Get Unstuck

It happens to the best of us.  Despite our best efforts, our noble aspirations, we get derailed from our writing track. 

I’ve got two projects that are going feral on me at the moment.  Part of that is because of deadline-related, contracted work, but I must be honest, dear reader…both these other spec projects are simply stuck.  Stuck!

So what do I do?  I try not to panic, and then I run through my bag of little tricks.  Here are my writer’s tricks designed to get me unstuck:

(1)   No floggings allowed (unless they work).  The first rule is to be kind.  Berating myself, cursing my laziness or my lack of inborn talent – all, alas, useless.  My first step is to get a good meal into me, and at least a couple of decent nights of sleep.  I’d say at least 75% of my stuck-ness in writing has stemmed directly from physical exhaustion, sickness or a lovely combination of the two. 

Only one memorable time did fury work,  to push me through a very difficult scene for a manuscript that was due the next day.  I used all my panic, rage, and fear and hurled it at the page.  The editor liked it – all those nasty emotions blasted through to the page and did a pretty good job.  But this is the exception, not my general rule.

(2)   Start a new project.  I know, I know…the common wisdom is to finish what you start, never abandon work or you will end up as I began, the queen of the 30 page novel.  But rules and tricks evolve over time, and now that I know how to finish things, I use the momentum and enthusiasm I generate at the start of a new story to infuse the stalled out project.  Like a jump from a fresh battery to a dead one.

(3)   Get back inside the story.  When a story goes feral, I mentally cannot enter the country of the story.  The story seems outside, far away, like a newspaper from two months ago that you find stacked up next to the cat box.  Who wants to explore something musty and dusty like that?

I have my methods for re-entering the country of the story and finding the thread again – I interview characters (especially minor characters who sometimes can tell me things about the protagonist that she doesn’t know herself).  I take lots of naps, and when I start to dream about the setting again, I’m good to go.

(4)   Instead of trying to reignite my passion for writing, I go for reigniting my passion for anything and everything.  I read fantastic books by people writing about stuff that fascinates me.  Biographies of fearless, entertaining people.  I eat really, really good chocolate. (Now, I really should list chocolate as a trick all its own …I’ll get back to chocolate in a moment).  I go for long walks alone by the ocean and watch the gulls swooping through the howling winter wind.  And that infusion of life jumpstarts the stalled project – see #2 above.

(5)   Chocolate.  As I mentioned, kindness usually coaxes much more out of me than the harsh lash of discipline.  Bribes work, and they must be liberally administered, before during *and* after the work.  Huge rewards work too, for a job or a story completed.

This is my short list of favorite, all-purpose tricks.  I have specialized ones that pertain to particular projects – I watch movies set in the historical settings I’m working on, for instance.  And I love to write on trains, for some unknown reason, and will travel to write sometimes.  Sometimes it’s the process of trying new tricks itself that gets me jaunty and unstuck again.  Doesn’t matter how you get there, only that you find the way to the story again.

 What do you do when you are stuck?

Vamps with a pulse and why/how writers make world building decisions

After finishing reading my first book,Once Bitten, a non-writing friend struck up a conversation about the book and during the course of it asked why, if my vampires didn’t breathe, did they have a pulse? I state in the book that a vampire’s lungs are vestigial, but it is also mentioned that their hearts still beat. She was curious if there was vampire lore to support those facts, or if it was just a suspension of belief kind of thing. I think I probably overwhelmed her with my answer, but I thought it was a really great question because the issue was wrapped in so much world building that I most likely could never fully explain it in the book without copping out and having a character lecture (not going to happen). After the fact, I thought it would make a really great blog topic because it gives a lot of insight into how my logic flows as I’m world building. (And yes, the post title is a little deceptive because I can’t actually promise to reveal how all writers make world building decisions, just how I do.)

Before I go into how I ended up with non-breathing vamps with pulses, let’s take a brief look at how the body works:
Normally the heart pumps blood through the body to nourish cells. At the lungs, the blood is infused with oxygen, which attaches to the iron in the blood and is distributed through the body. Nutrients are picked up in the intestines. Cells use the oxygen and nutrients and add carbon dioxide and waste to the blood. The carbon dioxide is released in the lungs and the waste is filtered in the kidneys. The heart is a giant muscle that creates enough pressure to push the blood through these various locations so that all of the above occurs in a continuous cycle. (That’s a simplistic explanation, but go with me.)

