it going as rapidly as possible, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last hour or so.  I am getting close to trying to shoehorn all three stories in.  If I do cut one, I think it’s going to be the one I introduced to my writing group on Tuesday.

6:02 PM: Distracting myself with chat.

6:05 PM: I now have a very good intersection for Plotlines #1 and #3.  Which means things aren’t looking so hot for plotline #2.

7:48 PM: Still mostly bits and pieces.  But time for dinner anyway.

Filed in Writing Group, liveblogging | Tagged | Comments (6)

Liveblogging Thursday: One Sentence

Thursday, June 24, 2010

So, earlier this week I talked about tanking my first scene.  I’ve spent the intervening days making necessary tweaks to chapters 1-5 to account for this lack of first scene-age, but there’s still one remaining problem.

The first sentence of Scene 2 is now the first sentence of the book.  And while it’s a perfectly serviceable sentence, it is frankly not worthy of that honor.  So, Liveblogging Thursday today will consist of Getting This Right.  My plan is to generate many first sentences, perhaps even several first paragraphs.  And then pick the one that is most stellar.

3:00 PM: A late start again. :-)   Perhaps I should just start redefining 3:00 as the beginning of my work day.  There’s really nothing standing in the way of that.

3:04 PM: Eating a broccoli salad while I work.  I made a lot less dressing this time, reasoning that a broccoli salad dripping with mayo and sugar sort of ceases to be healthy.  It turns out a broccoli salad not dripping with mayo and sugar sort of ceases to be delicious.  So, that’s a disappointment.

3:11 PM: You know what everyone hates?  A blank page waiting for one perfect sentence to come down from on high and make it beautiful.

4:12 PM: Several imperfect sentences later, I am feeling a bit lost.  I’m going to chill for a bit.  Back in an hour.

5:20 PM: Back.  All right, it is time to muscle through.  Ten first sentences.  Doesn’t matter whether they’re crappy or great, they just need to get done.

6:19 PM: Eight and a half sentences.  Remembering fondly that hour, around four, when I didn’t work but instead watched an old episode of DS9.  That was a halcyon hour of my youth.

6:28 PM: Ten sentences.  Do they all suck?

  1. I stepped onto the platform in Chicago’s Grand Central Station.
  2. A day and a half of travel had given me time enough to read Uncle Owen’s letter another twenty times.
  3. A day and a half of travel had taken some of the gleam out of my eyes, but the moment we pulled into Chicago’s Grand Central Station, it was back.
  4. The train ride from St. Eliphas, Iowa, to Chicago took a day and a half.  That was time enough for me to make friends with all the porters, mend a hole in my left stocking, and reread Uncle Owen’s letter another twenty times.
  5. Even before I stepped onto the platform I knew Chicago was everything I’d hoped it would be.
  6. Chicago.
  7. Chicago smelled like no other place I had ever smelled before.
  8. The first thing that happened to me in Chicago was a new sensation that came over me—a sense of my own smallness and insignificance in the face of this, the first truly big place I’d ever seen.  The second thing was a purse snatching.
  9. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make an appearance.
  10. I stepped down onto the platform and tried to look like I belonged there.

Favorites are probably 4, 7, and 10.

8:12 PM: All right, I guess I have a beginning.  It’s a variant on sentence 10.  Needs to be polished up and such, but it’ll serve.

1. I stepped onto the platform in Chicago’s Grand Central Station.

2. A day and a half of travel had given me time enough to read Uncle Owen’s letter another twenty times.

3. A day and a half of travel had taken some of the gleam out of my eyes, but the moment we pulled into Chicago’s Grand Central Station, it was back.

4. The train ride from St. Eliphas, Iowa, to Chicago took a day and a half. That was time enough for me to make friends with all the porters, mend a hole in my left stocking, and reread Uncle Owen’s letter another twenty times.

5. Even before I stepped onto the platform I knew Chicago was everything I’d hoped it would be.

6. Chicago.

7. Chicago smelled like no other place I had ever smelled before.

8. The first thing that happened to me in Chicago was a new sensation that came over me—a sense of my own smallness and insignificance in the face of this, the first truly big place I’d ever seen. The second thing was a purse snatching.

9. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make an appearance.

10. I stepped down onto the platform and tried to look like I belonged there.

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Is it Wednesday Already?

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Liveblogging Wednesday has been permanently relocated to Thursday, on account of my Game Night being permanently relocated to Wednesday.  Now, what am I going to cook?

