Two-for-Tuesday: Writing Pitfalls to Avoid

Okay, so I have been writing for approximately six days without any significant stops. I went out to dinner a few days ago and watched a movie the other night, but other than that, it’s been computer + dried-out eyeballs + butt in chair.

I took a break today to hit a few stores, including Bed Bath & Beyond. This is not a place to shop when you are in “getting revenge on life” mode. I came close to buying a $99 iron, a new shoe rack, six cereal bowls, and a giant serving tray I don’t need. What I did buy is not less frivolous, only smaller: a cutting board, a potato masher, and a pair of tongs.

Anyway, I’m going a little stir-crazy, but that’s all right. It’ll pass.

Today’s Two-for-Tuesday (courtesy Kate) deals with two common writing pitfalls I’m finding as I revise book 2. Avoid them at all costs, unless of course you can make them work for you, in which case please thank me in your acknowledgments.

#1: Floppy or overworked transitions

Ever had your narrator (assuming you write first-person) say, “But I couldn’t think about that right now, I had to XYZ and blah-blah-blah”? Then you are a flopper. Trust me, I know, because I do it a lot. You are trying to dump out of something without bringing it to any kind of satisfying conclusion. Very rarely do we ever decide “Well, I won’t think about that, I have to go fight some evil in the streets.” Even when you’re playing Batman out there, chances are you are still thinking about the mean boy who sent you a questionable text message, even if you meant to put it out of your mind (even if you told the reader that’s what you were going to do!).

A cleaner solution is to find a way to button the thought and move on without trying to tie things together. Maybe this comes from my film education. I remember watching a movie in editing class about a murder and then the police investigation afterward. It would cut from the storyline in the interrogation room back to the storyline leading up to the murder. It was well acted and very tense, except for one thing: every time the investigator would get the bad lady talking about “ooh, Jimmy sure made me mad the day we went to the carnival,” instead of just cutting to the scene at the carnival, the investigator would say, “Why don’t you tell me about that.”

The human brain can take jumps in your action. If you build your action well, in fact, the jumps will be invisible. But everybody notices the author’s voice lumbering in to say, “Why don’t I tell you about that?”

#2: Unbuttoned scenes

My novels are called horror. (Whether you find them horrifying is all on you.) As such, I deal a bit with suspense–good characters who suddenly might be bad, characters arriving at a certain point and making a realization. In these scenes, it usually behooves the book (if I’m not using that word right, I don’t want to know) to end the scene with a beat or a button. Now, I’m not saying we want to go all “Nancy Drew Files” and find bodies hidden in the broom closet at the end of every chapter, but, you know. Something with a bite, or a punch, or a kick.

However, I have a very bad habit of wrapping scenes up thusly:

“Don’t look,” he said. “It’ll only upset you.”

Inside, nestled snugly between the Swiffer and the wet-dry vac, was a body. A very dead body.

–Now, see, that would be all right, if we stopped right there. As I said, I’m not a big fan of bodies in broom closets, but whatever. The problem is that I can’t leave it alone. Always, always, when I’m revising, I find scene endings that look more like this.

I pushed him out of the way and ignored his protests as I pulled the broom closet door open.

“Wow,” I said. “A dead body. This is probably the guy everyone’s been looking for all week.”

Do you spot the difference? Do you see how in one instance, the writer hit the end and then just kept writing, even though she should have stopped?

The good news is, while revising, it is very easy to deal with these situations. You just highlight the last two lines of whatever it is and hit delete.

Okay, now, I really have to get to work. Plus the dog is all up in my grill and driving me bonkers so I have to get him to leave me alone. He’s pretty cute, though. He’s trying super hard to be a pain in the neck but he’s very sleepy, so his eyes are closing, which really impedes his ability to stare at me.

Happy Tuesday!

Is it seriously only Tuesday?

3 comments March 30th, 2010

Two-for-Tuesday: Katie tries to be useful for once.

It’s Two For Tuesday! Thanks again to Kate at My Sphere of Domesticity for the idea!

