My Year in Sometimes Writing

Well, here we are at the end of one eventful year, facing the start of another. In 2016, my personal writing progress and accomplishments feel particularly small and unimportant, but this is my blog all about me, so I'm reviewing my year in writing and related activities. I'll do a separate post about reading and books in January.

For the first four months of the year, I didn't write any fiction. I did some research and idea generation for a project I'm still thinking about. I reread a few old manuscripts and considered what I might salvage from them. I wrote a couple of essays that didn't end up going anywhere. Writing-wise, the early part of the year was mainly about investigating possibilities.

Much of what I actually spent time on during those months was cleaning my writing room. I filed years of documents into filing cabinets, got rid of a huge amount of clutter, and rearranged furniture to make my space more usable. I meant to post photos of the final product, but then I never entirely finished organizing the last few small areas to make it picture-perfect, and my attention moved to other things. Until I maybe get around to someday sharing the results, just know that I'm very happy with what I accomplished, and my room is a great place to work now.

From May to July, I took an online short fiction class from Gotham Writers Workshop, and that provided deadlines and motivation to get me writing again, eventually. While some aspects of the class worked better for me than others, I got a lot out of it. I wrote two stories, in addition to some smaller pieces prompted by exercises, and the process of writing them, receiving feedback, and reading and critiquing the work of others was all very instructive. In the writing and revision I've done this fall, I feel like I've made noticeable improvement, and it's in part because of what I learned during the class.

I intended to try publishing my class stories and others in literary magazines, and I did get as far as researching the submission process and revising one of the new stories in September. The feedback I got from critique partners indicated that I still need to do more work, and then the project fell victim to timing, because I was hoping to finish the story while planning my next novel draft. Once I started the actual revising of the novel, I was reluctant to put any time into reworking the story, so I set it aside. I would rather not abandon the project at this stage after all the efforts of my kind commenters, so I want to return to the story with fresh eyes in the new year.

The latest revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE has been my big writing focus for the last few months. Unfortunately, timing also dealt a blow to this project. I completed outlining the new version and started revising at the end of October with grand plans for a productive November. Then the election happened, and focusing on writing got a lot harder.

I haven't made nearly as much progress on the revision as I expected back in October, but arguably, that statement was going to be true no matter what, because all writing is always slower than I anticipate. I produced good writing in November and December, but I spent a lot of time not writing. Some of the interruptions involved following the news and making phone calls and attending a town hall and learning about political action. Others were all the usual distractions of life, which tend to be especially numerous toward the end of the year.

2017 promises to bring more of everything: more revising, more reasons to take action, more real life. I have a lot to keep working on.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lorraine Berry at Literary Hub contacted authors a few weeks after the election to find out how writers are getting back to work: "How are writers using their rage, their disappointment, their grief to get themselves moving? Mixed in each of the letters I received, even the ones where the sadness felt the most crippling, the writer recognized that action must emerge from the sadness."

Classing Up My Writing

The online class I'm taking with Gotham Writers Workshop is more than halfway through, and it's serving the intended purpose of helping me think about short fiction and generate new writing. Granted, having a deadline to submit a story for critique didn't save me from excessive procrastination, but eventually it did force me into several long days of writing. It's been a while since I've been deeply engrossed in a project, and I was happy to be back in that space.

I finished my story on time, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. Receiving feedback from my classmates was, as always, a thrilling and nerve-racking experience, and I spent the week constantly refreshing the class website to see if anyone new had commented. The students in our group bring a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives to their thoughtful critiques, as well as to their stories, and it's been fascinating to see how everyone reacts to each other's work. The feedback for my story gave me a lot of information about what resonated with people and what didn't work, and it will all be useful when I revise this story after the class is over.

Now, though, I have to write something different, because my second turn at the workshop is in two and a half weeks. So far I have no solid ideas for my next story, but I remain overly confident that the approaching deadline will spark inspiration soon enough. I may produce something promising in one of the short writing assignments we have for class each week, though more likely a decent idea will occur to me at some random moment. If I get desperate, maybe I can complete one of the unfinished stories from my teenage notebooks.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Sarah S. Davis of Book Riot shares her experience of growing up as the English teacher's daughter: "I was cocky in English class, slaying the classic white male authors and tossing around literary jargon I'd gleaned from my father's theory books in his office. I thought I knew everything. I didn't."

A Few Words

For the early months of this year, my writing activities consisted mostly of composing blog posts and query letters. I was thinking a lot about fiction (specifically my next novel, which I've been planning and researching), but I wasn't writing any.

Recently I became fed up with this situation and decided that it was time to produce some fiction. I'm not ready to begin writing the novel, so I started thinking about short stories, as I do from time to time.

I wrote two short stories last year (and read a great many). I haven't done anything with either of them, but since I've received feedback on both (one during my workshop at Squaw Valley), I could potentially turn my attention to revising them. That idea wasn't very appealing, though, and I was more interested in writing something new.

