GENREALITY

I love getting letters from readers. In particular I enjoy it when teens write to me and tell me they’re working on their own writing projects. They ask me some great questions, and even though they’re beginning writers, most of the principles that I find myself passing on are things that, beginning writer or experienced writer, even now that I’m published, still apply to my writing process.

So I’m sharing today a question from a reader named Grace:
I was wondering how you stick with writing on one topic for a whole book let alone 3 books. I have a slue of journals with stories that never quite passed the 50 page mark. I just lose interest because it is not quite time for the climax and back ground knowledge and thickening the plot can only go so far. How do you keep your self interested until the end of the book?

Interesting that she asked me this question, because it’s something that I struggled with. Before I wrote Prom Dates From Hell, I also had a whole mess of projects/books that I’d started but never finished, for exactly the same reason. I would lose interest and abandon one project for the next shiny thing.

Even now I deal with this; I don’t abandon the project, but there’s a point in every book (The technical term, for me, is “Chapter 4.”) where I bog down, convinced the book is horribly boring, and I suck, and writing a whole big book is an insurmountable task. It doesn’t matter than I’ve done it five times now. Every single book, I look at the mountain of plot I’ve got to climb, and wonder how I’m ever going to manage it.

Now, pre-book-writing, a couple of things helped me: I wrote a bunch of shorter pieces so that I got used to finishing things. A short story can be 4 pages, or it can be 40 pages. But it’s good practice being able to get a beginning, middle and end into a short space. There’s no space for the boring stuff.

For a book, the rise and fall of the plot makes for natural goals. I don’t just plan one climax at the end. I have several turning points that are like mini-climaxes over the course of the book. This is not just about plotting an exciting book. It’s about giving myself goals that don’t seem so waaaaaaaay far away and unattainable.

If you think about the book as a series of successively higher hills rather than one long, tedious climb up a mountain, it really helps. And since those parts are usually fun to write, it’s both a goal and a reward. (I love to write the scenes with the heroine and her love interest, so I tell myself stuff like: well, I have to get through this scene where they explain how magic works, but then Maggie and Justin get to fight then make out… er, I mean make up.)

And to Grace and everyone else (that is, ALL of you, because I’ve never met a writer who didn’t have books and books of scraps and starts and bits and pieces)… Whatever you do, NEVER throw away those journals! One of my abandoned projects turned into the idea for my September book (The Splendor Falls). Way back when, I had an idea for a story about a ballerina who breaks her leg and goes to stay in an old house with a ghost. The setting and whole rest of the plot ended up being completely different, but it all started from about 50 pages of story I began (then abandoned) in high school.

So, whether you’re a young writer, a not so young writer, beginning or experienced, on those days when the book seems too huge and the end too far away, just think about it in chunks. After all, you can eat an elephant one bite at a time.

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Tied up on a slew of different projects this week – new proposal, edits to a novel that was turned in last month, finalizing a novel that needs to be turned in – so I’ve got a short sample for More Than Life Itself, a novella that I’ve recently repackaged for release on the Kindle.  (I posted a little of this back in Sept, but wanted to show off the new cover art now that its actually available.)

New cover art by Neil Jackson

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Writing can be a very scary process. But something I’ve learned from experience is that if a project scares you, it’s probably good.

This doesn’t make working through the fear easier. One of the hardest things to do is nailing yourself to the chair and writing in spite of the fear. And on the flip side, just because something makes you laugh out loud, energizes you, makes you sniffle or is the most fun you can imagine to write doesn’t mean it’s no good because it wasn’t hard or scary.

Fear just happens in the writing process. Like the bogeyman, it pops out unexpectedly. It’s actually often worst for me AFTER I’ve written, rather than during. During I’m pretty good at tying the inner critic up, gagging it and stuffing it in a locked trunk. After, the critic pops out and screams all the things I didn’t let it say during writing. Which makes finishing something really fun.

My coping mechanism for this kind of post-project meltdown is pretty much to shut my mind off by focusing on something I really love, a book I’ve been looking forward to from a favorite author, episodes of Firefly, something that will capture my attention and give me a positive experience. And then I throw myself into writing something else, because writing is much more fun than angsting over what I’ve written.

But sometimes the act of writing is scary because you’ve hit on something important. Something about that scene really matters on a deep level. You’re revealing a truth that’s uncomfortable and the fear wells up. How to get past it and write anyway?

You can start by separating yourself from what you write. What your characters say and do are not reflections of you. (This is assuming we’re talking about fiction.) If it’s true for Character X, that’s all it has to be. But for the story to work you need all of X’s truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, no matter how much it may personally squick you out or how much you may disagree. So your characters may do things that are Not Nice. This is a big one, I think especially for women, because that whole Be A Nice Girl thing is so drilled into us.

Nice, to be blunt, is boring. Nice characters who only say and do nice things do not create compelling conflict on the page. Bring on the Not Nice. Welcome it. It’s a good sign.

But if you write about a topic or a character who isn’t nice, won’t somebody think YOU are Not Nice? Maybe. It’s a risk. At which point you have to ask yourself what’s more important. That everybody think of you as a Nice Girl, or to be the best writer you can be?

Nice is a straitjacket. Don’t worry about being nice. Worry about being good. It’s more important. Fear tends to evaporate when confronted, so recognize the fear and then write anyway. Everybody experiences fear at some point in the writing life, the trick is to not let it stop you.