Ironically, I posted two quilt pictures yesterday, not even thinking I could have used that post for today! Boo on me. But I guess it’s rude to poach from Crafty Monday.

So today I’ll talk about Two things I’ve done that increased my productivity and organization.

#1: All hail mighty Gmail.

Yes, I know that lately Google is taking a lot of flack for sorta kinda not abiding by their own “Don’t be evil” mission statement. And there’s that whole highly annoying “Buzz” thing. BUT I can let that go for now since migrating my mail to Gmail totally made my life about a hundred times easier. Here are some ways in which it rocks:

1. All of my email addresses go to the same place.
   My good friends and relatives are constantly puzzled by my multitude of email addresses. I have a bunch of them for different purposes–some for mailing lists, some for personal email, some for not so personal email, some for bills, some for shopping. I have a Yahoo address and an old work address from the dog show. Not to mention other Gmail addresses and a MobileMe account. Yes, I’m an email hoarder. In the old days, this was a total mess, because some of them were web-based accounts and some were set up using Apple Mail (which is like Entourage). I would often forget to check one for a while, and then I’d find it full of important, expired messages. So now every account I have (except the Yahoo address, because Yahoo remains unhelpful in this regard) goes to my Gmail account. My family still get confused and ask me which address to use, and I say, “Any of them!” They are usually still confused, but it works great on my end.
2. BUT I can send from any of my addresses.
   It’s very simple to validate an address so that you can send an email from it. You simply have to be able to check the email coming to that address. Gmail will send you a link that you click, which tells them that it’s really you, and then that address gets added to a drop-down list on your “Compose email” page. I’m not sure how this works with group email addresses. It could probably be abused in some instances. But I adore it. Especially since you can set it to default “reply from” whatever address the email was sent to.
3. I don’t have to worry about what emails are on which computer.
   For a long time, I used my home computer at home, my work computer at work, and a laptop for traveling. With my old accounts, once you download your emails to a certain computer, they are removed from your server (there is a way around this but it really just means you are going to run out of account space before too long). But since Gmail is web-based, there is no downloading. Everything lives online, and that means I don’t have to bcc myself on everything sent from one computer to make sure it ends up on the other one. I don’t have to have a separate email address for every computer. I just go to one website and everything is right there where I left it. This is also amazing for travel.
4. Gmail has very handy organizational tools.
   I make extensive use of labels, which are little colored tags indicating whatever the heck you want them to indicate. For instance, I have a label for “Hyperion.” I have a label for “Agent”. One for “BGDD” and “Promo” and “BGDD2.” I have “Statements & Bills” and “Travel.” And then I have “To Do” and “Reply.” You can apply as many or as few of these to an email as you want. For instance, if my agent sends me something about Book 2 that needs a reply, I will tag it “BGDD2,” “Agent,” and “To Do”. (If I REALLY need to get it done, I use the bright red “TO DO FOR REAL” label.) It is easy to switch labels so that something that was “Reply” easily gets moved to “Replied.” Or everything labeled “Current contest” gets changed to “Old contest.”
   You can even have a label for “Stuff I don’t know what to do with.” And labeling something, by the way, doesn’t automatically hide it from your inbox. Though if you want something out of your inbox, it’s as easy as clicking “archive.” If it has a label, you will be able to find it by clicking on the corresponding button displayed on the left of the screen. You can choose which you want to see and which you want to hide. For instance, I hide “travel,” because I don’t use it very often. But if I want to see it, it’s one extra click to show the hidden labels.
   If it doesn’t have a label, you can either search for it or look through “All mail.”
5. Gmail has innovate features that help you work smarter and faster.
   Google has an area called “Labs” that features new little functionalities they develop in-house to enhance their service. For instance, my main email page is divided up into panes. The leftmost and largest is the main inbox. On the right, there are panes for “TO DO,” “REPLY”, and “ACTIVE/HOLDING.” At a glance, I can see what needs attention. And then I can ignore it because I am a weak person and bad at getting things done. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I can see it.
6. Gmail has a lot of storage.
   As I mentioned, I have email from about ten addresses going there and I’ve used 4% of my storage. By the time I get anywhere near the current limit, I’m sure they will have increased it tenfold.
7. Gmail is free.
   Need I elaborate?

