Cheese with my whine?

So, I began this writer’s journey in earnest a little over seven months ago. I’m not counting any previous false starts (they never lasted long before) or tangential experiences (we’re talking stringing sentences together, but more interactive and emergent stuff or related non-fiction). What I mean is a serious focus on craft and honest attempts to tell a story from beginning through the middle to the end and come up with something that appeals to others.

DH lends help and support, when I ask. The Divas are simply amazing. Their tolerance for dumb queries and unconditional backing is unbelievable. Jodi manages to ask all the right questions or drop little bombshells of wisdom to make me think about what I’m doing. MamaDivine certainly learned from her! Bria and CC are enthusiastic cheerleaders.

So, what’s my problem?

Why am I still spinning my wheels and going in circles? Is it a lack of “pre-writing” and not knowing my characters enough to deal with their reactions to situations? I suspect the issue remains in my actual plots and structure. The hardest thing for me to do is step back and puzzle out the big picture for my own writing. Gathering the characters I want to throw together and stockpiling rocks to chuck at them seems easier. Often, I can visualize the closing scene/image.

Now, I’m probably whining, but I’m frustrated. I may have made too few attempts to speak with any authority, but I find everything falls apart when I try to go from point A to B and then head for C. My conflicts and dilemmas never seem to be sufficient or the details refuse to come together so things float around in limbo.

Several different approaches caught my eye or were suggested: Snowflake method, Emotional Structure, Hero’s Journey, and even breaking individual scenes down into notes for Meeting, Purpose, Encounter, Final Action, and Sequel/Aftermath. Each one taught me something about this process, but I’m still not satisfied with the results.

Analytical and highly focused on theory are now attached to my name. I think people are using nicer words than “anal” and “perfectionist”. Complements (and thanks to those who have made them!) must compete with the voices in my head, which are louder and more critical. I realized this would be a problem when I started, but it’s just another thing I wanted to learn about and overcome.

The Romance Divas are doing a free read promotion for Valentine’s Day. I’ve tried not to think about it much, but I may try to come up with something in the next two weeks. That’s scary! What am I thinking? Maybe, I should try a new spin on a familiar story so the plot and framework are a given. I don’t know.

We’ll see.

——

Wow, I think I just realized what the problem is. I’ve been editing. Too much critical thinking and not enough brainstorming and/or just writing. I’ve been skimping on my journal entries lately too. Not a good thing. Need to keep the words flowing, despite my cranky, persnickety, internal editor.

UPDATE: MJ’s written an awesome post on the subject of internal editors. Go read it!

The Plot Thickens…?

I’m stuffing the rewrite of Revealed back into a “drawer” again. I want to wait until a couple people have read it and commented more thoroughly on it before tearing it apart again and just sitting here second-guessing myself. I still don’t have a lot of ideas on how I’m going to fix the hero’s arc, but instead of beating my head against that wall, I decided to do something proactive.

I’m going back to the previous WIP where the pesky fellow was only a secondary character. I’ve been taking my spreadsheet that I based on the diagrams in Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey. I’ve added a lot of notes to it from various other sources as well, and I hope I have something I can work with to guide my thinking into a workable and interesting story.

The main problem is that I have 25k words written in this WIP already. Trying to determine if the already written scenes need to stay or just move is giving me a headache. I suspect I’m also having similar issues with the GMC of the characters not being defined well enough to propel the plot along in a meaningful fashion.

I’ve also been chasing down a lot of rabbit trails lately. I’ve found a lot of interest in the world of screenwriting. Setups and payoffs, ideas about laying out things to fix in the characters life to make the story pay off, and generally more information to take up space in my brain. I hope they’re worth it as I have been trying to think about how these little tidbits relate to the stories I’m trying to tell.

This new/old WIP has an external conflict that the H/h should be working to resolve, but it’s not gelling very well with the emotional story arcs that they also need to follow. His lack of responsibility and her overdeveloped sense of protecting her brother are nice opposites. He’s being forced to be respectable and she only sees the worst in his little vices (which compared to the examples that her father and brother have provided her of wastrels are rather pathetic).

So far, I think I have the opening worked out for both the hero and the heroine and the middle worked out for the hero. Her middle is a bit more muddled in my head. And about all I know of the ending for either of them is that the external threat is defeated and they have their Happily Ever After.

I also need to write up reviews for two books I managed to finish recently. I’ll try to get those done sometime here in the near future.

Holding Out For A Hero

I find myself rather annoyed with Hugh Daniel Leighton, Viscount Barrington.

Last fall, he whispered sweet seductions in my ear like the practiced rake he was, urging me to tell his story. So I abandoned the ms where he’d been a secondary character and found him a nice girl with a few quirks of her own.

Was the wretch grateful in the least? No! Every time he was on stage, he wanted off again. He hadn’t struck me as the shy nor reluctant type. Maybe this was he way of pulling a joke on me. He’s rather fond of getting attention that way, always trying to make someone laugh.

Everything I thought I knew about him, as a secondary character, also seemed to disappear during the month of November. His feisty, dragon of a grandmother, POOF! Billiard games with his best friend and wagering on them with reciting bad poetry as the forfeit, POOF! The sneaky debutantes who were trying to lure him into the parson’s mousetrap, POOF! About all that remained were his name and the fact that he was a charmer, who liked to play jokes (a recent development).