In classic vampire lore, piercing or removing the heart was often considered the only way to kill a vampire permanently. I decided to interpret this as the heart being important and in use. After all, why would the destruction of the heart kill the vampire if the heart wasn’t doing anything? (Yes, other writers have come up with their own lore to explain that. This one is mine, and I decided the heart should function.) So, knowing my vamps had beating hearts, I had to decide what other body functions would still be occurring.

I knew I didn’t want my vamps to have to breathe because many places a vampire can ensure is light-proof would have very limited oxygen supplies. Plus, the main purpose of the lungs is infusing oxygen in the blood. If my vamps are unaging, their cells do not go through the same cycles and do not need oxygen. But, I also realized my vamps would need the ability to draw breath if they wanted because speech is dependent on vibrations as air passes the vocal cords. Also, without breathing, my characters couldn’t smell anything. So, I decided that during the change, the lungs would become vestigial. They serve no overall purpose in the body, they are just sacks to store air so the vamp can speak. (This means a vamp would give great CPR because their lungs are full of oxygen as they don’t convert it to carbon dioxide. LOL)

Okay, so the lungs don’t do much. Back to that beating heart. Why is it beating?

My vamps can’t consume food, so most of their digestive track has been altered and rendered useless. But they do drink blood and they need that blood to survive. A starving vamps basically deflates and becomes sicklier and sicklier looking. The blood they drink nourishes and gives power to the body. What better way to move this blood around the body than with an organ that is one strong muscle and already does this anyway?

With that decision, I realized that most major vessels needed to be rerouted to the stomach. In the stomach, the blood that is consumed is absorbed into the vampire’s system. The heart then pumps this empowering blood around the body. Because the vampire is not aging, not dying, there is no reason to filter waste or carbon dioxide out of the blood, so the heart just keeps pumping the blood through the body, allowing it to be used as needed. As the blood is used, the amount pumping through the body is reduced and the ‘need’, the ‘hunger’, for more will begin. If the vampire doesn’t feed, the reduced amount of blood will cause the veins and vessels to shrink down, some veins may be temporarily shut down, allowing the vamp to conserve the life giving blood for the most important parts of the body. This causes the sallow, sickly look of a starving vamp and a persistent chill in the body.

The decision to have a pulse and circulating blood further helped my world building because I wanted the exchange of blood to be important. If the blood isn’t pumping, it’s much harder to bleed. Also, my vamps are sexy, and in my opinion, warm bodies with a pulse are sexier than cold ones without. ^_^

And that, is the basic logic of how I ended up with vampires with a pulse. There are further complications to my vamps’ systems, but those I do reveal in the story as Kita (my main character) learns them, so I won’t share here. I hope you found this to be an entertaining ‘behind-the-scenes’ look at my world building process.

Have a great Thursday everyone!

**Please note that I have neither a degree in biology nor physiology, so all of this is based on my understanding and a simplification of how body functions work.

How much would you pay?

Sorry for the lack of a post earlier this month — I was, at the time, scrambling to finish a draft and send it away before the approaching deadline made my head explode.  (Funny, how internally-set deadlines are worse for me than external ones.)  But now that’s off and away, I can step away from one fictional world (and immediately start tinkering in a new one), and, having sent the manuscript off at the end of last week, I can finally relax . . .

. . . just in time for the whole Macmillan/Amazon debacle.

A lot of people have already written more cogent and informed posts on the subject, and at the moment it appears that the wrangling stage has passed.  But because some of this centered on what the two different companies wanted to charge for eBooks, it’s got me thinking about a side tangent.  (Yes, I do this a lot — grab a marginally-relevant idea and run with it, maybe knitting it back into the original problem later on.)

Specifically: what makes you willing to spend more money on a book?

For a long time I refused to buy hardcovers — not because of the price, but because I was moving a lot, and every large heavy book I bought would be one more large heavy book that I’d have to pack, carry, and unpack.  Not to mention the everpresent problem of shelf space.

Even then, though, I’d shell out money for certain hardcovers when they came out.  Usually it was for one of two reasons: I’d been craving the next in a series and didn’t have the patience to wait at the library (or beg whatever friend had bought the book and then emailed me to gloat), or I’d fallen for an author’s style and trusted this new book to be worth price and weight both.