#2: Wordpress is your friend.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool do-it-myselfer. I hate the thought of paying someone to do something if I can do it myself. I especially love the “figuring it out” phase of doing things. For a while, my website was constructed like so: the front page was a Blogger blog. All of the interior pages were created in iWeb, which is a Mac application. I designed the menu in Photoshop and created a clickable HTML version which I then manually inserted into my Blogger template and then copied manually to each of the individual iWeb pages.

Was this fun? At first? Yes. Girl power all the way!

But as time went by, did I find that this took forever and made changing my website a tedious and horrifying process? You betcha!

After blogging at The Debutante Ball for a year, I became familiar with the Wordpress platform, which supports not only blogs but the websites around them as well. With Wordpress, you create a single header and a single sidebar and they are applied on every page (or on every page you want them on). It’s very easy to use on your own domain (which Blogger is not, in my experience), and for a DIY’er, it was not much of a stretch to learn how to customize where I wanted to customize. I was able to import all of my old Blogger entries. Last week, I was even able, with no fuss, to make the main page a static page without affecting the blog or the RSS feed (which is used for things like Google Reader–which would be #3 if this were Three-for-Tuesday).

Plus, if you just let them host your blog for you, Wordpress is free. If you are just starting a blog/website, you will find a multitude of free templates and themes to choose from as well as tons of free help and info. As yet, I haven’t not been able to find a solution to any of my issues.

And this would be a good time to give a shout-out to my old buddy and your friendly neighborhood image-hosting workhorse, Photobucket. I don’t know why I have an aversion to hosting my own images, but I do. Heaven knows it’s not a showcase like Flickr, but it gets the job done with minimal drama.

Okay. Hope that was informative! Now. Back to work with me.

7 comments March 23rd, 2010

One additional note for the book bloggers…

There are some fantastic posts out there right now with advice for the blossoming book blogger community.

Kristi, a.k.a. the Story Siren, has gathered a fantastic amount of info from her own experience, from publishers, and from authors. Alexandra Bracken shares the author’s POV.

So there has been a lot said and I don’t feel the need to add very much more. Except this one note.

You can kill two birds with one stone by following one very simple step (Why are we killing birds? That’s so violent. Let’s call it “feeding two birds with one bag of chips.”):

Post your good reviews on Amazon, B&N, and other online retailers.

How does this feed two birds?

(Bird 1) It gives you a place to promote your own blog. You can write your thoughtful review and include a link/reference to your blog. People who read Amazon reviews are probably people who like to read book reviews in general. If they like what they read from you, and see that you have a whole website/blog where you post other, similarly thoughtful reviews, chances are you will get a new visitor to your blog.

You can increase this referral rate by making sure your reviews are interesting, unique, and spoiler free. Also, if you don’t like a book, you don’t have to cross-post your review. But if you do like it, why not get your name out there AND help the author?

(Bird 2) It will make authors, agents, and publicists feel serious warm fuzzies toward you. As everyone knows, the book blogging community is growing faster than the number of available ARCs.

For instance, before Bad Girls Don’t Die was published, I was able to accommodate almost every ARC request. If things keep going the way they’re going, this is not going to be the case for Books 2 and 3. So when it comes time to print up & send out the ARCs, I will probably send my publicist a list of book bloggers who went “above and beyond” for Book 1. One great way to be considered for this list is to post well-written reviews on the major retail sites.

You may even attract other authors and publicists. If I read a high-quality review for another book at B&N or Amazon, and it has a link to a book blogger’s site, I will probably start to covet this person’s eyeball time and may even start to relentlessly and obsessively stalk their website and try to psychically convince them to review my book. (Or maybe not the creepy part of that. I’d probably send a link to my publicist.)

