A Message from Earthquake Country

I'm obsessed with earthquakes, and so I'm writing a novel that involves a major earthquake, and so I'm even more obsessed with earthquakes.

I've lived in the Bay Area for 14 years. I can remember about half a dozen specific quakes with enough magnitude to cause that adrenaline rush of excitement and terror. None did any damage where I was, and at most they knocked things off shelves closer to the epicenter. On maybe twice as many occasions, I've felt a small, questionable tremor that sent me to the USGS site to check, or I've learned after the fact that I failed to notice a quake while I was in a car or asleep.

The earth moves a lot in California, relatively speaking. Today a rare significant earthquake hit Virginia and was felt along most of the East Coast. Twitter went wild with quake reports, along with a certain amount of ribbing from Californians saying that a little shaking was nothing to get worked up about. I think most California residents aren't as jaded as they might pretend to be. A little shaking is still grounds for posting to the internet out here, even when nothing's damaged.

It's likely that I'll eventually experience a destructive earthquake, but so far I have no first-hand experience. Which I'm glad about, as the owner of a creaky old house built on a liquefaction hazard zone. (Apologies to my parents, who just had a collective heart attack reading that.) As a writer, though, I do have a morbid desire to know what it would really be like if it happened here and now.

(On the other hand, if the Big One happens here and now, that breaks my entire story, in which a massive quake strikes here and at a specific point in the near future, with a clear implication that it didn't also happen a few years earlier. Fortunately or unfortunately, I get no say at all in the real world timing.)

I've done a lot of research into past earthquakes and projected quake scenarios for the Bay Area, and I expect to do another round of research before the manuscript is finished. The destruction caused by even a very large earthquake in modern California would be far, far less than what occurred in places like Haiti, thanks to our much better building standards, living conditions, and infrastructure.

I'm trying to keep the effects of the earthquake in my novel realistic and to portray a likely quantity of destruction, fatalities, and so on. Since writers are sadistic, while doing my research, I frequently had thoughts like, "Only that many deaths? That's not very dramatic." Optimistic projections are good news for reality, not as good for fiction. I went with the worst-case scenario.

 

UPDATE, 11:55pm: The eastern part of the Bay Area just experienced a 3.6 quake, and Twitter is abuzz over this minor shaking. Incidentally, I didn't feel it in the South Bay.

Puzzling Things Out

As I've noted before, there's more to writing than writing. I didn't write during today's writing session. Instead, I mused on how exactly I'm going to fit together the pieces of a pivotal scene so it doesn't fall flat.

I've maneuvered my characters just about into position for the big, climactic confrontation in which everything is revealed. Tension is high, and everyone is at risk of saying things they wouldn't otherwise. For maximum effect, I've chosen a more dramatic and public moment for this scene than in the previous draft.

I need to pay attention to character motivation and create a spark that will believably ignite a showdown that should have happened years ago. I also have to keep in mind what each of the different characters knows, incorrectly believes, and is in the dark about, as well as what the reader knows. Significant parts of the backstory are different than for the last draft, so the nature of big revelations has also changed.

It's a complicated puzzle that I've been working toward solving throughout this revision. Tomorrow I'll try writing the darn scene and see if I can get all the pieces to snap into place.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Leslie Greffenius at Beyond the Margins discusses How to Begin a Story: "I've found that, when I begin a tale, I have to write a provisional beginning until I've written an entire first draft. Then, after I have an idea of the shape of the whole piece, I go back and re-write a beginning that will draw readers in -- if not now, then soon, and for the rest of their lives."

→ Kiersten White offers a tongue-in-cheek Guide to Genre Within YA: "Dystopian: Must have a main character with the letter X or Z in their name. If you have no characters with Xs or Zs, you are doing it wrong and you have not written a dystopian." (Thanks, Nathan Bransford!)

On Writing Buddies

This afternoon I met up with my friend Anna, the one who recently started self-publishing. While we've been in frequent contact through blogs and email, we hadn't seen each other in person for over a year, and we had a lot to catch up on.

We talked for hours about the writing life, time management, where our stories come from, revising, NaNoWriMo, the changing realities of publishing, and families. It was great to sit down together and prattle on about the big and small issues that fill the wacky world of writing.