So I set out to write another short story, but this time, I gave myself a challenge to go even shorter. (Actually, the biggest challenge was to focus enough to create anything at all, since I'm out of practice.) After some brainstorming and playing around with a bunch of half-formed ideas, I found myself with an odd little story that's only five paragraphs long. And I liked it quite a bit.

There's certainly something refreshing about writing such a bite-sized piece of fiction. The last story I wrote took weeks of thinking before the idea gelled enough for me to write a rough draft. With this story, I typed a first line with no plan for what would come next, and about twenty minutes later, the whole piece was done. It still needed work after that, but I figured out all the details during another productive swim and then rewrote in an hour or two.

I sent the story off to some critique partners, and getting comments on a work this short was also pleasantly straightforward compared to the novel feedback I'm usually asking for. So little to read meant my critiquers were able to mention all their thoughts, down to the word level, without an unreasonable investment of time. (Thanks, guys!)

Now that I've collected their clever insights, I'm ready to revise. And for once I can feel confident in predicting that I'll be done with revision any day now.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Guardian, Alison Flood tries to identify the earliest ebook: "One journalist even took his computer on a wheelbarrow to the beach, along with a generator, to read Host in his deckchair."

It's The Little Things

Earlier this month I wrote about the three levels of problems that I'm addressing in my manuscript right now. I was most scared by the hard problems, such as ongoing character conflicts that my audience found unconvincing. These large-scale issues don't have a single source or a clear solution, and I was worried about how long they would take to fix.

I've been working on these problems for the past few weeks, and while it would still be lovely if I didn't have any huge issues to deal with, I've been pleased to find how well big problems can be addressed with little changes. When it's not really clear why a character keeps feeling or acting a particular, plot-important way, I don't have to rip apart and restructure the entire plot. Instead, I'm finding that small tweaks to the thoughts and behavior in each relevant scene goes a long way toward altering the overall perception of what's going on with that character. I'm accomplishing what I need to by adding and editing sentences or paragraphs, not by throwing out pages at a time. Sometimes even changing a word or two is all it takes to appropriately alter the tone.

I have a recurring problem with portraying characters in love, which I wrote about some years back (still a useful post, if I do say so myself). Once again I was faced with readers who pointed out, "He keeps telling us they're in love, but nothing is showing us they are, because we only see them fighting." A story is made out of conflict, so it's easy to gloss over the happy parts, and I do that too much, particularly when it comes to characters starting a relationship. I was concerned about needing to find room and reasons for long, lovey-dovey scenes. But when I got into analyzing the problem, I determined that half a page of the characters joking around happily was sufficient to change the balance of the chapter and make them not seem to merely fight all the time.

One part of the plot relies on the reader understanding that while a father and son don't get along, they had a good relationship when the son was growing up. While I was reading my manuscript aloud to my familial literary advisory board, I learned that my audience wasn't picking up on the backstory of the happy childhood. That wasn't surprising, because I noticed that I'd neglected to establish it much at all. I wasn't sure where and how I was going to show the situation of the past without adding a bunch of flashbacks to a novel that's already too long. But it turns out that a few sentences here and there mentioning happier times can plant the idea in the reader's mind so the scenario will be interpreted correctly.

Or at least that's what I hope. I won't be certain any of these fixes are working until I've run the new draft by some other readers. What I learned from the first set was that in some areas I was being far too subtle, while other ideas were beaten into the reader's head with way too much repetition, so I may not be the best judge of how the message is getting across. For now, though, I'm operating on the belief that these relatively small fixes are making a big difference. It's certainly making this round of revisions less scary.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Michael David Lukas writes at the Opinionator about When the News and the Novel Collide: "Fiction is supposed to reflect reality, in some way or another. But reality is constantly changing. It can take years to write a novel and in those years, history marches on. Wars break out and governments are toppled, perceptions shift and new gadgets are invented."

Defining the Problems

Last week I reported on my big step of finishing a draft, reading it aloud to my trusted loved ones, and trying not to fall into a pit of despair at the realization that I still have more work ahead. I had a wonderful vacation to visit my far-away family members and not think too much about my novel. I returned home not exactly eager for more revision, but at least ready to face the next step.

Reading my novel to a (very patient) audience turned up three levels of problems that I need to address:

The easy problems are the sentence-level issues that I noted myself as I read aloud. Whenever I stumbled over a phrase (and I did this a lot), I underlined the tricky area, and it will be simple and satisfying to fix all these rough patches. Reading my work aloud led me to notice words that were repeated in close proximity or awkward combinations of sounds. Occasionally in a long dialogue I'd become confused about who was speaking, and of course anything that's confusing even to the author is a huge red flag. Spotting these easy problems didn't really involve the audience, though I think having listeners caused me to read more slowly and thoughtfully than when I read aloud to myself, which I do often and highly recommend to all writers.