Voila! Two fat and happy birds.

Thanks for reading!

7 comments November 12th, 2009

No NaNo This Anno.

The draft of BGDD2 is due to my editor at the end of this week. But, uh… we won’t think about that right now.

What a lot of people are thinking about is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Basically, the idea is that you spend the month of November writing a 50,000 word novel–or 50,000 words of a longer novel (since 50k is pretty short for any category except YA).

I have never gotten very far in NaNo. For the past few years, what with revisions to BGDD and dog shows galore, November has been packed with activities that would make such a rigorous writing schedule impossible.

For those of you who are participating, please heed this advice:

(1) Wear reading glasses and take frequent breaks from staring at your computer (and no, switching to Twitter or Facebook from MS Word doesn’t count as a break).
(2) Don’t be too hard on yourself.
(3) Don’t assume that by the end of the month you will have a draft that is ready to send to an agent. You will probably have to revise your NaNo. But that’s okay. Everybody revises.
(4) If you do get started and find you can’t finish, or fall way behind on your wordcount, don’t just give up your novel altogether. NaNoWriMo is fun, what with all the zeitgeist and such, but it should be a launching point. Meeting NaNo’s wordcount should not be your ultimate goal; finishing a draft of a novel should be your ultimate goal. So if you have to slow down and finish your draft by, say, March instead of December 1, I say go for it. Don’t just give up forever.

On the other hand, if you are not doing NaNo, like me, how about treat November as Reverse NaNoWriMo? Every day, try doing, making, eating, or learning something new! Enrich yourself so that when you DO feel motivated to sit down and write your novel, you have lots of interesting new stuff to draw from. (Writing is allowed, too… in moderation.)

Be sure to tweet about your adventures and label with #reversenanowrimo … so I can see what you’re up to!

My Reverse NaNo deed for the day? Starting a vermicompost bin. See, I had this Rubbermaid tub full of soil that, with neglect, had turned into rich, crumbling, beautiful soil with worms in it. So I figured, if I did it on accident, I can probably keep it up on purpose. I went digging for worms near the drainage ditch at the end of my street (the glamour continues…) and put them in with the old-timers. Cross your fingers!

Tomorrow’s activity? (Spoiler alert!) –Going back to WORK. Argh. It’s not that I don’t love my work and the people I get to see when I’m there, but still… argh!

Happy November!

6 comments November 1st, 2009

How writing is like jazz

Writing a second book is a funny thing. Typically, the first book is the product of a year’s (or a few years’) worth of experimentation, revision, polishing, agonizing, and nail-biting. When you feel you have something worth looking at, you start submitting to agents, which can take months or years, and then your agent submits it for sale at various publishing houses, which can take months, and then finally, the book comes out.

The second book (for me, at least), is a very different process. Disney-Hyperion bought my second and third book with an eye toward developing a series out of “Bad Girls Don’t Die”. With any series, the ideal situation is to follow up the first release within as tight a time frame as possible. This means that, while I had years to bumble around with Book 1, Book 2 is due out in stores in less than two years.

And I still have to write it!

Luckily, I’ve been blessed with the most razor-instincted (new word) editor in the whole world, the Delightful Editor. The Delightful Editor and I spent weeks working out the outline for Book 2. Every time there was a tough question to be asked, she asked it. And if I didn’t have an answer, it was time to think again. Gradually, we came up with an outline that’s clean and virtually cheat-proof.

(I love to cheat when I write. I think nothing of setting Future Katie up for a mess of trouble down the line, if it means I get to create a darling on the current page. …Of course, we all know what happens to those darlings!)

But working together, we came up with a storyline that’s strong, spooky, and gives the characters room to grow and change. And now we’re on to the writing.

To revisit the title of the post, writing is like jazz because it’s at its most brilliant when it’s a little loose–when there’s freedom. Imagine a jazz quartet playing with sheet music in front of them, sticking to the notes as closely as an orchestra. You’ll get a song, yes, but you won’t get the magic. And the magic is what counts–in jazz and in writing.