It's always great when I get to talk to my writing buddies about writing. I'm fortunate to have a large number of writer friends both in the real world and online. We're at all different points on paths heading in many directions, and that means a lot of opportunities for both teaching and learning. It's wonderful.

To all my writing buddies: This would be both lonelier and more bewildering without all of you. Thanks for being there.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Steve Himmer shares a touching story at The Millions about young people yearning to read: "One recent morning, my almost four year old daughter started crying out of the blue. I asked her what was wrong, and she wailed, 'I don’t have a library card!'"

More on Writing Miserable Characters

I posted yesterday about making a character's frustrating behavior more palatable by having another character express impatience on behalf of the reader. Today as I continued revising the section that caused me to dwell on this issue, I discovered that in my previous draft, a character exactly echoes the language from that post and says "Is it possible you're blowing things out of proportion?"

I was amused. I also cut the line, because I didn't really like it and the scene changed enough that no longer needed someone to lose patience with my main character right then.

Writing a troubled, depressed character doesn't only run the risk of the reader wishing they'd hurry up and get over it. The reader may be unable to sympathize with the character in the first place, or may find it too unpleasant to spend time in the character's head.

I want to avoid this reaction from my readers, so I always pay attention to writing advice about how to successfully portray a character of this type. Last year I attended a workshop with agent Donald Maass, and he covered this topic. Looking over my notes from that part of the workshop, I can summarize the advice in a couple of points:

1. Show from the beginning that the character has a desire to get out of his unhappy situation. Establish what he has to learn or let go of (for example) and why he is currently powerless to change. This gives the reader a feeling of hope, and they'll be rooting for the character rather than giving him up as a lost cause.

2. Provide the character with some admirable quality that will make the reader care about him right away. Sympathetic, likable traits make it easier for the reader to cope with the otherwise potentially distasteful experience of being in an unhappy character's head.

Maass has further discussion of what he calls "dark protagonists" in his book THE FIRE IN FICTION, which I recommend.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Linguist Ben Zimmer writes in the New York Times Book Review about computer analysis of the language of fiction: "'Bolting upright' and 'drawing one's breath' are two more fiction-specific turns of phrase revealed by the corpus. ... The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions."

→ Michael MacLeod from the Guardian share his notes from Neil Gaiman's talk at the Edinburgh Interational Book Festival: "For several years I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them. With the kids' library I did it alphabetically but I discovered I couldn't do that with the adult one because there were too many big boring books to read, so I did it by interesting covers."

When Your Character Needs to Get Over It

I'm losing patience with my main character. This is probably a bad sign. Because if I want to yell, "Oh, stop whining and get over it already!" even though I have a thorough knowledge of his backstory and every nuance of his current situation, then it's a good bet that a reader will have even less sympathy.

This character has been a tricky one to write. He's depressed, he's at a bad place in life, and he's justifiably pessimistic about his future. Less justifiably, he's uninterested in accepting the support that's offered to him. I've set up the reasons for his refusal in his history and personality, and hopefully readers will buy the flawed logic behind his choices. The plot depends on it. But I worry that my character is spending too much time wallowing in self-pity.

The readers of the previous draft were extremely helpful in pointing out where they felt sympathy for my character's problems and where they thought he was only feeling sorry for himself. (I have one early reader who can always be counted on to tell me when she thinks a character deserves to be slapped -- and I seem to write a lot of slapworthy characters.) This is supposed to be the improved, less whiny version of the character, but I'm not sure I've got it right yet.

A couple of weeks ago I linked to a post by Theresa Stevens on avoiding melodrama by having another character point out when a character's reactions are out of proportion. That second character acts as a proxy for the reader, who is probably thinking the same thing, and provides an opportunity to explore the motivations behind the response.

Along similar lines, Robin Black suggests in a Beyond the Margins post:

Let a secondary character express impatience with the character's stuckness before your reader does and odds are your reader will never feel the need to express it. And this is a technique with broader use than just stories about loss. There are many times when having a supporting player express a frustration that is in some ways a near inevitable byproduct of the story, will take pressure off the reader who may well be feeling the same thing.

So I've had quite a few other characters tell my main character that he needs to get over himself. Maybe it's too much, and maybe I need to more quickly get to the point in the story when he actually does. I'm confident that the readers of the next draft won't be shy about letting me know.