Learning about the medium problems was what I most wanted to accomplish by reading to my familial literary advisory board. At the end of each chapter, I'd ask them for reactions, and sometimes there were specific parts that they were confused about or found implausible. These are issues that I couldn't spot on my own, because I have the scenes and justifications inside my head and already know what I mean by everything. I find this type of feedback the most rewarding part of receiving critique, because when a complaint has a clear, distinct source, it's never too much work to fix it, and afterwards I know I've made a worthwhile improvement. Also in the medium category are the scenes that felt too long once I read them aloud, a problem generally noted both by me and by my listeners.

The hard problems are the ones I hoped I wouldn't encounter, and the ones leaving me discouraged. I'm grateful to have such a perceptive audience at my disposal, and I wouldn't have read my manuscript to them if I didn't want to know what they thought, but some of what they thought is that there are still large-scale issues in my story, and I agree. These are problems like a failure to convincingly explain and portray the anger one character feels toward another throughout the novel. A criticism of that type can't be fixed by making changes to only a scene or two, and I'm often not even sure how to fix it. The hard problems are hard because addressing them requires significant work, and at the same time, they are the most important issues to deal with, because they have the greatest impact on the novel.

So, right now, I'm sorting out the logistics of dealing with these three levels of issues, and I'm starting to make progress on fixes. The hard problems are still scary, but I'm figuring out a way to deal with them while staying out of that pit of despair.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund speaks out In Praise of Slow Writing: "With time on my side, what may have been a surface scene just to move things along becomes something much deeper; when I take things slow, everything connects in ways that matter much more than if I were going for speed."

Decompressing

It's been a hectic month for me and my novel. Over the course of the past couple weeks, I read my entire manuscript aloud to my incredible panel of in-house consultants. As you might deduce, this means that I successfully wrestled my novel into a state where it was fit to be read in its entirety, so yay for that. It was a near thing, with a schedule that involved revising the end on the same day that I read aloud the end. All that rush means the fact of completion hasn't quite sunk in yet. And I don't even want to toss around the word "finished," because, well, yes, my manuscript still needs more work.

The best thing about reading my entire manuscript aloud to my familial literary advisory board is that it gave me the chance to hear how the words sound and the story flows, to gauge an audience's reactions in real time, and to get detailed feedback from readers on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

The worst thing about it is of course all those same things, because I learned which parts I have problems with myself, and even more crucially, what elements didn't work for other people. This knowledge is incredibly valuable and also a bit discouraging. I wanted to think that after a few small tweaks, my manuscript would be ready to go out into the world, but now I realize that more substantial work is going to be required.

I haven't yet figured out how much further revision is in store. At the moment, I'm on the vacation that served as a powerful deadline for the work I've just completed. The time away is giving me a chance to step back from the story and contemplate how I'll approach the problems when I return. I'll be back next week with more thoughts, but for now, I'm enjoying some down time.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Eleanor Henderson writes in Poets & Writers about The Beauty of Backstory: "The world would be a bland place without backstory, and yet the story doesn't stop there. There are a thousand and one ways to use backstory in fiction--just as many ways as there are to manipulate time."

Feedback From Squaw Valley

Yesterday I wrote about how the workshops are structured at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. As I mentioned, we had a wide variety in our group in terms of writer experience level and the style and content of the work under consideration. Approximately half of the manuscripts we critiqued were short stories and half were chapters from novels.

Though I spend most of my time noveling, I've been getting more interested in short stories lately and have been trying to read and write more of them. I was aware that it's less complicated to workshop a complete story rather than a piece of a larger work, so I decided to challenge myself to write a new story I could bring to the conference. I wrote one during the couple of weeks beforehand. I thought it was pretty good and was curious how others would respond.

When I arrived at Squaw, I learned that my story would be workshopped on the final day. At first I was concerned that I would spend all week in nervous anticipation, but I soon decided it would be nice to wait and hear feedback after already knowing a lot about the general tastes of each group member. And honestly, since I'd written the story so recently, I didn't have as much invested in it as I might have if I'd submitted a chapter from my novel. So I didn't stress about it.

During the conference we received some great advice about workshops from several of the staff members. We heard that while there's value in having your work critiqued by others, it's by far more useful to be the one giving feedback. The reason for this is that when a writer suggests improvements to a story, they are really stating how they would change the piece if they were writing it. But the author under critique doesn't want to write more like someone else, and the advice often doesn't wind up being applicable to their manuscript as written by them. The advice giver is the one who benefits, by thinking about an assortment of stories and forming opinions about strengths and weaknesses that can later be applied to their own writing.