So I try to give myself a little freedom. But there’s also a flipside. Even as they improvise, musicians are always thinking of the central creation. It’s all about the song. “Loose” is one thing–”loosey goosey” is a totally different thing. You can fool around, but only if you fool around within the parameters of the song. Otherwise, you’re not playing the song–you’re just playing.

I’m finding myself in the same situation. My instincts tell me to just write and see where it takes me. As I was working this past week, I (narratively) “bumped into” a character, who suddenly took on a life of her own. Is she in the outline? No. Does she bode poorly for Future Katie? You bet. Was she a darling? Absolutely.

I’m self aware enough to know when I’m writing myself into a corner, and let me tell you, I saw the intersection of walls coming from a mile away. I wasn’t writing the book–I was just writing.

So I did what they tell you you’re going to have to learn to do–I murdered my darling. I took that character and her rogue storyline and I politely showed them to the door.

But what they don’t tell you is that murdering your darlings isn’t like taking players off the board in chess–it’s more like checkers. You can pilfer that store of cast-aside darlings as much as you want as you continue within the parameters of your story. And that’s just what I plan to do. I’m going to take this character I created and then discarded and use what I love about her for another character–one who actually belongs in the story.

You must be playful when you write. But every game has rules. Just like every song has, at its core, a melody.

PS – One of my favorite musical performances EVER was Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, et al, at the Hollywood Bowl about two years ago. They played a number of incredible songs, including a version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that had me weeping. But of course you can’t talk about Dave Brubeck without talking about this (one of my favorite things about Dave Brubeck is how restrained he is–what he’s NOT doing is almost as important as what he is doing.. the ultimate editor):

PPS – For another completely transcendent performance, check out Brubeck’s Alice in Wonderland.

1 comment August 1st, 2009

I get by with a little help from my friends…

I’m at the Debutante Ball today, blogging about mentors in a post that is really more about collaboration.

Speaking of collaboration, can you spot my helper in this photo?

4 comments March 10th, 2009

Balancing the character arc

I’m in the middle of revisions for Project X. For a little while, I’ve been struggling to figure out just what I needed to tweak to allow a couple of the main conflicts to fit together better. The primary victim of all this has been a minor character named Jesse, who has been eliminated from existence and then brought back to the storyline in a manner that he would be all too fragile to cope with, were he a real person.

But what I realized two days ago was that, in messing around with a couple of minor characters and even a major character or two, I was completely ignoring some changes that needed to be made to one of the two lead characters. I was coming to feel that there was something off about her, about the way she developed.

And then I realized–she didn’t develop. She sprang into the book fully-formed, and continued from that point to wreak havoc on everybody she came into contact with. She was like Athena, leaping from the head of Zeus, only less mythical. This didn’t make her particularly sympathetic, which I could live with–hey, very few of us feel sorry for absolutely every person we encounter–but it did leave her looking a little shallow.

So what did I do? I sanded her down a little. I took a fully-formed character and left her more vulnerable, with more to learn. This not only gives me a little more play as far as writing her into some of the earlier scenes, but it also gives her the potential for a little bit of understanding. Readers will get where she’s coming from better than if she had been allowed to continue in her old incarnation.

After all, when you watch The Incredible Hulk, part of the fun is seeing the guy before he’s the Hulk. If you don’t know his pants ever fit, it doesn’t seem quite as tragic that he outgrew them.

So I’m having a good time redrawing my own little Hulk from the ground up. And hoping that it helps the book evolve.

What made me think this was thinking, the other night, that I love writing about teens because everything they do is formative. Every conversation is important. Every encounter has the power to change your worldview. And my mind wandered to this character and wondered how her worldview had been changed in the narrative as it was.

Just some thoughts from the old noggin. Happy Thursday! The Office starts tonight! I am soooo excited.

7 comments September 25th, 2008

I get it, I get it! There’s a gun on the mantle!