Now that I’m a little more settled and have more discretionary income, I’m more likely to pay more for a book regardless of whether it’ll fit in another box (or even on the shelves…again).  But there’s a weird sort of mental calculus that comes into play when deciding whether to buy the hardcover/paperback/trade paperback, and I’m not entirely sure what feeds into it.

For example, I’ll buy manga even after I’ve read the entire series online, so the excuse of  ”must know what happens next!” that feeds my series-buying doesn’t enter into it.  I could say that it’s a desire to give my business to this author in gratitude for her work, but somehow I doubt that sort of noble impulse is more than a later rationalization.

Some of it has to do with how familiar I am with the author’s work, how likely I am to reread this book (very likely, most of the time) and whether I’ve been wanting more in this series.  For books by an author whose work I love and whose style I know I’ll come back to repeatedly, I’ll shell out full hardcover price — and it’s possible I’d even pay more.  For books that I loan out again and again, I’ll buy more than one copy, just so when I get the urge to read it I won’t have to figure out which of my friends currently has it. (I’ll only do this with paperbacks, though.)

What about you?  What makes you wait for the paperback, purchase the hardcover, go for the deluxe foil-stamped limited edition?  Hell, what makes you more likely to wait at the library or pick it up used?  And if you’ve started at the library or used book store, what will make you buy a new copy?

A day in the life of someone who (ahem) “doesn’t work”

Someone recently said to my husband something on the order of, “Well, your wife doesn’t work…”

Needless to say, my reaction when he shared this with me this was something along the lines of MUSTSTABKILLSLAYOMFGWTF???

Ahem. After I calmed down a smidge (and, trust me, a smidge isn’t very much at all) I considered the reasoning for the REALLY STUPID AND RIDICULOUS remark. I mean, after all, I don’t actually GO anywhere for work (except for the occasional convention, though those have been referred to as my “vacations”. Yes, more STABKILLSLAY moments ensued.) I sit at home on my butt (why, yes, that’s usually how one sits) and “play” on the computer. And, my writing-related income has been approximately $0.00 since last July thanks to the change in publishers. (Though, since the new contracts were sent back a few weeks ago, that should change very soon. Whew.)

So, since I’m not allowed to do any actual stabbing and slaying and killing, I’d like to go into what my normal weekday has been like this past month (and will likely continue to be through most of February.)  See, I have a deadline of March 1^st for the third Demon book, which is contracted to be approximately 100K words. (Let’s just say that I’m not there yet.)

**

Wake up 5:30am. Let the dog out. Make coffee and toast. Get the newspaper. (Doesn’t this sound so homey and domestic?!) Drink coffee, eat toast and read paper for twenty minutes. Check email and do my blog-surfing for about half an hour. Wake the Kid and get her ready for school. Walk the Kid to the bus stop. Put the Kid on the bus, walk home. Have conversation with the husband, then kick the husband out of the house (nicely!)

By this time it’s about 8am. Respond to emails that have to be responded to. Open the file for Book 3 and skim through what I was doing the day before. Find my notes on what scenes still need to be written. Get more coffee. Start writing. Oh yeah, breakfast would be nice.

Get more coffee. Write some more. Oh, crap, it’s 10:30 already? Grab a snack. Let the dog out. Get more coffee. Respond to more emails that need to be responded to. Ignore the phone for all but a select few phone numbers. Look at the scary white board with the To-Do list on it that says “Promo stuff for Blood of the Demon.” Oh crap, I have a release coming up and I’ve done NOTHING. Also on the To-Do list is “Answer interview questions for [various blogs.] Oh, double crap. Coming up with witty and interesting interview answers takes me hours, and I’m too stressed about the status of book 3 to be willing to take the time out to do those right now. Maybe tomorrow. No, really.

It’s noon? How the hell did it get to be noon? Make another pot of coffee. Heat a can of soup up. Look at what I wrote this morning and decide that maybe it doesn’t suck too hard. Dive in to the next scene that needs work. Write some more. Snarl at dog for interrupting me simply because he has to pee. Why the hell can’t he use the cat box like the rest of the animals in the house?