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Comfort With Discomfort

Monday, June 21, 2010

I’m thinking today of Sons of the Wolf, a wonderful Gothic suspense by Barbara Michaels (AKA Elizabeth Peters) that I read years and years ago.  I remember this one scene where the protagonist was locked in a tower, and outside her room was a large, muscular, violent dog.  She needed to get out to help her beloved, but to do so she’d have to get past the animal.  I remember her saying something like this:

“I was terribly afraid of that dog.  I wasn’t afraid that it would bite me; I wasn’t afraid that it would scratch me.  I was simply afraid of it.”

That’s how I feel whenever I contemplate messing around with my book.

I’m not afraid that I will mess it up; I’m not afraid that I will be unable to execute my plans.  I am simply afraid of it.

Today I am taking a second (ok, thirty-fifth) look at the first scene.  It’s a good scene, a solid, character-setting scene, but I must admit that it is a touch backstory-heavy.  I’ve received comments about it in the past, and I’ve always looked at it and decided, “No, no, they’re wrong.  This is the perfect scene.  The scene.  It fits.”

And it does, but that is not enough.  Comments add up.  Today I finally decided to go ahead and see if it can’t simply be cut.

Which means reading over the first several chapters and making sure they still work without the scene.  Which they do, 95% of the time.  The other 5% can be easily polished smooth, but it means touching my novel.  Messing with it.  Taking it out of the Done pile and moving it back to the marshy no man’s land of Not Quite Yet.

This is not something I want to do.

And it has me surfing the web, writing this blog entry, doing everything except my assigned task.  All because of that fear, which is not even about any particular eventuality, but just about… it.  My book.

Rather than pushing that fear aside, I am trying to let it in.  Trying to deal with it.  Trying to gain a little more comfort with discomfort, you know?  Because being afraid is not the same thing as having a problem.

I feel like this is the sort of attitude that could revolutionize my life.  I’m cold?  Not the same thing as having a problem.  I’m tired?  Not the same thing as having a problem.  I’m not saying these things aren’t unpleasant.  I’m just saying it’s possible to know that you’re unhappy, while also knowing it won’t change your expectations for yourself.

Anyway, this first scene revamp is a thing I’m doing.  Which means eventually it will be done.  It’s just a matter of how long it takes me to get there.

Filed in Discipline, Revision, The Terror | | Comments (0)

Liveblogging Thursday: Home Sick Home

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Ok, sorry for punking out on the whole Liveblogging Wednesday thing yesterday.  I had a lot of stuff going on, and people coming over in the evening.  Suffice it to say, I dropped the ball.

That’s ok, because today we have the new, better, extra special Liveblogging Thursday.  Today I’m going to be working on the sequel to my book.  It takes me about 45 scenes to make a book.  It might be 43, or 48, but it’ll be somewhere in that neighborhood.  It occurred to me a couple of days ago that if I managed to either write or edit one scene per work day for the rest of the year, I’d have time to write 90 scenes and edit 45.  That is, I’d have time to write a book, even accounting for a lot of missteps and discarded plot lines along the way.

If I managed this, it would be a significantly contracted schedule from that of my last book (which took about two years).  It would also be a schedule that would enable me, once published, to put two books on the shelf every year (or nearly two books, assuming that I needed to take some time for promotion and touring).  It would also be  a schedule that would enable me to flirt around with new ideas without feeling like I was abandoning this series.  In short, it’s a worthy goal.

Day One of the new regime went off very well, and I so I am presently on Scene #2 of Book #2: Home Sick Home.

3:42 PM: Got off to a late start today.  Still think I should be able to finish, though.  I have the idea for how the scene will roll out, I just need to get it down.

4:37 PM: I think last week I said that the thing I like best about writing is the scene making.  Well, the thing I like least is the decision making.  I know that sounds contradictory, and I guess it is.  But this is true:  I can spend any amount of time making a decision.

5:29 PM: Taking a break for an hour or two.  Back before too long.

6:34 PM: Back.

6:54 PM: One of my favorite sites: www.ssa.gov.  For all your historical baby naming needs.

7:45 PM: Meet Alice Wayne, AKA Plot Device.  (I’ll have to use her again later if I want to make sure that isn’t the case.)

8:03 PM: Ok, I know how I’m going to use her.  More or less.

8:07 PM: Getting close to the end of this scene.

8:16 PM: Out of power.  Gotta head home. 

10:10 PM: Home.  Ate dinner, watched a (sad) Deadliest Catch, and now I’m ready to finish off this scene.

10:53 PM: Done.  This scene is exactly the sort of scene that is the hardest for me to edit.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, except for the fact that it is not fantastic.  Oh, well.  That’s a task for another day.

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Liveblogging Thursday This Week

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Cheaty, I know.