This isn't to say that all workshop feedback should be ignored. It's up to the writer to decide what suggestions to take and how to implement the ideas. We heard that the best advice might be the stuff that resonates right away (you already knew it was a problem), but it can also be the feedback that you're angry about hearing until two months later when you realize it was right (deep down, you really knew it was a problem). One leader said that if we use five percent of the critique we receive, we had a really good workshop.

So, what did I hear when my story was workshopped? Overall, people liked my story, and they had a ton of suggestions for how to make it better. I think that's the best possible outcome of a workshop. There was some good debate about various aspects of the characterization and plot, and I've written down a bunch of conflicting opinions about scenes to shorten or lengthen or add or delete. It'll take me some time to go through all the notes and marked-up manuscripts and compile all the information, and then I expect I'll put the story aside for a while, but I think eventually it could become something much stronger than it is.

Squaw Valley Overview

I spent last week attending the writers workshop run by the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Yesterday I reported on some highlights, and today I'm going to cover the basics of how the conference is run.

First off, as I discussed a couple months ago, I did have to apply and be accepted in order to attend this program. Then I had to pay a sizable fee for tuition and housing. I feel fortunate that I was able to afford this (and even pay extra for my own room and private bathroom), and I'm happy to say that I also feel I got my money's worth. Scholarships are available, and from talking to people I got the impression that financial aid was offered to a fair number of participants. Details about all this stuff is available on the FAQ.

The conference was held at the Squaw Valley ski resort, with all the events taking place in one large building that serves as the main dining and drinking area for skiers during the winter. Lodging is either at the Squaw Valley condos (The Village) or in vacation rental houses nearby. I had very convenient housing in the condo building closest to the meeting area, so my commute was the shortest possible, about a two-minute walk. Some people were a mile or more away and had to either walk that or drive in each day. I shared my condo with two other women, and we had a good time hanging out in the evenings.

Each morning from 9 to noon was spent in workshop. I was with the same group of 12 workshop members all week, but every day we had a different staff member lead our discussion. This gave us the opportunity to benefit from a variety of perspectives and discussion styles. The organizers clearly took great care in arranging the schedule of group leaders so that every workshop had a chance to work with an editor and an agent as well as several types of writers.

For each workshop session, two manuscripts were up for critique, and the bulk of the morning was devoted to discussing these, though often the leaders also gave some time over to a small lecture or writing exercise. The schedule of manuscripts was set in advance, and again there was a deliberate system behind which participants were paired with which professionals.

I'm sure effort also went into assembling a workshop group that included a variety of backgrounds, writing styles, and experience levels. As I said yesterday, my group worked together very well despite having such a mix of people. Over the course of the week, we got to know each other's tastes and opinions, and many of us left with ideas about who we'd like to exchange work with in the future.

Squaw Valley Highlights

I'm back from the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and wow, is my brain full. I had an amazing time, and I learned so much.

Before I start reporting on my week, though, I have to mention something even more exciting. Yesterday, my new nephew made his way into the world. It was very thoughtful of him to wait until I was home and had the day free to do nothing but wait eagerly for news of his arrival. I'm looking forward to going back east to meet him -- and play with his big brother again -- later this summer.

I have so many things to say about Squaw Valley that I plan to do a series of posts over the next few days. I thought I'd start off with a list of high points, and later I'll go into more detail about various aspects of the conference.

In no particular order, the highlights:

→ I spent three hours every morning with a dozen people tasked with pointing out faults, and it was wonderful. I really lucked out in having such a smart, insightful workshop group that got along well.

→ I got to speak casually with several authors I already admired and some others I didn't yet know I was in awe of.

→ A successful novelist read the first chapter of my novel, praised it repeatedly, and then told me why it's not the right place for the book to start. She blew my mind with her brilliant idea for a better opening, and now I can't wait to get back to work. The best news? It doesn't involve changing everything!

→ For eight days, pretty much every conversation I had was about writing and books. It was heaven.

→ The writers, editors, and agents who make up the staff shared their wisdom and talent in panels and readings so compelling that I attended almost every one, despite the warning that it wasn't possible to do everything.

→ I witnessed Amy Tan playing the ukelele and chatted with her about The Rock Bottom Remainders. (She also gave a couple of inspiring talks.)

→ Whenever I went outside, I got to gaze at gorgeous mountain scenery, and during our afternoon off, I had time to both visit one of the peaks and get down to the Lake Tahoe shoreline. Photo album here.

More to come about the format of the conference, the process of receiving feedback, and the knowledge I gained.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Beyond The Margins, Kim Triedman offers advice on how to prepare your loved ones for your book release: "People will take umbrage at things you never even imagined could be offensive. Your agent will quietly bristle at the way you describe the inner workings of the publishing world. Your neighbor will take offense at the ugly living room furniture you describe, recognizing it -- correctly or incorrectly -- as her own. Your sister will assume that all the emotional dysfunction you've heaped on the fictional sister in your book is your way of getting back at her for being the free-loader in the family."