Charlene Teglia is the author of multiple romances for multiple publishers. Her most recent release, Claimed by the Wolf (Dec. 09 St. Martin’s) is in stores now.

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What scares you?

I don’t mean from a horror standpoint. Monsters, goblins, germs, clowns…  Whatever.  I’m talking about pushing yourself, as an artist to the edge of your comfort zone.

I love this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, to an aspiring writer: You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

This is sort of the flip side of what Candy was talking about yesterday. Beautiful things inspire us. But I think that what really gets to the heart of things, what connects with our strongest reactions, is when we examine what scares or intimidates us, what seems almost too much to our restrained sensibilities, then go there.

I’m not just talking about tapping into your nightmares–monsters, germs, clowns, whatever–to write a horror story. (Though that is useful sometimes.) I’m talking about pushing yourself, as an artist, to the edge of your comfort zone.

Sure, I’d been scaring my characters in my “Girl vs Evil” series with my own bugbears for while. For example, in Highway to Hell (which, ahem, I will just mention, just made the YASLA 2010 list of Best Books for YA) my protagonist Maggie is on the hunt for El Chupacabra.  But reaching into my psyche for what I’m physically afraid of (heights, monsters in the dark, etc.) is the fun side of peering into the dark. We connect to the things that scare us, but in a ghost story around the campfire way.

But what if you don’t write fantasy or horror or action thrillers. We still have to push ourselves to face what intimidates us, but on an emotional level.  Being the first in a relationship to say ‘I love you,’ looking foolish, failing abysmally and having to pull yourself back up from that.

For me, at least, it’s even harder to get at the heart of the internal jeopardy. Facing down demons–well, anyone would be scared in that situation.  But making my characters truly emotionally vulnerable? That’s hard.

In my latest book, The Splendor Falls, while there is a point where my heroine Sylvie is in physical danger, thing I struggled with was punching up the emotional stakes. It wasn’t enough for her to be a little freaked out that she was seeing and feeling inexplicable things when she came to stay at her ancestral home.  It wasn’t enough that she worried people would think she was weird. She needed to be worried that she was losing control of her senses, her ability to tell what was real, and that if anyone discovered she was having this problem, she would lose what little control she had over her life.

But in early drafts, I held back from that. Those emotions scared me, not least because they were very close to my own real emotions. But those are exactly the ones we had to get in touch with. When I pushed my character to the point where I was uncomfortable, it made for a much  more dramatic conflict.

For writing to be really affecting and effective, the stakes have to be really high for our characters. We can’t put them in a situation that’s a little bit unpleasant. We have to immerse them in things dire. As authors, there is no better way to get in touch with that place where were not sure if things are going to be okay for our character, we have to go to places that scare us personally.

So what are you afraid of?   It would be WAY too much of an overshare if I told you all of mine, but losing control is a big one of mine. (Not a surprise to anyone who knows me. I’m just a WEE bit uptight.)

So, get out of your comfortable zone, and delve deep, past dinner table emotions, right to the fears and anxieties that lie close to your heart. Those are the conflicts that make a book worth reading.

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So, I was doing housework and thinking about writing. I know this is a shock–yes, I actually do housework. Specifically, I was cleaning the floors.

Now, this is a multi-step process where the wood floors are concerned. I have dogs. They’re small, but they have a lot of hair. I swear, I could knit a puppy with the hair that I brush off my dogs. And in the winter, they track dried grass and dirt in from the backyard.  So unless I stay on top of things, I get… well, not so much dust bunnies as dust dinosaurs hiding in corners and under the couch. I worry that some day they will become sentient and attack me in my sleep…

What does this have to do with writing? Someone once told me that revising a manuscript was like peeling an onion. I don’t remember her point exactly; it has to do with working in layers, and probably because it makes you cry.

But for me, the process is more like cleaning my floors.

First, I have to get the big stuff. The dust dinosaurs and the dried grass that accumulates against the floorboards. In a manuscript, these are things like plot inconsistencies, logic and pacing problems. They’re easy to see–impossible to hide, really. Even if you think you’ve swept them under the couch, they may drift back out to embarrass you when company comes over.

Next I get out the Swiffer for the smaller stuff that the broom leaves behind. This, in my manuscript, are where I tweak things, punch up the emotional highs and lows, smooth over rough and clunky spots, enrich characterization, excise clichés, and make sure every scene serves the story.  I spend the most time on this go ‘round, and just like with the Swiffer, sometimes it takes going over things twice to make sure I get the corners and the cracks.

Last comes the mop.  Depending on how well I did the clean up in the last round, sometimes I can go quickly here, picking up anything I missed, and making sure everything is smooth and glossy.  This is where I tighten and clean up the prose, proofread for typos, and tweak the grammar.

Now, here’s the thing. No one has to eat off my floor. No one is going to be performing surgical procedures there, either. The dogs are going to track in grass the first time I let them out. There’s no such thing as a perfectly clean floor.

And a perfect manuscript is just as out of reach. In fact, if you obsess too much about mopping and scouring your work, then it becomes sterile, and you’ll buff all the life out of it.

In the end, that’s the trick with revising your manuscript–knowing when to let go.  A manuscript needs to be clean and tight, but you don’t want to edit the life out of it, either. I always think when you reach the point where you’re just moving figurative furniture around, it’s time to pack it up and send it in.

And for the record, I’m WAY more OCD about my manuscripts than I am about my floors.

Friends of laps, bane of floors

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