2pm. Wow. Have managed to write almost 3000 words. Makes up for the day before when revisions of the previous chapter gave me a negative total for the day. Pour last cup of coffee that I can have and still maintain any hope of getting to sleep tonight. Go back through previously written stuff and realize that there is a Giant Gaping Plot Hole of Doom. CRAP! Fret and fume. Look at the clock and realize that it is too late in the day to start a total plot overhaul (which involves the majority of my living room wall, a lot of butcher paper, and many different colors of sharpies) because at 3pm I need to stop writing so that I can ride my stationary bike for half an hour before showering (yeah, haven’t done that yet) and then leaving at 4pm to go pick the Kid up from aftercare and take her to her karate. Bring laptop to karate and work on edits while Kid is doing her class. Come home and accept that there won’t be any uninterrupted time to write for the rest of the day.

Do evening stuff with Kid and Husband. Tell myself that I’m going to get to sleep by 9:30 so that I can get a full night’s sleep. Actually get to bed around 10:30. Lie awake for half an hour worrying about the Giant Gaping Plot Hole of Doom.

Wake at 5:30..

 But, y’know, I don’t actually work.

MacMillan vs. Amazon

So I was going to write about the editorial muck I’m neck deep in, then Nora brought this to my attention and everything else got derailed.

So here’s what happened. Publishing giant Macmillan, parent company of SciFi/Fantasy giant Tor, decided it wanted its ebooks to cost around $15. Amazon, primary retailer for ebooks, didn’t like this at all, and, to show their strong displeasure, have pulled all Macmillan books, print and electronic, from Amazon.com. (Though Macmillan imprints like Tor  seem to be fine).

This is certainly only temporary, but it is a pretty powerful statement from Amazon about who really controls the price of ebooks. However, while they battle it out, the real victims (as it always is in wars) are the civilians, in this case, the authors.  These are people whose books have just vanished from Amazon through no fault of their own, and that sucks. Now, of course there are other retailers, but come on. This is Amazon.com, the online book behemoth. This isn’t small change, especially for scifi/fantasy with our tech savvy audience.

This is also a first shot in the coming greater conflict between retailers and publishers as ebooks move from a fringe format to a real money maker. Who really controls the price? What will that price be? It’s a very interesting conflict to watch for signs of what the future holds for ebooks. Meanwhile, however, it really sucks to be a Macmillan author.

What do you think? Would you buy an ebook for $15? Who’s in the wrong here, Amazon or Macmillan?

ETA: Macmillan’s explanation via Publisher’s Lunch (thanks to Nora for the link, she finds everything!)

UPDATE! Amazon has relented! They will be selling Macmillan books again. Their explanation is a bit backhanded, but that’s to be expected from someone who’s been pushed to do something they don’t want.

Writing Funny

Apparently, I write funny. When accused of this, I take “funny” to mean “ha-ha,” though it is possible that the speaker is referring to the fact that my handwritten “I”s are crowned with little hearts or that I WRITE IN COLD EMOTIONLESS CAPITAL LETTERS but that’s another blog post entirely.

Anyway, my most successful stories have been humor, and many high-level short story markets specifically note that they don’t receive enough humor. (This does not mean they don’t get enough submissions that try to be humorous, just that they don’t get enough that actually succeed.) So in this blog post I thought I’d share my years of wisdom with y’all about how to write funny.