Why I Love My Critique Group

My critique group is awesome. The three of us have been together for a decade (!), supporting each other through myriad changes in our writing and personal lives. Over the years, the focus and format of our group has evolved. We now meet once a month by video chat, mostly to talk about what we've been writing and reading. Our critique function is only activated occasionally, when someone needs it.

The group gave me incredibly useful feedback on the second draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, working through the manuscript a few chapters at a time over the course of several months (we were meeting weekly then). When I someday reach the end of this draft (I will get there, I will!), the big test will be how the two other group members react to it.

I can guarantee they'll have plenty of conflicting opinions. We met this week to discuss my revised first chapter because I wanted to get their feedback before I submit it to Lit Camp. We spent a good portion of the meeting laughing over how often the two of them had opposite reactions to the contents of the chapter.

Getting their differing perspectives was hugely valuable. Readers aren't all the same, and it helps to get as many opinions as possible. With only two people in the group besides myself, I'm working with a very small sample size, so it's just as well that they don't always agree. (Incidentally, I have more critique partners outside this group who will also review the full draft when it's completed.) The debate during the meeting allowed me to get a better idea of why they felt as they did and figure out how best to respond with changes.

I can't overstate the importance of having other people read your work before you send it out. It's impossible to judge your own writing as if you don't already know what you meant to say and what all the backstory is that explains why the characters are doing what they do.

For example, I worked for ages on my opening paragraphs until every word was perfect. The reaction from my critique group (in this case, the two of them were in agreement) demonstrated that I'd still written a very confusing collection of sentences that left the reader unclear about what was going on. Furthermore, our discussion of the opening made me realize that for some reason I'd fixated on conveying something that doesn't even really matter. I can adjust the opening to omit this, and it will be much clearer and more effective. Despite all my attention to these paragraphs, I couldn't get to that realization without the help of people outside my own brain.

It's not an easy thing to hear criticism of your writing, and I'm a little overwhelmed thinking about the work that still remains on this chapter (not to mention the whole novel, eventually). But I'm glad I have a critique group I can rely on to react to my work honestly.

For more of my thoughts about requesting and responding to critique, check out this article I wrote a couple of years ago.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ On the Amwriting blog, Jason Black explains how readers are like Sherlock Holmes: "They miss nothing. Every detail matters. If you're a criminal, the very notion of trying to sneak something past Mr. Holmes should make you nervous. If you're a writer building the very world into which your Holmesian reader will stroll, you should also be nervous."

What Have I Done?

Last week I promised to give an in-depth answer to the question "How's your novel coming along?" and the real question "What are you doing to your finished novel that's taking so long?" But first I want to provide the context for my revision by explaining what happened before I got to the current interminable stage of the process.

I came up the seed of the idea for THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE in the summer of 2007. I spent some time planning out the story and researching over the next few months, but I was mostly focused on revising a different novel. That November, during National Novel Writing Month, I wrote a complete first draft of 80,000-plus words in thirty days.

The first draft of DAMAGE wasn't terrible for a novel written in a month. It was my best NaNo effort to date (and would turn out to be the last NaNo novel I was happy with). I shared the manuscript with three or four friends who understood the nature of a NaNo draft and knew that the story and I weren't ready for any serious feedback. Then I returned to the novel I was already revising.

I didn't even look at DAMAGE again for over a year. When I read through it, I was reasonably pleased with what I'd written and started to think about focusing on it again. In the summer of 2009, I began the second draft. Only I didn't want to run into the problem I'd recognized in past revision attempts, when the presence of the original text made me too conservative in my edits. So I decided that I'd essentially write a second first draft that was based on the original story but not comprised of any of the same sentences.

I'm glad I used this method for creating the second version of DAMAGE. The original had some good things going for it, but it was only barely the story I wanted to tell. The plot was simple and contrived, and the behavior of the characters often didn't make a whole lot of sense. By rewriting from scratch, I gave myself the freedom to find the novel's true potential.

It took about eight months to write the second draft. I was very happy with it, and I felt it was stronger than anything I'd written before. But the real test would be sharing it with other readers.

I have wonderful, insightful critique partners who are generous with both praise and complaint. Through sharing and discussing the manuscript, I learned about the novel's strengths and its still considerable flaws. This second version was on the way to being a great book, but it needed more. More connections between the storylines, more coherent character motivations, more reasons for the reader to care about what happened.

While I didn't agree with every single thing my critiquers said, they were mostly on target, and the suggestions they made led me to even more ideas for improvement. I started giving the story a really, really hard look and thinking about what needed to change so that this time, I'd get everything right.

Later this week: The exciting tale of spending a very long time stuck in the revision planning stage.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black offers some dialogue advice at the #amwriting blog: "It's not about how you write the dialogue, but rather, how you decide what the characters should and shouldn't say: rely on shared context. When real people talk to each other, a prime strategy for economizing on words is not to say anything the listener already knows."

