The new idea is like an unborn baby. It has never cried, dirtied a diaper, spit up on you, kept you up all night…all the things babies do that makes you wonder why you EVER though this was a good idea. The book you’re working on right now is a three year old having a full-blown tantrum on the living room floor.
Robyn Lee Hatcher, via Fliterary
Shameless lift from Chuck Wendig’s blog post today- 25 Ways to Be a Happy Writer. I love Chuck. I want to marry him and have his babies.
What? He’s already married with an adorable ankle biter? And I’m already an old married lady and twice his age and way too ancient to have anyone’s babies even if I could which I couldn’t?
*sigh* Guess I’ll have to settle for just loving his blog then.
Potty mouth extraordinaire, with metaphors that will set your eyeballs on fire, for sure, but there’s so much crunchy writerly goodness in his posts.
I loved every one of his points, though this one maybe spoke most of all to where I am with my writing now. # 25- Finish Your Stuff (okay, he didn’t write “stuff”, if was another word starting with ‘s’. But I’m working on my own potty mouth right now and do not want to swear, not even quoting a swear!) -
Every time you fail to finish your work, a little girl loses another kitten. A unicorn loses his horn and becomes a regular stupid old horse. A sweet old lady chokes on her dentures. But worst of all, every time you fail to finish your work it wears another small hole in your soul. You can feel it there — that ragged tear in your cloth, wind whistling through the gap. Because you know what it means. You’re giving up. Giving in. Handing over the keys. Letting the terrorists that are your Doubt and Fear and Uncertainty win. You know what all the books published and movies made and comics inked have in common? Someone finished what they started. And finishing will give you a bliss-boost. All your happiness circuits will fire like a 21-synapse-salute. Even if it’s not the best thing you’ve written. Even if it’s the worst.
Because the best thing you never finished is always less than the worst thing you did.
I’m so glad I have a strong writing goal for April. I can’t wait to get this research and planning done and start writing!
And I adore this image by the lovely talented Art ~ 4theGlryofGod. It to me is the total recipe for happiness. Plus the last point made me smile.
At last it’s done- my writing room is finished!
Well, almost! I still have a few things to do, like sewing a roll up blind for the window and a cushion for the chair. I need to sort through all my bags and boxes of crafting and sewing stuff and get them on the empty boxes, waiting on the shelves. But the main part of the work, all the building, is complete. I can put away my saw and my workbench and my hammer and my drill. I can sit in there, close the door, and write.
I finished it yesterday, my birthday. A fabulous present for myself. I did nothing “exciting” and birthday-ish, didn’t even have a cake. But I finished the shed and that’s plenty exciting enough for me!
It feels wonderful! Even better, the satisfaction of doing it myself. It’s not perfect, by any means. But it’s my work. I created it. And that feels good. It’s not quite how I planned, especially how long it’s taken and how much it’s cost, but the final result is waaaaaaay better than I thought it would be.
It was a lot cheaper than the other alternative, too, which was buy a vintage caravan to put on our parking bay. It would have to be vintage because nothing else fits on our tiny space or has the door on the right side, and they cost a bomb now. That wouldn’t have been nearly so practical either. I’m sure having the shed insulated and such a nice useful space adds more than I spent on it to the house value too.
But I don’t care about getting the money back.
The main thing is, I now have a perfect “room of my own.” I can shut the door, put my earphones on, and write. Or I can sew. Or I can paint. I can make a mess, and no-one needs to see but me, and I don’t need to clear it away before dinner time!
I love all the white. I love the simplicity of it all. I love the huge desk. I love all the shelves.
The wall to the right of the desk is all wide white shelving, behind me if I face the window. They weren’t there when I took the photo, but they come up to the edge of the green pinboard now. I worried I’d feel like they impinged on the desk space, but they don’t. They feel like they give me more desk space.
And I have loads of room on the shelves for my crafting and sewing stuff, all neatly packed in boxes so it doesn’t look cluttered and distracting, and labelled so I can actually find something when I want it.
I love that the little space feels so open, with the big window looking on to the garden. The whole shed is only the size of an ordinary double bed, but it feels far more spacious inside.
I want more than ever to build my own tiny house one day. Maybe when we’re living in Australia. For now, my shed is enough.
Now, time to write again. On the way home from work tonight, I started reading the rejected Christmas story, for the first time since I submitted it. Thank goodness, it needs work, for sure, but so far it’s not as bad as I feared it might be!
I uploaded it to my Kindle, as a rtf file. Amazing reading it like a “proper” e-book. I’ve never done that before. Such a different experience to reading on the computer screen. The things that need changing are jumping out at me. I know I can make this a far better story, and it’s clear how, too.
I’d strongly recommend trying it! I plan to edit with the document open on the computer to make changes, and my reading copy on the Kindle in front of me. I’ll report back on how it goes!
Anyone got any other favourite editing tips to share?