• First, practice drawing little hearts above your “i”s … aha! Got you! That was funny because you were expecting me to start off with some point about writing funny “ha-ha” and instead I gave you a point about writing “funny!” The utter unfunny-ness of the prior notwithstanding, the point I’m trying to illustrate is that humor (like horror) comes from carefully building up a specific expectation in the reader and then swiftly and utterly subverting it. This subversion of expectation triggers a feeling of delight and wonder in the reader, much like one experiences after playing 3-card monte on a seedy street corner in New Jersey and NOT getting mugged in an alley behind the Little Caesar’s afterward. Research indicates that the human laugh response was developed as a way of communicating to one’s primate homies that a situation that could have resulted in serious harm or danger (e.g., slipping on a banana peel) has been resolved without injury (except to the bum of the slippee) and so said homies are safe to lower their guard and relax. Isn’t that interesting? I am not even making that up.
• Inappropriate emotional responses are totally funny. (This is kind of a corollary to the first point, but you’re living in a fool’s paradise if you think I’m going to start getting all taxonomical and shit. P.S. Profanity is comedy GOLD!) Whether it’s an overly-exaggerated response (think of Ignatius J. Reilly’s hilariously inappropriate attitude toward Myrna Minkoff in “A Confederacy of Dunces“) or a wryly understated response (think of Jeeves’ dry retorts to Wooster’s exuberant outbursts), interactions that are “off” emotionally will generally be taken as humorous or indicative of some kind of serious mental defect in the character. So tread with care.
• Much of humor is in the choice of words. Words are hilarious. George Carlin did whole *acts* on nothing more than words and word choices. Slang and colloquialisms are a great place to look for humor. There’s nothing funnier than a 41-year old housewife saying “fo’ shizzle.” Ask my 11-year old daughter if you don’t believe me. Also, just as there is no crying in baseball, there is no honor in humor. If other peoples’ words have gotten big laffs, then you should consider it your right and privilege to steal the funny right out of them whenever the opportunity arises. WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS? you ask, outraged. If your audience knows what you’re referring to, you have successfully picked the pocket of cool and you can now go buy yourself a hot dog. You’ve shared an inside joke and made your audience feel “with-it” (see “Ironic quotes around conscious anachronism,” e.g., T. Herman Zwiebel … MY GOD, IT’S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN!) Warning: if they don’t get your reference, they will look at you like you’ve been raping muskrats.
• Also, the arrangement. Sentence fragments are gut busters. As is overdescription for effect (e.g., instead of referring to “3-card monte” you refer to “3-card monte in New Jersey behind a Little Caesar’s.” Why is it funnier that way? Because New Jersey is ALWAYS funny, and so is Little Caesar’s. However, their pepperoni pizza is great when you’ve got a mighty hunger and just $5 in your wallet.) (See “Non-sequiturs”).
• Puns are the humor equivalent of muskrat-raping. Shaggy dog stories are the devil’s hemorrhoids.  Feghoots are like farting loudly, and on purpose, at your mother’s funeral while bending over her open coffin. My favorite author from age ten to thirteen was a famous author we shall call Iers Panthony in the interests of anonymity (and because I don’t want to show up in his inbox in the form of a Google Alert, which might cause him to send a cadre of muskrat-raping thugs after me.)  Re-reading certain works by this famous author today, I have a hard time telling what bothers me the most: his casual pedophilia, hyper-creepy sex scenes, or his incessant use of puns. Of course, he’s made himself a nice little career mixing those unholy ingredients in varying proportions, but I encourage the reader to think of him as an anomaly. Do not think you can build a career like Iers Panthony’s in today’s post-Seinfeld world!
• Pie. And Muskrat Raping. This is only my second “Magic District” post, but I swear to you now … I will mention “pie” in every one of my blog posts. One, because it’s fun to click that clicky box. Two, because it’s a complete non-sequitur and non-sequiturs are quite funny IN MODERATION. Overdone, they’re worse than puns. Finally, repetition is funny, and gets funnier the more times you do it, until you’ve done it too much and then it’s just horribly, horribly lame. Why do you think South Park stopped killing Kenny after Season 3? One, because it was harshing their buzz to come up with new ways to kill Kenny every week and Two, BECAUSE IT WASN’T FUNNY ANYMORE. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine if it was ever really all that funny in Seasons 1-3.

That’s about all I have time for today. What do you think, readers? What are some rules for funny you’ve noticed? The first person to say “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog—few people are interested and the frog dies of it” gets a cadre of muskrat-raping thugs sent after them because that shit is just. not. funny. Fo’ shizzle.

You must answer me these questions three…

Hello! I’m Jeannie, another of the newbies and today I’m going to talk about something every writer (especially first timers) should be willing to do — asking questions.

Why did I choose this topic? Well, mainly because I recently found myself in a situation that required me to direct a lot of questions to my agent. In December, my editor at Bantam jumped to another publishing house. She and I had worked very closely on my book through two major rewrites, and I’d gotten very comfortable with our relationship. Naturally her departure left me wondering just what the heck I was supposed to do about my pending release, not to mention the second book.

I peppered my agent with questions. “What does this mean?” “Is my release date going to be pushed back?” “Is my contract in jeopardy?” “Who’s my new editor?” “Do I even have a new editor?”

My agent was wonderful and answered all my questions. “This means you’ll have a new editor to complete the release of the first book and to work on the second book.” “No, the release date won’t be pushed back.” “No, your contract is fine.” “Here’s the name of your new editor, and yes, you do have one.”

The main point I needed to understand was that a changing of the guard is not unusual in publishing. People come and go. It’s part of the business and we, as writers, have to learn to be flexible and roll with the punches. One of the best ways to do this is by not being afraid to speak up, ask questions, and voice our opinions especially when it involves our careers.