In the Beginning

Because I've been working on my second storyline, I'm back at a beginning again and musing on all the things that are fun about the beginnings of stories. I love setting things up: introducing the characters, establishing their situation, hinting at what might happen.

I've been writing about two characters who are starting a relationship, and as they fall in love, I'm falling in love with them all over again. And I'm hoping that readers will fall in love with them, too, and root for their relationship to work out.

Throughout this revision, I've been paying more attention to backstory and when I reveal it. My previous draft suffered from the problem that I revealed important pieces of character history too late. I recently linked to a post by Livia Blackburne in which she talked about her changing attitudes toward backstory. I've gone through the same shift.

With my last draft, feedback from readers showed that they often didn't sympathize with characters until later in the story, when I got around to sharing some insight that explained why the character was behaving in a particular way. Duh. I've been moving this kind of information to the beginning of the story, and I can already predict that it's going to make a big difference for the next batch of readers.

I've been pleased to note how many of the narrator's important characteristics I managed to establish within the first chapter, and often within the first few pages. Most of what matters in this storyline has been referenced or hinted at in the beginning.

I've added in some little moments and details that will be echoed later in the story and grow in significance. I love doing this and always feel so clever when I do, which probably means I've created far too many of these moments and that I'm hitting the reader over the head with them. I'm sure my critique partners will let me know.

In the beginning of a story, I'm always very self-congratulatory. All the doubt and despair is hiding somewhere in the middle.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Atlantic features an interview with Colson Whitehead about ZONE ONE, released this week: "Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book." (Thanks, The Millions!)

Pondering the Backstory

I'm often surprised by how far it's possible to take a novel without really thinking through the backstory.

Say I've decided that before my protagonist, Daisy, started her successful chain of hot chocolate restaurants, she trained dolphins for an aquarium show. I probably have some excellent reasons for choosing this backstory. For example, Daisy always loved to drink hot chocolate after a training session, when she got out of the warm water into the cold North Dakota air. And in my novel, Daisy often compares her experiences with managing a restaurant chain to her past teaching dolphins to catch rings on their snouts.

So I tell myself that this is Daisy's backstory. I write the first draft of my novel, in which I tell readers that this is Daisy's backstory. I revise my manuscript to introduce the backstory more gradually, having Daisy think about her dolphin-training days at relevant emotional moments. I research, learning how trainers teach animals tricks and that a dolphin's nose is more properly called a "beak."

I bring my revised draft to my critique partners, an insightful, knowledgeable, and astute bunch. One says, "Daisy always yells at her employees for making mistakes. If she was any good at training dolphins, wouldn't she be more patient?" Another points out, "You make a big deal about how Daisy hates waking up early. I've read that dolphins are most receptive to training right after dawn, so you should have Daisy reflect on how this was a big problem in her last job." A third asks, "Even if it was cold in North Dakota, wouldn't training dolphins be such strenuous exercise that Daisy wouldn't want a hot drink afterwards?"

Back home after critique group, I cry into my pillow for a little while, and then I think about the questions my readers have raised. Each observation is valid and needs to be addressed in the novel. I'm going to have to make some changes to the story, and that will be hard, but the payoff is that the novel will grow richer and more complex as a result.

I turn over and stare at the ceiling, and then I start thinking about Daisy's backstory. Really thinking about it. When I began work on this novel, I'd defined a history for her and sketched out a few specific incidents that shaped her life. But I hadn't given her past much more thought than that. In the course of a couple of drafts, Daisy's character had evolved and deepened, and the backstory had remained as vague as ever.

I think about Daisy and how she behaves in the course of the novel. I imagine a younger, more naive version of my character during her aquarium days. I ask myself some very important questions that I should have asked earlier: Why did Daisy become a dolphin trainer in the first place? Was that her true dream, or perhaps a role she settled for because there were no openings in the cephalopod department? What aspects of dolphin training did Daisy excel at, and where did she struggle? What was her daily life as a trainer like? When did she realize she'd had enough and that her real ambitions lay in the hot beverage industry?

Lying there in bed, I tell myself all sorts of stories about Daisy's past. It's great fun, and so much easier than having to write stories down for the benefit of readers. I realize fascinating details about Daisy's character and come up with exciting new subplots. As a dolphin trainer, Daisy would have experience with scuba diving. What if the restaurant operations manager who betrays her in the novel was previously her diving buddy? They'd have a history of trusting each other with their lives, making his later treachery that much more painful.

I am bubbling with ideas. I can't wait to start revising again.

