The last post of 2012. Oh, the pressure!

This makes me think of endings… and beginnings. These ideas fortuitously play into the topic at hand – when should a writer abandon a scene/plot/character/work that just isn’t working rather than rewriting for the fiftieth time?

My story, A Guardian’s Destiny, was a work in process for sixteen months, give or take. I wrote, rewrote, edited, revised, rewrote and on and on for what was longer than was good for me or it. I was halfway through rewrites that added a major character when I couldn’t take it any more. I knew it needed fixed, but I couldn’t figure out what the fix might be. Frustration didn’t begin to cover how I felt. When I stepped back and looked at it with some small measure of objectivity, I could see it had “Edit Face.” Not pretty. So, I put it in a virtual drawer and began something else.

When do you make that call? End one thing, begin another?

That is a personal decision, but here are some things to consider.

Time – How long have you worked on your scene/plot/character/work? Think about Return on Investment or Lost Opportunity Costs. Yes, we want our writing to be its best, but it will never be perfect and we need to recognize the tipping point where we have gone beyond productive effort. If you could have written a multitude of other scenes/plots/characters/works in the time you’ve spent on this particular one, then maybe it’s time to let it go and move on.
Sanity – Is it making you crazy? My story was. That’s not constructive and it’s stressful.
Distance – Sometimes, it isn’t that you need to completely abandon your scene/plot/character/work, it’s that you need some distance from it. Your muse may need time to gel. Time to work out exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. It may be weeks, months, years or never. You just never know.
Perspective – It’s just a story. We’re not curing cancer. Don’t marry your scene/plot/character/work. You need to have some perspective. Sometimes, things just aren’t working and you need to stop. If it helps, save all the drafts or put any deleted text into a different document. Then it isn’t really gone, just not where it isn’t working.

A Guardian’s Destiny has been tucked away for six to ten months. My critique partner asked to read it anyway despite my protestations that it seemed hopeless. After all this time and with her help, I think it may be time to take it back out and finish it. With a second set of eyes and ideas, it may yet be salvageable, but I know now that if it isn’t complete in a reasonable amount of time (not months on end), then back in the drawer it goes.

Here are some sayings that I keep in mind to help me.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind…… John Neal

It’s only a book. If nothing is happening – hit delete and start over. ….. I don’t remember where I heard this, sorry.

When your moment of truth comes, remind yourself: They told me it would be hard. This is what hard feels like. I can do this. ….. Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent

What do y’all think? I’d love more great quotes and/or tales of death, birth and maybe rebirth of your scene/plot/character/work.

And the character ran away with the story (or, my story wandered off track). . .

December 28, 2012

Nancy

Craft & Skills First Drafts Nancy Greene Rewriting The Writing Life 5 Comments

Hey diddle diddle

the cat and the fiddle

the cow jumped over the moon

the little dog laughed to see such a sport and

the dish ran away with the spoon

Okay, it’s all fun and games when the dish runs away with the spoon, but not so much when it’s your character who’s running off with your story. Or at least what you thought was your story.

As a discovery writer, I tend to have my stories overtaken by events. I’ve had a character yell at me that while he could be a cold blooded killer, there was no way he was going to kill that girl for that reason. When he refused, it changed everything. I have to say he was right when I looked at it, but still, what do you do?

Moments like that when my characters talk to me, heck, when they rebel are part of the reason I’m a discovery writer. For the most part, I let them take me for the ride and then see what I ended up with in editing. But sometimes the tangent the characters want to travel down isn’t one they should. Or, as often happens to me, my short story becomes a novella, becomes a novel, becomes a trilogy. Sigh. I’m in the middle of that now with New Bohemia: Just One Night. When I started that story, it was a short that kept interrupting my ability to work on a novel. So, I figured what the heck, I’ll write the short and get it out of my system. That was months ago. At 60,000 words, the story isn’t so short anymore because I decided I needed to kill off my main character’s parents in a way she’s going to feel responsible for the deaths. The story didn’t derail so much as I added a twist to make my characters’ break-up make sense.

As I see it, the trick is knowing when the diversion adds to or deepens the story and when it doesn’t. If in Chapter 12, Rafe is suppose to have a have a fight with the love of his life and the relationship is supposed to look like it’s over, but, instead, if Rafe decides to go hunting with the guys and finds a magic sword that happens to be Excalibur, you might have a problem or, at least, be writing a different story than you thought you were.

If you’re an outliner, you probably know almost immediately when your characters stray and can assess whether in the overall plot arc if the diversion is a complication that should stay or navel gazing that needs to be cut. It’s a bit harder for us discovery writers. After all, we often don’t know where the story is going. (Yes, I acknowledge that this is the way to madness for some.) It could be that the first 100 pages is wrong and not the “diversion”. Been there, done that and it stinks.

So, you have a couple of choices when the characters try to run the show.

1. Go with it. Since the characters are only the writer’s unconscious mind, they might be on to something.

2. Assess the detour and see if it’s a path the story should travel. If not, stop or see #5 below.

3. If it’s a main character mutiny, write it and worry about whether it works in rewrite. This is often what I do.

4. If it’s a minor character, cut, paste and save the “new” story for a sequel or related story.

5. Cut, paste and save in another document, and keep on your plan or outline.

Sometimes when your characters decide to turn left instead of right, you discover wonders. Sometimes it results in the never ending story. The latter isn’t good. You must finish the story. Any story. Every story.

Remember, you need to choose what’s important for your story. If the track your character wanders onto doesn’t advance the story you want to tell, stop, hold a character intervention and get back to the plot line you want. If the path through the forest isn’t well defined, don’t be afraid to leave it and smell the flowers along the way. Just watch out for the big bad wolf, and Hades.