It Takes Time

This morning when I sat down to write, I was at the beginning of a chapter. I had a new scene planned to open this chapter, a scene that didn't occur in the previous draft, so I was writing from scratch, not working with existing material.

I decided that most likely the first word of the first sentence was "I". I typed that to get myself going. Fifteen minutes later, I was still staring at that "I", all alone there on the page.

Half an hour into my writing session, I had a few sentences. After 50 minutes, when I took my 10-minute break, there was half a page.

I'm careful about what I do during the breaks in my writing session. I get up from my desk to stretch and refill my glass of water. I check my email and look at Twitter, maybe skim an article someone linked to. Nothing too involved, nothing that pulls me out of my writing zone.

And that's good, because when I came back from my break, the scene really started moving. The writing was going so well that I even skipped my second break. I had an excellent writing session today, ending up with a long new scene that I really like. On Monday I'll probably hate it, but for now, I'm pleased.

That's not what I expected when I stared at the word "I" for what felt like forever. This is usually how it goes, but I'm always quick to forget what it was like the last time.

Many writers don't have the luxury of the quantity of time available to me. Maybe they only get half an hour a day to write, or less than that. Some of them do remarkably well within those constraints. Others try and fail to make progress, then beat themselves up over not taking advantage of those small chunks of time the way some writing guides advise.

As my experience demonstrates, it's not an easy thing to get a good quantity of writing done in a single half hour, compared to what you might get out of the next half hour, and the next. Some people are better at it than others, and the same person can have different results day to day, but in general, it takes a bit of time to ramp up into the creative zone. I'm not the only one who thinks so. This essay by Paul Graham on the subject of creative time has always stuck with me, though it's targeted at programmers and their managers.

If you've been trying to write a little every day and it's not working for you, experiment with finding a longer block of time once a week and see if you get more done. And don't feel like you're wasting time when you stare at a single word and nothing else comes out. The rest of the words are still making their way to the surface.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black continues an insightful series on forty-five flaws that expose your lack of storytelling experience.

The More Things Change

Today I looked over my outline -- a set of virtual index cards created in SuperNotecard -- to consider whether the sequence of events in my story still makes sense. As I've revised over the last couple of weeks, I've ended up rearranging scenes and writing some unplanned new scenes, so the outline needed review.

I was relieved to conclude that the basic order of events is still logical. With the recent changes, there are even parts that work better than before. Since my novel involves three separate storylines, the idea of doing any more serious restructuring is daunting. I'm glad that I get to keep the chapters in the order I decided on months ago, but I really wanted to assure myself that I wasn't just avoiding change because it's the easier option.

I get kind of exasperated that at this stage I'm still sitting down and writing scenes that take the story in a different direction than I planned. By now, I want the story to be settled.

During my more reasonable moments, I realize that this is a very silly thing to want. It's awesome that without even meaning to, I keep coming up with ideas that make the story better that I thought it was going to be. Oh yeah, duh. As I've written about before, it's crucial to get the story right, and I'm just going to have to make as many changes as it takes until that happens.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Michael Agger at Slate investigates the science behind the question of how to be a faster writer: "It's no secret that writing is hard ... but why can't I be one of those special few for whom it comes easily? What am I doing wrong? Why haven't I gotten any faster?" (Thanks, Edittorrent!)

Forcing Time to Write

For a control freak, I'm surprisingly bad at managing my time. During the years that I've been writing "full time," I've repeatedly set up a writing schedule, stuck with it for perhaps as long as a month, and then regressed to my normal inclination to do anything other than write.

You see, I very much enjoy having written. More often that not, I enjoy writing while I'm in the process of doing it. But I almost never believe that I will enjoy writing. As a result, my struggles with writing are largely struggles against avoidance.

I've blogged before about using a timer to trick myself into writing. Part of my latest productivity scheme involves scheduling blocks of time for writing and breaks. I write -- and only write -- for 50 timed minutes, take a break for 10 minutes, and repeat. So far, it's working well (I say with complete awareness of the pattern discussed in the first paragraph).

I'm using a Mac application called Alarms to keep track of the 50/10 sessions. It's a neat little app, and I recommend it, but of course there are plenty of options for timing yourself. What I like about Alarms is that it easily lets you schedule multiple alarms at once.