This example, of course, is unrelated to the novel I'm currently writing. (To read about Daisy's adventures, you'll have to wait for my next book.) But it's an experience I've gone through many times. Just this weekend, I realized how few specifics I knew about a backstory in which two characters meet online. I made that backstory decision when I first conceived of the novel and then worked on the manuscript for years without fleshing it out. I finally realized that I was going to have to know more about their online beginnings if I wanted the story events to be consistent and believable.

So I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, telling myself stories until I fell asleep.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black offers great advice at #Amwriting about suspension of disbelief: "The reader will give you one freebie. They will suspend disbelief for you, no questions asked, exactly one time."

Drained

I just finished writing an emotionally intense scene. Yes, another one. This one's a real doozy, probably the emotional climax of the whole novel. I'm exhausted. Most of the time I wouldn't classify writing as "hard work," even though it's difficult, but scenes like this take more exertion than physical labor.

For reasons that I can barely even justify to myself, I had to write this scene while sitting and lying on the floor rather than at my desk or in a soft chair. I guess the best explanation is that I needed some discomfort to get into the mindset required for the scene.

I think I'm content with how the scene turned out, but as usual, I'm sure to hate it tomorrow. And I won't know if it really works until the draft is done and I start getting feedback from other people. The version of this scene in the last draft received lukewarm reviews from my critique partners, but it's changed considerably, and I believe the new situation and execution is much more compelling.

Right now, I could really use a nap.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Ned Beauman looks at the TV Tropes website and discovers The Million Basic Plots: "It's best to spend just enough time on TV Tropes that you're anxious to do something original, but not so long that you're paralyzed."

Be Careful What You Repeat

I was sending email to a friend about a book we'd both read and both found problematic. The book had an exciting plot that was bogged down by unnecessary description and repetition.

As I was listing my complaints to my friend, I realized that too much repetition doesn't only leave readers bored and wishing the author would hurry up and get to the new stuff. An even more serious problem with repetition is that readers might be led to incorrectly believe that an oft-repeated detail has some important significance that will be revealed later.

In this particular case, the narrator frequently remarked on the oddness of a certain phenomenon. I spent the whole book waiting to find out the secret cause of the phenomenon and coming up with various theories of my own. At the end, it remained unexplained. This was apparently just an odd occurrence after all.

If the detail had been mentioned only once, I wouldn't have expected it to mean anything extra. The multiple repetitions made it appear highlighted for a reason, but I now think it was just another instance of sloppy writing and editing. Grr.

Writers, take care that what you include in a story, and especially what you repeat, doesn't result in readers focusing on the wrong points -- unless you're doing that deliberately and carefully. Once again, this is one of those areas where getting feedback from early readers is crucial, because it's very difficult to spot in your own work.

I repeat: Get feedback on your work from early readers! There is no substitute for an outside perspective.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Becky Tuch at Beyond the Margins on Obsession: What’s Healthy, What’s Not: "The key to transitioning from one type of obsession (destructive) to the other kind (productive) is very simple: write anyway. Find the doubt, the discomfort, the anxiety, and write anyway."

→ Livia Blackburne dissects the Anatomy of a Death Scene: "Then I started thinking. People die in my books as well. Why don't my beta readers cry? So, being the cold, analytical psychologist that I am, I went through Plain Kate’s death scene line by line to tease out the elements that tugged at my heartstrings."

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.

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."

What We Write About When We Write About Love

My critique partners have problems with my relationships. If they object to my real-life involvements, they've kept quiet about it, but they're always vocal in questioning the relationships I write for my characters: "What does she see in him?" "Why would he stay with her?" "Were they ever really in love?"

In most of the stories I've written -- and really, most of the stories anyone has ever written -- people fall in or out of love. Based on the progress I've made as a writer in other areas, I'd expect that these days I'd be much better at writing about love than I used to be. The consistency of feedback from my critiquers suggests otherwise.

Why is it so hard to write convincingly about love? I've been pondering this issue for a while, and I've isolated a few of the difficulties:

→ Love is arbitrary. In real life, on those rare occasions when we're called upon to explain why we love the people we do, our responses are cliches that don't tell the full story: "We have chemistry." "We have a lot in common." "She makes me laugh." "I just feel comfortable with him." People fall in love as a result of an idiosyncratic, favorable set of circumstances. Even if we managed to reconstruct and describe how love occurred, it wouldn't be an explanation grounded in logic. The truest answer is, "We're in love because we're in love."

Now take this problematic situation and stick it into fiction, which is burdened with a need to be more believable than reality in order to convince the reader. If fictional love is as arbitrary as real love, readers and their pattern-seeking brains won't buy it. But if the characters' relationship develops based entirely on logic, that rings false to readers. Fictional love needs more rationale than real love but somehow also has to reflect the randomness of life. Good luck with that.

In my own writing, I've bounced back and forth between the extremes, and now I'm starting to settle into a more workable middle ground. I give characters a few tangible reasons for attraction of the type that they could report to friends, and then I focus on capturing the "because we're in love" emotion that's at the core of a relationship. Which brings me to...