This couldn’t be more vital to a first-time author. No one expects you to know everything going in. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of other authors, your agent, and especially your editor. They are there to support you and guide you.

Above all, remember it’s your career, and you have a right to know where it’s heading.

Writer’s block is a writer’s best friend

Today I’m going to talk about writer’s block.   For me it’s like the honesty of a friend telling you something you don’t want to hear.  You can always depend on your friends to tell you when you screwed up.  Right?  Writer’s block is like that for me.  I know some of you are probably thinking, “Huh?” Others are thinking I must be a glutton for punishment.

Any writer can tell you that writer’s block is not fun. Actually it’s about as far from fun as it gets. But for me writer’s block doesn’t mean I’ve run out of ideas, it means I’ve run down the wrong road. Writer’s block is my muse’s way of telling me, “The bridge is out! Go back, stupid!”

Forced plotting and putting words into your characters mouths is (at least for me) the surest way to contract a nasty case of writer’s block. Listen to your characters. If what’s coming out of their mouths sounds forced or out of character — watch out, you’re about to step into a whole mess of trouble.

Bugs Bunny knew what he was talking about when he said, “I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

When I get writer’s block, that means I didn’t take that left turn. It means I didn’t see the signs; or if I did, I ignored them. It means I didn’t listen to my characters. But most of all (and worst of all) it means my muse isn’t going to let me go one word further until I find out where and how I took that wrong turn (aka screwed up), and go back and fix it.

So sit back, be quiet, and listen to your characters. Most times they know the story better than you do.

Story Mapping: How I do It

Today, I want to talk about practical magic — how to make a story come alive.  When I first started out writing, I was the queen of the thirty page dead novel – I’d start writing, and then the story would lose its spark and die on me.  After one too many of these, I read up on story structure, but though my drafts got longer, they stayed incoherent.

Happily, once I learned the trick of what I describe in this post, I started completing what I wrote, and selling it soon after.  And I want to save you the time it took me to learn what I describe here.  Of course, process is different for every writer and every book.  I still will write a short story without any outline at all, and have gotten results that way.  But for novel-length work, this is the default process I use, and it has given me something to lean on when I get confused and lost in the fog 

My process is a weird hybrid of the “plotter” and “pantser” methods of writing a book.  Depending on the book itself, I may improvise more or plan more in advance – whatever the book itself needs from me to come out.  But I have a bunch of different tricks that I use to get to “the end.”

First, let me give you some internet resources:

1.  Jim Butcher’s LiveJournal page:  Jim lays out, in commonsense and no-nonsense fashion, one of the best, most concise distillations of story structure ideas I have ever seen.  His essays on characterization, story arc, and story climaxes brought together a lot of ideas I have encountered in a lot of different places:

 http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/

Just keep reading and scrolling down back through his story craft series of posts – awesome.

2.  Randy Ingermanson, the Snowflake Guy:  This is the material I found first, and after I started applying his concepts of story-as-fractyl I started selling in short order:

 http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

 He has a computer program that helps you to apply the snowflake method to your own projects, but I’ve used the concept w/o the program too.

3. Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet:  The screenwriter Blake Snyder (who, sadly, passed away last year) wrote the fantastic book SAVE THE CAT, a practical and down-to-earth primer on how to construct effective commercial stories.  Though his work focuses on the screenplay form, his ideas translate easily to novels.  I read SAVE THE CAT before I found this tidbit on line, so I’m not sure if it will be of use to you without the foundation of the book as a whole.  But his “beat sheet” is a basic outline of the stations a story will hit on the journey from beginning to end:

 http://www.blakesnyder.com/tools/

There’s a list of tools on this page, including deconstruction of movies using the beat sheet. 

 4.  Holly Lisle:  One Pass Revision

I was very, very lucky to find Holly’s site when I was first starting out.  Tons of articles about writing, the life of writers, and the practical nuts and bolts of writing.  This article is very helpful in the revision stage, but I take the section “Discovery” and do it before I start writing:

 http://hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/one-pass-revision.html

How do I use the above resources when working on story structure myself?  Here is my process:

 1.  Idea germination:  I keep a little moleskin journal filled with ideas.  When I read a great poem, have a disturbing dream, get a little snippet of an idea, I write it down in the idea book.  There it may stay for years.