PS- The hot glue gun is NOT going to be on display on that shelf permanently! I left it there to cool down after making the fabric covered pinboard from a leftover sheet of the insulation board. Only just noticed it in the photo!
I’ve done it! Submitted my novella to a lovely editor at Entangled.
I’m happy with what I sent. Okay, I did attach the not-quite-optimal version of the synopsis (hint: if you decide to do some last minute tweaks, DO NOT attach the document while the tweaked version is still sitting on your desktop unsaved, you will be sending the old version!), and my blurb for the query letter sounded a little too generic rent-a-romance for my taste (by that stage I was way too tired and last-minuted to do a good enough job on this, unfortunately).
I just have to hope the story speaks for itself and he likes it!
I’ll know within the next three weeks, anyway. The great thing about Entangled is the short wait times. Also, everything I’ve heard (and my personal experience with my last sub) says the editors there give the best rejections around. Getting R’ed sucks, anytime, but a nice friendly personal rejection is soooooo much better.
So, tonight I’ll just wait for the post-submission crash. I’ve run on diet cola and adrenaline the last five days, getting this story written and edited. Off to the Day Job in the morning. The Thursday I can start work on the Writing Shed. Sitting crosslegged on the bed with my laptop on my knees works okay for short stretches, but can be a killer for twelve hour plus writing stints three days in a row! My back and neck are not happy right now.
Getting back into some carpentry again will be fun. I’ll be insulating the shed, and lining it with pine tongue and groove boards, then building in a desk and shelving. After that, once I’ll make curtains or a blind, and a couple of cushions, it’ll be ready to move in. I got a lovely white cane office swivel chair on ebay for £8, which made me happy (compared to £60 for a new one)!
My Writing Shed will rock!
In the meantime, I’ll move on to a different writing project too - the rewrite of the Valentine’s Day novella to send to Entangled. Seeing an Entangled editor say in the July Wish List she wanted small town romances made me very happy as well - maybe the Haven Bay series? They also need complete rewrites, but I love those stories!
I also need to catch up on the lessons and homework for the online writing course I’m doing, which will mean more planning on the big fantasy romance.
I just found out (thanks to Lacey!) that Harlequin are doing So You Can Think You Can Write 2012 in September, though they’ve changed the rules (again!) and it’s more like last year’s Mills and Boon X-Factor style New Voices contest. Guaranteed publication for the winner again. I’m guessing that means NV won’t be happening this year. Interesting!
I’m not sure I’ll enter, as I’m feeling I want to be monogamous with Entangled right now.
Fab image and inspiration from Winning Edits
A cross post with the group blog, Seven Sassy Sisters.
I’ve been the Slacker Sister lately. This is my first post for ages!
I do have a good excuse- a family crisis sent me jetting home to Sydney with no notice, straight into the twilight land of the Internet-Free-Zone. Even if I’d been able to get away long enough to buy an dongle, it wouldn’t have done me any good, my parents live in a reception black hole. In a way, though, I found it all strangely relaxing. No responsibilities except caring for my parents, a good and necessary duty.
Then I flew back to a clingy husband who’d missed me desperately, a psychotic cat who won’t leave me alone, and a Day Job that ate my brain and my time from the minute I walked back in the door.
The good news is, the Day Job have agreed to let me drop back to half time hours. Yippee! With care, extreme frugality, and with any luck selling a story sometime in the next year or so, we can survive on half my income. And I have a wonderful two days extra a week to write. Not just that, the Work-Life balance changes. I get a hell of a lot more life out of two days less work, because I’m betting two long days, with a day off in between, won’t leave me nearly as brain fried as four of those days do! My job role changes a bit too, as with luck in the dividing up of the different parts of my job between me and my job share-ee (does that word even exist?) I’ll manage to end up with the less stressful part of it. Looks like it’s heading that way, anyway!
Which isn’t what I meant to post about at all! What I want to post about is telling a good story. That should probably actually be showing a good story, as I do way too much of the telling side of things.
Coming back to Old Blighty, the Land of Endless Wifi Connection, I discovered what I’d missed while I was away. Harlequin annoucing a Romance Fast Track. Sweet! I’d just thought up a new story idea, just perfect for a Romance. Except I promised I the other Sassies I wouldn’t start a new story until I finished one of the many I already had.
Then I found an even better answer. A rejected story just shouting out to be rewritten. At the time the rejection hit, I had plenty of ideas how to change it, how to fix it, but I’d shelved them to start another story. Now the timing seemed ideal. Pull that story out again and go for it. I’d written it as a novella, but only skated across the surface of the characters’ conflicts. If I went deep, dug out all the potential for real emotion that already existed between them, if could be a fifty K story.
Rereading that story was fascinating! The first time I’ve ever had that experience of putting enough distance between myself and the first writing to read the story as if someone else wrote it.
What an amazing experience! I’m seeing it so differently now compared to when I first wrote it and reread it immediately after to do some surface edits. Some of it is wonderful, and really needs to be kept. Some is slow and draggy, the pace is all wrong. Some of the scenes I most wanted to include just don’t work for me now.