Waiting for the Muse?

December 26, 2012

mary

Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch The Writing Life 3 Comments

The romantic image of a writer is often that of a solitary genius, communing with his muse and waiting for inspiration to strike. When it does, he writes like a fiend, hammering out a fantastic story in a mad rush of glory. And, yes, I’ve had the experience of waking in the middle of the night with a burning urge to write and a story that won’t let me be until I’ve recorded it in its entirety. The fire of inspiration is an amazing experience, obsessive and surreal and fantastic.

But, like many of life’s other marvels, it’s not an everyday occurrence.

Anyone aspiring to be a professional writer cannot afford the time to wait for a muse to slap him upside the head and tell him to start writing her story already. What does one do with one’s time while one waits? If you’re anything like me, you get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, fritter away your spare time with other hobbies, and then, on New Year’s, realize that the only thing you wrote all year was that one story from that one weekend where you couldn’t sleep because the muse had taken control of you. That was the year I realized I wanted to write, professionally, and also the year when I realized that waiting around for inspiration was not the way to meet my goal.

If writing is a hobby for you (and that’s okay if it is-I know people who write, well, but prefer to direct their time and passion elsewhere much of the time) then it’s perfectly fine to wait until you’re really in the mood for some writing. But if you hope to make a career of writing, to be a professional writer as opposed to writing solely for personal pleasure, then you can’t afford to wait for the muse to strike. You need a body of work that you can shop around to publishers, agents, markets. To create those stories, you need to make writing a habit.

Set aside time on a regular basis to write. Prioritize writing-don’t cut short your writing time for socializing, housework, or other hobbies. Create space and time in your life to write and use it. If you’re stuck on one part of a story, try another part-or another story. What you’re writing is not as important as the fact that you’re writing. You’ll find out that the more you write, the easier it is to write; the less you write, the harder it is to get started or keep the momentum going.

Yes, inspiration has its place. There are times when I’ve needed to set a story aside and spend some time thinking in order to get a grasp of a character’s motivations, to pick between two or more alternate plot twists (each of which would lead the story to a radically different ending), or to stop a short story from bloating itself into a novella by picking out what themes and ideas are the vitally important ones. There are times I’ve needed to sleep on it, clear my mind by doing something other than writing, or hope to be ambushed by my muse in the shower or while making dinner. Stories, after all, are powered by ideas. But we cannot wait for an idea so strong that it wrests control from us; such ideas are too few and far between. Instead, we need to make writing a habit, in order to create fertile ground for new ideas to be born.

In the Spirit of the Season

December 24, 2012

David Carrico

Doing Good in the World Life Philosophies The Writing Life 2 Comments

This is a very different article than I had planned to post. As I write this, it is the day after a very unsane (as opposed to insane) young man named Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and started shooting people. By the time he was done, eight adults and twenty children were dead, including himself. I have not been as horrified by one man’s actions since the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. My stomach still churns in nausea. What Lanza did was just evil. No other word applies.

Yeah, I know, that’s kind of a heavy thought with which to begin a Christmas blog.

Christmas is associated with Jesus Christ. The very name is a reference to him. And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about the person of Jesus Christ, you have to admit that he was (and still is) one of the less than a handful of people who truly affected the lives of people and tribes and nations all over the world for well-nigh 2000 years.

And regardless of your beliefs or feelings about Jesus, you have to admit that his teachings on ethics are very powerful.

Jesus is credited with speaking what’s usually referred to as The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s actually a paraphrase quote from Matthew 7:12. A modern translation puts it this way: “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you.”

There is no question that both history and modern society would be very different if everyone lived by that principle; if we-each one of us-treated everyone we met: rich or poor, literate or inarticulate, genius or mentally challenged, healthy or ill, complete or handicapped, regardless of race, creed, denomination, nationality, or political beliefs, with the same courtesy, care, and consideration we would like to receive; if their needs were of higher priority to us than our own.

We live in an imperfect world, comprised of imperfect societies and filled with imperfect people. And to be honest, I see no hope of attaining perfection on this earth. When I read the Bible carefully, I see people just like the people I work with and for; just like the people I live among; and, unfortunately, some people not much different from Adam Lanza. Homo sapiens hasn’t appreciably improved in the last 2000 years, from my point of view. Oh, we have more knowledge; we have more extravagant philosophies; and we certainly have a lot more toys with which to get into trouble. But inside, at the core of us, we haven’t improved. And that means that things like this tragedy will continue to occur.

Does that mean we give up? Does that mean that we just let the evil that exists in the world today take control? Does that mean that we allow acts such as Adam Lanza’s to occur in our world and in our lives without response?

I submit to you that the answer is a loud and resounding “No!”

Here’s another quote:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

No one really knows who first stated that in just those words. It’s been attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mills, and Charles F. Aked. But really, knowing the authorship doesn’t affect the truth of that sentence. It is, by every standard I can apply, a true statement. And from it we can draw a corollary that if good people want to resist the triumph of evil, they-we-must do something.

I submit to you that this is not a question of programs, or societies, or governments. I submit to you that the only solution that will work is The Golden Rule. Resistance to evil must begin with each one of us and how we relate to each other, whether it’s a co-worker, a neighbor, the barrista at the local Starbucks, the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart . . . you get the drift.

John Wesley, Christian evangelist and the founder of the Methodist denomination, I think expressed what our reaction should be as well as anyone. He put it like this: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”

So in the true spirit of the Christmas season, and in the wake of the tragedy in Connecticut, here’s our challenge:

Do good to everyone you meet. Be kind to everyone you meet. Not just at Christmas season, but every day of every week of every year. To do less is to give in.

Merry Christmas.