2.  When I decide to take the idea and run with it (or an idea grabs me by the throat and insists I write it *now*), I usually start with settings.  I love big settings, I was a history major in school.  It’s where my ideas start growing into a full-fledged story.  In my mind, the outline/synopsis is my roadmap through the country of the story.

 3.  I do the Snowflake process first, but in a very loose and organic way.  I take maybe a week to expand the story idea from a single, tight sentence to three sentences, a paragraph, four paragraphs, a page plus character interviews.  I also sometimes write up a one page blurb of about 250 words as Holly Lisle suggests in her article.

 4.  At this point, I write a very rough synopsis, often in bullet form.  I use the beat sheet list of 15 story points to work up a storyline that takes me from the beginning to the end.

 5.  Once I have that, I write the first 50 pages.  The synopsis is still very rough, so the writing can be “pantsy” and exploratory.  Sometimes the story will veer off in unexpected directions.  I pay a lot of attention to setting, the main character’s motivation, and the initial set up of the catalyst that sets the story into motion.

 6.  Then I write a synopsis in full sentences, usually ending up with a document between 8-10 pages.  I tweak it and the first fifty pages, and then I send it on to my agent to get feedback. 

 7.  As I write the complete manuscript I sometimes read Jim’s livejournal for inspiration and to help me fill in the gaps in the story that I inevitably discover.

 As I mentioned above, no two books are alike, and no two writers are alike.  See if the tools above help, and if they do, adapt them to your own style of writing and make them your own.  Wishing you all the best as you explore the country of your story!

Oh, a writer’s life for me…

Greetings everyone. My name is Paul Crilley, and I’m yet another of the new Magic District bloggers. I’m afraid I’m not off to a very good start. I was supposed to write my first blog on the tenth of January, but that date seems to have come and gone with little to show for it except a couple of extra holiday season kilograms and a desire — no, a need – for the new school term to start. I had a list of excuses ready, the main one being that my internet was down, but truth to tell it completely slipped my mind. I’m terrible like that. My office is filled with post-its, my white board scrawled with barely legible reminders and notes. It’s entirely possible that I did write up a reminder, but I can’t seem to read my writing so we’ll never know for sure.

I suppose a little bit about me would be appropriate at this point. I’m a 34 years old Scotsman living in South Africa with my partner and our two kids. (Who are amazing, despite my aforementioned desire for the holidays to be over. Like, now.) I’ve always wanted to be a writer, ever since Mr. Davidson, my English teacher, gave me an A for a short story I wrote back when I was twelve. I’d always liked making things up, but that little hint of encouragement made something click in my head, and that was when I decided I wanted to do this for a living.

It took a while though. When I was 16, I wrote a fan letter to Margaret Weis asking for advice. She told me that it takes either a million words or ten years of writing before you can produce something good enough to be published. That number was spot on for me. When I was 26 I sold my first short story to the DAW anthology, New Voices in Science Fiction.

Over the past eight years, I’ve had another dozen or so short stories in print and had two books published. (But I’ve sold five. Three of them are still in the pipeline.) I’ve also written for local television, working on sitcoms and dramas, and even dabbling in soap operas. (Not so much fun, that last one.) Last year I got to do something I’ve always dreamed of when I freelanced on Bioware’s upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

On the prose front, I write the Abraxis Wren series for Wizards of the Coast. The stories are mystery/crime novels set in the fantasy world of Eberron, and Wren is a consulting detective inspired by Sherlock Holmes.  But this year is the year that I get my own stuff out there. The first book in my Young Adult series, The Invisible Order comes out on September 28th from Egmont USA. The book is called Rise of the Darklings and follows the “thrilling adventures of Emily Snow and Spring Heeled Jack as they stumble upon a hidden war being fought between faeries and mankind on the streets of Victorian London, adventures that will force them to stay one step ahead of secret societies, evil faeries, and ancient legends come to life.” Ooh. Doesn’t that sound exciting?I’m really proud of the series, and hope it does well. (Which, I suppose, goes without saying.)

Anyway, that’s enough from me, as I’m starting to even bore myself. Truth to tell, I still feel like I’m incredibly wet behind the ears. I’m learning new things every day, and don’t really feel I know enough to dole out any secrets of writing. I’m still trying to discover that for myself, so if any of you have any secrets to share, I’m all ears. But what I can do is bring you along for the ride, and if anything noteworthy happens on the road to publication, I’ll be sure to talk about it here. And any questions you have, I’ll try my best to answer them.

Ciao.