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
Anton Chekhov

Most writers (and probably readers) have heard this advice, although I’d always heard it as “a gun on the mantlepiece,” thanks to which I learned that I had no idea how to spell “mantle.” (Hey, I grew up in the sunny South. Santa came in through the front door.)

Anyway, I’m reading a book (okay, listening to an audiobook–audiobooks rule!) right now–which shall remain nameless–where the endless foreshadowing sans payoff is about to drive me totally bonkers.

Don’t get me wrong–it’s a really good book. I love the characters, the story, the setting, the tone, the language. Gosh. A great book. If only I could go through it with a red pen and remove all the guns and mantlepieces.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Blah blah 8 chapters of character development and story development about Donny and his friend Gordon, and so on… and then WHAM! Donny, the narrator says, “I had no idea that it would be the winter that tore apart our friendship forever.”

Oh, snap! No way, Donny! Do tell!

Blah blah 4 more chapters of really good writing and lots of interesting stuff–plenty of stuff, really, to keep me reading; I mean, really, what a taut narrative! I am so engrossed in this story! And then WHAM! Donny says, “If only I’d known that everything that has happened since that winter was telegraphed in that conversation.”

What can you possibly mean, Donny? (Because said conversation was about, like, running shoes.)

Blah blah for another 5 chapters, Donny and Gordon go on with their lives and things really start to get interesting. What amazing writing this is. I’m enthralled. Then–WHAM! Donny says, “In a way, what Gordon and I realized that morning was that some inevitable point was approaching for both of us, after which nothing would ever be the same. Of course, neither of us knew it until it was too late.”

COME ON, DONNY, THROW ME A FRICKIN’ BONE HERE!

By this point in the story, all I can think of is that something horrible is about to happen. I can hardly keep my mind on the primary storyline any longer. The mantlepiece is piled high with guns, and I am about one glass of white wine away from skipping to the end of the story to see how they’re fired and who gets shot.

I mean, yeah, foreshadowing is all well and good, but for heaven’s sake, you don’t have to start telegraphing the ending in every chapter. It’s like the old Nancy Drew serials–every chapter ends with a BUM-BUM-BUMMMMM, such as an ominous phone call or a body found in the hospital broom closet.

The dour predictions and hints are laid on so thick that the following actually happened: I accidentally had not downloaded the final segment (since audiobooks are broken up into multiple files). I was listening to the last one I had, and saw that there was an hour left. “Aha!” I thought. “Finally I will get to hear how everything fell apart and Donny and Gordon ceased to be friends.”

Forty-five minutes left… thirty minutes left… eight minutes left… I thought, “Well, it’s going to be a sudden ending, but at least I will get to know what the heck Donny was moaning about all this time!”

WRONG, of course. When I realized there were six more hours of what is otherwise a fantabulously well-written audiobook, I was SAD. That is SO BAD, my friends. I never, ever want my audiobooks to be over. They are my friends, and I want them all to be 45 hours long. I should have been so excited to learn that Donny and Gordon and I were going to get another 8 chapters together.

As an author, this is probably the second-worst thing you can do to your readers. (The first is to write a terrible book that everyone claims is really good and you’re a dummy if you don’t like it.) This crime–the second–is to write an amazing book that they wish they were done with, already.

(The third is to write a terrible book that they read anyway, because they want to know how it ends. The fourth is to write a boring book that wastes their time but is ultimately ditchable.)

So please, fellow authors. Maybe you’re planning some gunfire in chapter 26. But do me a favor and keep the gun off the mantle until chapter 22 or so.

PS – Next week is my first week blogging as a member of the 2009 class of The Debutante Ball, a wonderful group blog for debut authors. I start blogging Tuesday, and I’m joined by a bunch of other cool authors, whose books all sound very excellent and intimidating. I’m the first YA debut author, so please meander over there Tuesday and read my post and comment and be all, “Wow, Katie, you are AWESOME!”