→ True love is all show and no tell. In these relationship discussions with my critique group, my sheepish reply is always something like, "But in the narration, he keeps telling us how much he loves her!" I should really know this one by now: Don't tell the reader that the characters are in love -- show it! Duh.

I've been paying attention to how people behave in real-life relationships to identify those little moments, in public or private, that indicate when people are involved and even demonstrate how long they've been together or how it's going. Sticking a few of these moments into a story does far more to bring the relationship to life than the most passionate inner monologue expounding upon how much a character loves someone.

→ Relationships that end were once beginning. It's hard enough to convince my critique partners of the love between characters who are starting out together, but things really get tricky when I write about a relationship on the rocks. Inevitably, my readers look at the misery and antagonism of characters breaking up and say, "There's no way they were ever happy together. They should hurry up and end it."

This is a tough one. The point of a story about a soured relationship should be that it's a painful situation and that it's unclear what the best outcome is. None of that works if readers aren't sympathetic to how much the characters are struggling, so I need them to appreciate how good the relationship once was. Do I do this through flashbacks, memories, passionate inner monologues? None of these are great, all-purpose solutions.

If it's possible to begin the story just before the circumstance that tears the characters apart, the writer has the opportunity to show the relationship in a happy starting state. But relationships often break apart in a gradual way, unconnected to any single event. I'm still figuring out how to effectively write this kind of story.

What problems and solutions have you encountered when writing about love?

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jennifer Schuessler at the New York Times Book Review explains the redesigned best-seller lists that track e-book sales. A accompanying graphic shows how print and e-book sales compare.

→ At Conversational Reading, the Spring Big Read will be LIFE, A USER'S MANUAL by Georges Perec. I read this fascinating book in college, and while I don't think I'll have time to reread it with the group, I'm looking forward to following the discussion.

Seeking Feedback

This post first appeared as the August Writecraft column in WritersTalk, the newsletter of the South Bay Writers branch of the California Writers Club.

 

Critique, like revision, is an essential part of the writing process and one that many writers dread. It's scary to share your carefully crafted words for the explicit purpose of learning what's wrong with them. But there's no way around it: if you dream of the day when thousands of people will read your book, you have to start by letting a few people read your manuscript.

It's not trivial to find readers who can give you honest, useful feedback. Family and friends may be eager to read your work in progress, but don't expect to hear more than a few (biased) compliments when they do. Most people, even frequent readers, don't have experience reacting with much more than an "I liked it" or "I didn't like it." You may be able to coax out a more detailed opinion with questioning, but when sharing with people close to you, it's often better to accept the ego boost gratefully and then look for real critique elsewhere.

Other writers are a natural choice for feedback. They're already accustomed to analyzing stories in great detail, and they understand that when you hand them a manuscript, it's not going to be as polished as a finished book. You can join a critique group or find a writing friend to trade manuscripts with one-on-one. An added benefit of mutual critique is that as you practice responding to the work of others, you'll get better at evaluating your own writing.

You may also know non-writers who have experience thinking critically about stories. Anyone in a book club is a good candidate. Or ask that friend with a book review blog or the one who has lots of opinions whenever you watch movies together. Remember that reading for critique and offering thoughtful comments takes time. If you won't be reciprocating the favor with a critique of your own, consider treating your reader to a meal while you discuss their feedback.

My Story So Far

I write novels. I've written quite a few, and some of them over and over again.

Last year I thought it was time for all my writing and revising to pay off, and I sent a lot of carefully written and targeted query letters to agents. I received just enough interested responses to know that my confidence wasn't completely unrealistic. Eventually I also got enough feedback, from both professionals and critique partners, to decide that my manuscript still wasn't ready.

I'd written four drafts of that novel (or maybe six or seven, depending on what you count) and made substantial changes to the plot and characters. The current version of THE OVERWORLD has many strengths, and it reflects the improvements in my writing skills that resulted from working on this novel for years. There are also so many big problems with the manuscript that I had to put it aside for a while.

Another first draft that I'd written a couple of years earlier had been on my mind, and I turned my attention to revising that novel, keeping in mind everything I learned during OVERWORLD rewrites. I've now completed the second draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, and I'm making plans for the third. The new version is a fairly different story than the original, and I like it a lot better. I also like it better than THE OVERWORLD, and that's a hard realization after all the effort and expectations I put into that book.

At meetings of the South Bay Writers, several speakers have chronicled how many seemingly promising novels they went through before getting published. It gives me hope when I hear stories like Erika Mailman's that go, "Again I reached that point I had with the [last] book, where I thought, 'Okay, maybe this isn't my book either.' So I started writing a third book."

I'd like to believe that THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE is my book, the one that will turn all this work into a career. But I've thought that before. And that's how I know I'm on exactly the right path.