Ok. A bit more than that remained, but re-reading the ms revealed huge, gaping holes where his side of the story should be. Like the original 2400 word draft, there are clues and vague hints at goals and motivation, but nothing concrete or developed. His character arc seems to be missing. There was too much focus centered on the heroine and her story. DH’s biggest complaint is still that Barrington hasn’t earned anything along the way, it just happens to him.

So I complained about this troublesome hero previously and Jodi suggested reading Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger. The book had a lot of common sense advice. It’s not a workbook/worksheet type of book. I’ve looked at those types of character sheets before and gone, ‘Uh, yeah, but most of this is too modern pop-pysch for someone who lived 200 years ago!” What I ought to do is just start writing in his POV and see what happens. I’ve done some work on his GMC. Goal and Motivation, check. Conflict, hazy at best.

Last night I came across some old notes for the story where he’d been the secondary and I had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. I’d worked out three separate story arcs with creating conflict through the gaps in each characters expectations. I’d ignored that little exercise for this one. No clue why, probably too excited about exploring Dunne’s structure at the time. So that’s also on my to do list.

Seger’s approach includes defining the character through consistencies and paradoxes. Ok, skipped that big-time for him. There are hints, but I need to expand on them and nurture them into something meaningful.

I need to go back and look at their relationship again as well. In those old notes I found the following quote: Dilemmas: mutually exclusive goods or lesser of two evils. Whoa! *head smack* How is it I can think I’ve learned something and then space it so completely, so soon? There’s very little conflict on his side of the relationship right now. He’s pretty clueless about the whole thing and seems to just go along for the ride for no real reason. He cares, but he’s been rather bashful about admitting why.

Learning more about the editing process beyond the word/sentence level helped none of these issues only compounded them. So, how about all those scenes? Didn’t I spend a month last fall dissecting scenes? Didn’t I think about the purpose of each scene, what the characters in the scenes might want to accomplish and how they’d go about creating that conflict necessary to keep the interest and tension going? Didn’t I have a nice little format for thinking about this already worked out? Uhh… no. Apparently, the panic of 1,667 words a day with very little preparation sent all thoughts of that approach right out the window.

Keeping forward momentum in multiple story arcs is exponentially harder than just one.

Sometimes I think I’m cramming too much into my brain. Getting everything to gel together into a coherent and working mindset is proving difficult. I’ve got a lot of habits to break too. He verbed/She verbed is still my favorite sentence construction. One interesting comment that DH was regarding how often my word choice wasn’t quite the most effective one to show what I wanted.

Back to the story board…

Oh, and blame Dana Belfry for the length of this post because she called me a blog slacker. Sometimes stuff has to percolate in the grey matter for a while.

Pinning Down Details

I finished the story arc I’ve been talking about recently. I’m not at the point where I can do them quickly, so I may just post them as I finish them and feel they’re readable. Once I finish a few more minor edits, I will post that one on a page here with links to it, hopefully tomorrow.

One of the reasons this one went so easily, after I got past the first obstacle, was that I was more familiar with the characters and had taken the time to draw out a reasonable road map of where exactly I wanted to go. Problems arise when I try to skip the step of pinning down some detail upon which hinges either a major plot point or one that defines a character. My food critic and her chef suffer from this lack of detail currently. I really need to dig into their story, give the world more depth and provide the characters with more dimensions.

One of the Romance Divas (Hi MamaDivine!) asked me if I’m going to participate in NaNoWriMo this November. I hedged with her and said I probably won’t because of how crazy November can be around here. To participate on the official site, you need to be working on something new. I don’t want to scrap 25k and begin again from scratch. I could work on the novel in a less official manner but I know I’m reluctant to go in and add more bulk to my novel in progress just for the sake of increasing the word count by 50k. The prospect of a large-scale goal and deadline are also making me balk. I don’t think I’m quite ready to commit to something that large and looming. I’d like to take a bit more time for planning and practice first.

More on Structure

Character Arc and Story Structure — Ref.: Peder Hill at http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/index.htm

I neglected to find a pretty image to go along with today’s post. I chose the image and post to serve as a focal point. The diagram is very familiar to me by now. Books on plot and structure obligingly include at least one variation when discussing the Classic Three Act Structure and overall story arcs.

Today, I stumbled across Peder Hill’s take on how a novel is written. I haven’t dug through all the sections on his site yet. I’m still immersing myself in learning how to construct a story that doesn’t just meander aimlessly as it explores characters and conflict. I’m probably too methodic in my approach, but my brain works that way. Learn the rules, color inside the lines, and play along with the sheet music firmly on the stand in front of me. That sort of rigidity keeps me in my comfort zone while I’m learning new concepts.

I decided that I need to set aside another 30 minutes out of my day and practice writing extremely short pieces that include a set up, several increasing tests and crises that build to the climax and then wrap everything up. I will probably also sit and brainstorm these beforehand instead of trying to do them off the cuff. To make this work, I will need some accountability, so I’ll try to post the best one of these each week. So if you don’t see any, ask me what happened and make me go write one!