8 comments August 28th, 2008

Katie Alender’s Practical Rules For Writers

Yeah, that’s right. I’m doling out writing advice. But none of that foo-foo writing advice that’s actually about the words. No, my friends, this is about the writing.

Advisement #1: Get a little notebook, and take it everywhere.
Everyone has done the thing where you’re going on with your daily life, and then it hits you: the perfect convergence of idea, character, setting, situation. The germ from which an influenza of literature will spring forth. “When you know, you know,” and you, my genius friend, know–this idea is the best. idea. ever.

Then later, when you get home, you don’t have the faintest idea what your idea was.

A small notebook will fix that for you. You can use your notebook for everything writing-related–and NOTHING not writing-related. No grocery lists, phone numbers, pulling pages out to dispose of your chewed-out Fruit Stripes gum. ONLY stuff about writing. Turn to this notebook every time you have anything to jot down about current and future progress, and you will eventually have a handy-dandy little nugget of fascinating notes and story ideas.

Advisement #2: Only write in this notebook with ink that will not bleed if it gets wet.
You think I’m kidding? I learned this the hard way, by taking a notebook that had four pages of snippety ideas from a mass brainstorming session and dunking it in the pool, only to find that of my four pages, all I had left was a faint blue wash and one lame bullet point I’d written with a ballpoint pen when I went to the kitchen.

Which leads us to our next point–

Advisement #3: Don’t write when you’ve been drinking.
If you are under 21, don’t drink at all. If you are over 21, don’t drink when you need to write. At best, it will be just fine. At middle, it will be a hilarious pageful of typos and bizarre phrasing. And at worst, you will come to see yourself as one of those special, romanticized self-destructive authors who can only work when they’ve downed a few pomatinis.

Note to crafters who are reading this: this advisement also applies to sewing. At best, you sew the sleeve on inside out and the neckline shut. At worst, you sew your pinky to the neckline.

Advisement #4: Get some reading glasses, preferably with a light tint (I like pink).
This profession is brutal on your eyeballs. Staring at a computer all day is the ocular equivalent of jogging barefoot on concrete. Eventually, something’s going to give out. Delay this by investing in a nice pair of reading glasses (and not the ones in the drugstore endcap). Your friendly neighborhood optometrist should have good quality ones with non-distorting lenses for about $20. A light tint (which most optometrists can do for you on the spot for like $10) will ease the burden even more.

And as a plus, when you are in your writing haze but need to get up and grab a glass of Kool-Aid, leaving your glasses on will keep the world slightly blurry and keep you from noticing things like the pile of laundry waiting to be folded, thereby allowing you to get the Kool-Aid, bypass the chores, and go right back to writing.

Advisement #5: Just do it.
Outlining and character development are all well and good, but you can really shoot yourself in the foot with all that stuff. When you’re feeling excited about a new project, it’s natural to make little lists of characters and outlines, but if you aren’t careful you can expend all of your enthusiasm making giant lists of foods your characters like and dislike.

There is such a thing as overplanning, and I would say the rule of thumb is this: when you know enough about your characters and story to write the next chapter, stop making notes and write the next chapter. It’s a lot easier to find a way to get from Chapter 23 to Chapter 24 than to have an entire notebook of scribblings and try to start Chapter 1.

All of that buildup puts tremendous pressure on you. The part of your brain that makes lists is not the same part that writes stories. They are friends, but they do not go to the same parties or like the same music. And if you stick with Mr. List too long, Mr. Writing is going to take one look at Mr. List’s year of planning and run screaming from the room. Because no matter what Mr. Writing does, Mr. List will be hovering over his shoulder saying, “You can’t do that! I know it’s what feels natural, but look at my brilliant outline! Caroline can’t possibly meet Jorge at the grocery store on page 16, because the whole book hinges on their meeting at the laundromat on page 24!” And he’s right, of course. So what does Mr. Writing do when faced with this dilemma? He gets up from the computer and watches Oprah while Mr. List gloats about being right.

