Conflict

I've discovered that the part of writing I struggle with the most (setting aside creating characters and the actual world in which I write) is layering conflict in a story. As I write I tend to forget that I need more than one single issue to hold the book together. I get caught up in the main plot and write to move that forward but I forget that in, say, a teen mystery the characters have other things going on. They have school. They have budding romances and unrequited love. They have rivalries and cliques and get pissed off at friends and relatives on a fairly regular basis.

I have a bad habit of letting all those other things fall away and without them, the work falls flat.

On any given day, I have a lot going on in my life. I have problems with work. I have problems with family and friends. I find myself, to paraphrase one of my senior managers, unable to get out of my own way. I get stressed out; I feel an overwhelming urge to curl up in a chair with a book and a hard drink.

And that's all without anyone trying to kill me, which is what my characters have to deal with on a daily basis.

But somehow, when I sit down in front of my computer and begin to type, I develop a one-track mind. Which, for me, is odd. Granted, I get hung up on various topics and I've been accused more than once of talking about work too much. But the way my brain works in general is that it jumps around. I can't just sit down and watch a TV show or movie. I have to read a book or surf the net or something like that. I can go to the movie theater and absolutely love the movie I'm watching but by the halfway point I'm checking my watch and trying to gauge how much longer it's going to last.

I get bored with things. Even when I go on a kick with a new TV show (MacGyver, at the moment), I can't just focus on that. I'll surf the net, read fic, and write all while watching the show. It keeps me engaged.

But when I write, I latch onto the one main plot and let everything else fall away. Yes, that main conflict is the driver of the story but if I want people to identify with my characters and be drawn into the book, it needs to have more.

So, while I can certainly fix this in revision (and I suspect that will be the case), my new writing goal is to consciously focus on all aspects of the story as I write, rather than leaving it to revision to repair. And I'm getting better at it. In my current book, my main character has an ex-husband who still wants to be in her life--and protect her from herself. She also has a boss who she'd like to push out her office window. She has two kids who are still reeling from her divorce. And she has the mystery.

And once a chapter or so I recall some (or, on a really good day) all of these. And I might even have a flash of insight as to how to work in one or more of them.

Have to start somewhere, I suppose.


x-posted to my LJ

Beloved characters

I've commented on part of this before. The fanfic debate aggravates me because I know firsthand that the reason we fanficcers write these stories is because the characters have reached us on some level. I'm currently slightly obsessed with Remus Lupin (okay, slightly may be a tad of an understatement), which I'm sure y'all have noticed. His character draws me in. He's complex and wounded and honest and inspiring and he just interests me so much, which is why I keep blathering about him.

I have a lot of wishes and dreams relating to writing. I want to get an agent. I want to get published. I want to see my book--my own book--on a shelf in Barnes & Noble. I want to make a bestseller list. I want to make enough writing that I can quit my day job and write for a living.

But more than anything else I want to create characters that will instill in my readers the type of attachment I've felt to Remus Lupin, Dennis Booker (21 Jump Street), Templeton Peck (The A-Team), Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu (Star Wars). It would mean, to me, that I've done my job as an author and made my audience care about my characters.

Hell, I'd even be happy to have my fans up in arms about something I'd done to my characters because it would mean that my audience had developed a relationship with these characters to the point that they felt they knew them, believed in them, understood how they functioned and why--and had developed their own opinions on these characters.

Cross-posted to my LJ

Know that point in a story ...

... where you're kind of grasping for something, anything, to just keep the book going forward until you get your momentum back and get the thing back on track and going in a direction its actually supposed to go?

Yeah, that's where I am right now with my current book, Deception.

I almost feel as if I've lost track of the story and just need to keep writing and things will start to fall into place again, and then I can get rid of the crappy stuff when revision comes around.

Altogether, though, knowing that writing the last word on the last page does not, in any way, shape, or form mean that this book is complete does not make me feel better about how lousy the story is right now. The writing itself isn't bad, I don't think, save for the fact that the story is just rambling along aimlessly and completely without direction.