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Three Conversations About Self-Publishing

Friday, June 11, 2010

With my friend Becky, about six months ago.  My summation:  “I dunno.  I think if I couldn’t get published traditionally, I’d have to take a good, hard look at my work.”

With my writing group, Wednesday night.  My summation: “I think it’s a path to publication that is opening up for some people, like bloggers and celebrities and other people with existing platforms.  But I personally would not do it.”

With Mark, last night.  My summation: “It’s not the worst idea.”

All this is to say that my attitude toward self-pubbing is rapidly opening up.  Which I don’t think is because I’m crazy, or because I haven’t found an agent yet.  I think it’s because between the blogs and the e-readers and the bestselling books based on Twitter feeds, we’re reaching a sort of inflection point.  Things are changing.  For some writers, they already have.

Now, I am not anywhere near ready to comb through the Lulu terms of service yet.  But, Mark and I did have another “what would we do if the book didn’t sell” conversation last night.  It seemed to me that there were two possible paths: (1) write another book, and hope that when it sold, it would pull this one along with it in a package deal and (2) self-pub.

Just for the hell of it, we talked about how to chart a course down Path #2.  “What if I released it as a blog?” I asked.  “A chapter a week, for about a year.  And if you want to read the whole thing right now, you can buy a self-pubbed copy?”

Mark liked it.  It tied into that whole giving-your-stuff-away-for-free ethos that is such a big part of the web.  “You could be, like, the Jonathan Coulton of cozy mysteries.”

“But my audience isn’t all that webby,” I pointed out.  “It’s entirely female, and I’m not really sure it’s necessarily the youngest, most tech savvy females.  My audience properly includes my mom.  My mom is never going to read a book online.”

“And here’s the real kicker.  I’d be risking not just this book, I’d be risking the entire series.  If my book didn’t take off for any reason, I’d never get it, or any of the sequels I intend to write, picked up by a traditional publisher.  I’m not saying I can’t come up with another idea.  I’m just saying, I’ve got plans I don’t want to torpedo on a whim.”

And yet… the idea still held some appeal.  It was new, it was sexy, and it involved higher royalties.  So when I got home, I looked up “serialized online novels.”  And it turns out that, yes, this is a thing that is done.  And is it successful?  Sometimes.

The really successful serialized books I found were in the horror genre, i.e., they had a primarily young, primarily male audience.  And it’s hard, honestly, for me to know how successful they really were.  Which brings up the whole question: what is success?  How do you define it?

I used to define it as having a book published that was critically acclaimed.  Now I couldn’t care less about that last clause (well, I could care less, just not a lot). But I think that for me success still entails a presence on a bookstore shelf.  Which probably means publication, traditional publication.

So that is what I’m pursuing.  But I’ll be honest: the idea of self-publication still does have its appeal.  On the one hand, everything would be on me: the editing, the marketing, et al.  And on the other hand, everything would be on me.  It would be my baby, start to finish.  I could get started today, and if I didn’t get my feet under me immediately that would be ok, because there’s no one I’d ever have to get approval from.

Filed in Self-Publishing, The State of Publishing, Uncategorized, Writing Group | | Comments (2)

Liveblogging Wednesday: In With The New

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

3:50 PM: And we have a very late start to Liveblogging Wednesday this week.  Sorry about that.

Today I plan to start on a new book.  Not the sequel to my current book, but a whole new project, something Mark and I dreamed up during our what-would-you-do-if-you-had-to conversation last week.  I’m still mostly interested in a series following from The Big Life, but that is obviously predicated on… well, The Big Life selling.  I’m planning to work on the sequel soon, but it will do me no harm to tool around with another idea in the meantime.

What I Have: A strong hook, and half a dozen protean characters.

What I Need: Everything else.

4:45 PM: I have had the way this scene goes in my mind for days.  Some people say they like writing better than editing; some people say they like editing better than writing.  I know it sounds weird, but I am not huge on either.  What I like is… scene making.  I really don’t know how else to describe it.  Figuring out what will happen, how it will go down, what images and emotions will be central to a scene… that’s what I like.  The writing… sometimes, that can be hard.

I’m taking a quick break to read Outlander’s story for Writing Group tonight.

5:27 PM: Back.  Man, that was a sad story.

5:33 PM: Ok, that big moment I was writing to is done.  It went down pretty well, I think.

6:26 PM: And they find a body.  Dun dun dun!

6:30 PM: On page three.  Because I’m not messing around.

7:04 PM: Breaking again to read some more stuff for writing group.  Back before too long.

8:05 PM: All right, I think I’m done for the day.  Not a great day of liveblogging, but I have some good pages and some neat ideas.  Gotta make dinner and get ready for group.

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