I've found that if I know the clock is already running on the next block of time, I'm less likely to bargain with myself for "a few more minutes." With all the alarms pre-set, I stick to breaks of only 10 minutes. I also stop writing after 50 minutes so that I won't lose my break. This means I'm more likely to leave off in the middle of something interesting, which improves the odds that I'll pick right up with typing once the break is over.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Randy Susan Meyers at Beyond the Margins shares passages from writing guides that contributed to My Homemade MFA: "On my bookshelves are over 90 books on writing... I read all, highlighted most, and drove the facts into my brain by writing papers (for myself) on them."

The Choreography of Motivation

At some point in the past, I noticed that one of the trickiest things about writing is the choreography. I was writing a scene that took place during a party, and I needed the main character to talk to first one set of people and then another overlapping set, and later to be alone with somebody. Something like that.

My challenge was figuring out how to get the right characters into the right combinations and places so that the scene read naturally, without anyone saying anything so blatant as, "Well, I'm going to go talk to those other people now." (Okay, I'll admit I may have tried that tactic once or twice at an actual party.) Compared to the work of managing these logistics, writing the dialogue in the scene was downright easy.

I've tackled countless other choreography problems since then. Today, I was struggling with a scene because of another familiar issue, and I realized it's sort of a variation. I started thinking of the problem as "the choreography of motivation".

In this case, I had a character who did not want to have the discussion that his family members were trying to have with him. The character's goal was simply to leave. But as the author, I had a different agenda: I needed a certain amount of discussion to take place so that crucial pieces of information could be revealed at this point in the story.

The author doesn't get to take part in the scene, so I had to carefully choreograph my character's motivations throughout. His overall desire was still to get out of there, but on a moment-by-moment basis, the other characters said things that believably kept him around and talking a little longer. "Believable" is the key issue here. If the character just sat down and agreeably participated in the discussion he'd been avoiding since the beginning of the book, the reader would find his behavior false and inconsistent.

I may not have gotten it right, and there may not be enough justification for the character's actions in this scene. When I eventually seek feedback on this draft, I'll be counting on my readers to point out the places where I've inadequately choreographed my characters' motivations.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lauren Schmidt at the Effectivism blog looks into how to buy a greener book: "What has a lower carbon footprint — buying a book from a local store or ordering it online? What about buying your books via a Kindle or other e-reader?"

→ Rebecca Joines Schinsky of the Book Lady's Blog offers her Mid-Year Reflections on Book Polygamy: "I was skeptical at first, not certain that reading more than one book at a time would mean that I read more books overall, but it’s shaking out to look that way."

I'll Get There Eventually

Thanks to everyone who contacted me with encouraging words in response to yesterday's whining and venting. I decided to post about the frustration I was feeling because, hey, what's the point of having a blog if you never use it to complain? And I also wanted to express that writing is often unpleasant and tedious, just like any other kind of work, and that's no reason to give up on it.

In terms of focus, this week has the been the best one I've had in a long time. I'm holding myself to a new schedule that I think I'll be able to stick with, and I'm getting a lot of work done. "A lot" is still only a very few pages each day, and as I said, that makes me impatient. However, it's significantly more progress than I'd be making if I wasn't buckling down, and it doesn't look as though writing any faster is going to be an option, so this is the rate of progress I have to live with.

Some day that's not as soon as I'd like, I will get to the end of this draft, and it will be the story I want it to be. And then, yes, all you people who have been eagerly asking when you can see the manuscript will get your chance to tell me what I still don't have right.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ On the Diversity in YA Fiction blog, Laura Goode discusses considerations for writing characters with A Skin Not Your Own: "I think it’s this anxiety about imagining a racial experience not your own that leads so many white authors to write one-dimensional BBF (brown/black best friend) characters, who only show up to support the white protagonist in a time of need, ask exposition-inducing questions, or basically prove that the protagonist is not a BWP [Bad White Person]."

→ William Skidelsky at the Guardian Books Blog investigates the true price of publishing: "I have always assumed – like, I imagine, most people – that the high cost of hardbacks is down to the fact that they are much more expensive than paperbacks to produce. But in fact this isn't the case at all."