This is why they say padding a story shows. It does. I'm not trying to make it longer at the moment; given that it seems to me that little has happened and I'm already halfway through, length is not a concern of mine. If anything I'm probably going to have to cut out a lot. But what I'm writing now is, really, filler. It's to fill in the blanks, get something down on paper, until I can pick up the action again and tie the story back together.

Does anyone else have this issue? (I'll refrain from linking yet again to Holly Lisle's piece on middles, which always makes me feel much better about my inability to write the middle of story coherently.

x-posted to my LJ

The first steps of revision

So, revision is going well so far. Dining room table is rather covered with notebook, pens, clean manuscript pages, scribbled manuscript pages. Yet, for the moment, despite scatter, not chaotic. And I have a lid from a paper box on the table which cat uses as a bed. It pleases her to be able to watch me and it keeps her from laying on my papers and getting in the way. Spent the evening last night listening to Queen and U2 and revising. Queen is truly lovely dance-around-the-house-alone music. Cat thought I was crazy, I think, but it was fun.

I'd already been through most of the pages I revised last night, but I found so much more wrong with them on the second pass. I did the first pass on the living room floor in front of the television so I probably wasn't paying that much attention.

I'm working at the very beginning of my book so at the moment it's more stylistic changes, noticing poor word choice or bad use of punctuation. I haven't created plot problems yet, really, but as I read through the beginning I'm (1) noticing the things that I'd planned to do more with and which I know I forgot about later in the book and (2) coming up with ideas to elaborate later--and for future books if this takes off as a series.

All in all I'm currently pleased with how revision is going, although that is subject to change without notice.

Also, I have a new livejournal for posting more personal ramblings. See here.

Revision Time

Well, I'm about to start revising my first book, the first Taggert Twins mystery. Anyone who'd like to read the draft and give me feedback, please leave a comment.

To tell you the truth, I'm really sort of scared to start. I'm going to use Holly Lisle's guide to revising a novel as sort of my guidebook, but with a few changes. You wouldn't know it to look at my apartment but I'm really big on organization -- at least when it comes to my writing. For the book I'm about to revise, I have four documents. And that's low. For the book I'm working on now I have, I believe, at least 9. I have things for the synopsis/outline, characters, plotting notes, the actual text, tracking my progress, tracking my scenes and chapters, etc. And I know that as I go through revision, I'm going to want separate lists for notes about plot lines, notes about my characters, notes about ... I don't know what but you get the picture. A single-subject notebook like she mentions in the linked page will just not do for me.

I'm completely anal about some things. What can I say? *shrug*

I'm also scared because, in the writing of the draft, I had a couple of characters and a whole plot line that, because I didn't know what to do with them in the end, I let completely drop off. The characters disappear and the plot line stops at a big ol' brick wall. Goes nowhere. So I know I have to either figure out where to go with that plot line or take it all out -- which is going to leave a massive hole smack in the middle of my story. (Sort of like Holly's dancing bears and clowns or whatever -- if you haven't read her article on Middles, I suggest you do. It's quite amusing.) And I'm no closer to figuring it out now than I was before.

I'm also worried I won't be able to keep up the current pace I have on my current book once I start revising the original.

But it's time for a trip to Wal-Mart so I can get my pretty notebook and my pretty colored pens. And sooner or later I need to get a filing cabinet or file box or something for the fifty bazillion notebooks I have floating around my apartment. They have fic from at least seven different fandoms and are in varying states of disarray. They need to go hide somewhere before they drive me insane. Hmm. Maybe something else to buy at Wal-mart.

On another topic, I totally didn't realize how thick 208 pages can be. And, dummy that I am, I didn't realize until I'd already printed 60 pages that I hadn't put in page numbers. Pray to god that I don't drop the damn thing or hold it too close to a fan. (Yikes)