Advisement #6: Chances are, you’re going to have to sacrifice something.
When I am busy with a book, I don’t exercise. This is because, due to my schedule, my morning exercise time and my morning writing time are an either-or partnership. I write OR I work out. So here’s where your priorities come in. Decide what you really want, and go for it. However, chances are you can find ways to compromise. For instance, since I can’t work out in the morning, I take the dog all the way around the block instead of just up and down the little grass strip when I take him out. And I try to eat a little better.

Advisement #7: Your first draft does not have to be publishable.
It’s not supposed to be. It’s a first draft. Yes, there is always a sense of “hurry hurry hurry” with writing, especially when you have an idea that you’re afraid may be bubbling up somewhere else in the market. But you’re not doing yourself any favors submitting a hastily underwritten manuscript.

That being said…

Advisement #8: Know when to say when.
This is two-tiered: yes, the first draft is supposed to be crap. BUT–it’s supposed to be crap you’re passionate about. If you find yourself forcing every. single. page, chances are that once you do produce your wonderfully crappy first draft, you are not going to have the slightest interest in revising it. Good writing doesn’t have to flow, but passion for the project should flow.

Second tier, know when to stop revising. Just like overplanning, you can overwork a manuscript. At some point you have to stop grooming your showdog and take it out to compete.

Because…

Advisement #9: Joyless writing shows.
If you aren’t enjoying yourself, or if you’re forcing something, or if you’re taking the manuscript in a direction that feels wrong just because you’re supposed to, readers will pick up on it. Trust me. Double trust me. I read a book once that had the strangest feeling to it, and then I realized that it was evident to me that the author had no fun writing it. None. Zero. And no, I’m not naming names.

Advisement #10: If you own more than five books about writing but have not yet written anything, spend less time at the bookstore and more time writing.
It’s easy to hope that the magical writing book is out there, waiting for you. That, having bought and read this book, you will suddenly be compelled to write your masterpiece, the Great American Novel (but of course you’d never call it that… you’ll wait for reviewers to call it that). You will suddenly be struck with inspiration and insight. Characters will spring from your head like tee-shirts from a cannon.

But here’s the deal. Most books about writing DO have good info, but they are often just repeating info from other books about writing. And one thing ALL books about writing have in common is that while you’re reading a book about writing, you are definitely NOT writing. Because you are reading.

My advice? Pick up Stephen King’s “On Writing” and Brenda Ueland’s “If You Want to Write.” Read them, then log off on Amazon.com and go write something.

******

Okay, now I’m off to actually write something. Happy Saturday!

17 comments February 16th, 2008

Like writing, only faster.

A very wise and wonderful woman, an accomplished artist, once told me that if she’s away from a painting for even a day, she comes back to it feeling a little bit like a stranger. Overall, this is true of my writing as well. The more I write, the better things go. And when I really get stuck, agonizing weeks can pass before I hunker down and get past it. (Note: this isn’t writer’s block — this is writer’s laziness.) The point is, sooner or later, I move ahead.

Revising is kind of like that, only instead of having the luxury to spend two weeks quilting and trying to forget what a slacker I’m being, I have fifteen minutes to go sew three crazy quilt squares (side note: anticipation is high for this being the Ugliest Quilt Ever), stare at the wall, stare at the dog, eat some pretzels, and then sit down again.

My typical feeling is that solutions are out there waiting to be found. When revising, that becomes, “Solutions are out there, so start covering ground like a cocker spaniel at a field trial.” Flush those suckers out of the brush. Go go go!

In a way, this is painful, and more frustrating and soul-sucking than I would have guessed. Because it must. be. written.

And then, it’s also freeing. Because it must. be. written. And that’s that. And hey, if Idea #1 flops, take five minutes and think of a fix for it. I’ve been pleased to realize that the fix does come. Maybe fifteen minutes of staring agonizedly into space is as productive as two weeks of quilting and soft focus on the writing.

I hope so, because it’s all going in. Some may come back out.

But it’s liberating to do this speed round. Like finally amping the treadmill up to “run” and then realizing you can actually keep up.

March 1st, 2007