There are bits that work, sections that carried me along with the story and the feelings and when I came to the end of the scene I was all “I wrote that? Wow!” . Then are far too many other bits where I was “I wrote that? WTF, why? What was I thinking?”
The fabulous thing is seeing what needs fixing. Really getting why the story was rejected. And seeing what can be a cut and paste and tweak and work just fine, because it does work fine. Right now it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of the pieces are perfect and I know just where they fit. Some of the pieces are lovely but I have no idea where they can go. And some of the pieces seem to come from a different puzzle entirely!
I can see that my story arc is a mess. I structured it all wrong. It’s a reunion story, and the heroine held on to the “big sekrit” of why she left him before for far too long, meaning when she did eventually disclose it,, it seemed way too tiny to be a convincing reason. That needs to come out way sooner.
The emotional resolution comes way too early, and then it’s more external factors keeping them apart. So that needs to be switched around, altered more, taken deeper. The Black Moment, the change demanded of them both, the moment where they face losing the love of their life rather than surrender their defences, needs to be bigger. More of an emotional death, a death of their old ways of protecting themselves against hurt and pain. Reading this blog post helped me see that.
Plus the hero is just too nice! Sure, it’s going to be pitched as a sweet romance, so he’s not going to be a Modern/ Presents style Alpha, but that doesn’t mean he needs to be a wimp. He can be a whole lot angrier, and a whole lot less forgiving, at least to start with.
Lots to fix, lots to work with. And just two weeks to pull together a polished first chapter and a synopsis that makes sense.
Eep!
I need to listen to the advice in the picture. Tell the truth. Think. Care. Let blood flow (mine, not the characters, dig into my own heart). Inject a splinter- find the characters’ painful spots and probe them. Especially as I’m editing an already written story- cut the crap. Drop the backstory. Lose the long scenes with secondary characters. hit the delete key on those scenes I thought I just had to have but really don’t work in this story.
Most of all- keep the focus. Characters, conflict, and a satisfying and emotionally real climax. Solve an emotional issue, and remember that’s the most important story problem, not anything external to the relationship.
I’m writing romance, and emotion is what it most needs to be about. Not my wonderful setting. Not the hero and heroine’s realtionships with other people. Their relationship, and the deep emotional blocks that keep them apart. The moments of tenderness, of yearning, of the magic of falling in love. The pain of knowing that it can never happen, this relationship can never work, of old hurts being uncovered, of defences being torn down and desperately rebuilt.
I always want to add more. More external conflict. More stuff in the characters’ pasts. But what if the stuff I already have is enough? What if instead of throwing more into the mix, I took them deeper and further into what’s already there? Maybe the three words I most need to remember as I write this story should be “Keep digging deeper.”
Keep digging deeper.
What three words best describe what you need to write a great story?
Photo by Amulon Photography
Disappearing. That’s what’s happened to the last few weeks, they have, quite literally disappeared, with not much to show for them.
After the see saw ride of a week while Mum was in hospital, and all the will I- won’t I about whether I should go, a phone call from my sister three Saturday’s ago decided me. I had to go, and I was on a flight to Australia that evening.
I stayed over two weeks, came back to the UK, and straight back to work, still jetlagged, so no time to blog.
No internet connection while I was there, either, only crazily expensive access via my mobile to send an email or two a day to my husband, who I missed a lot.
I’m very glad I went, I know me being there helped everyone. A big, unexpected expense, but worth it. Going was far less stressful than staying here and trying to keep working, and supporting my sister over the phone and email, and worrying about Mum and Dad would have been.
Being there wasn’t stressful. Emotional, yes, especially seeing how much memory my father has lost and how it affecting him. Challenging at times, especially the first few days. After that, it felt like a strange sort of holiday, an interlude out of time. I cooked and shopped for them. I did some patient education around managing their health conditions. I tried to get Dad to see his doctor and talk honestly about his problem. I went for little walks with them, as far as they could manage. I went with Mum to her cardiologist. I supported them in getting some home help set up. I helped my brother understand what was going on.
I also did my morning pages. I wrote some more on my Wrong Brother story, which is morphing into something very different to what I first thought it was. I read a lot. I enjoyed being back home in Sydney, my real home, not just the place I live. I heard a lot of stories about when my parents first met and their early married life before I was born.
Taking that time to be with them was a gift to me as well as them.
Then I came back to England. Went back to work. Caught up with my internet writing buddies again. A week after I got back, that time out feels almost like a dream, lost time, time that didn’t really exist, that just disappeared.
Yet it changed things.
It deepened my relationship with my parents. A true adult relationship, untainted by past hurts. My husband seems to appreciate me more. He missed me, the first time we’ve been apart for over 24 hours since we married. The Day Job seems to have missed me too. I planned to give notice in mid May, give them time to get my replacement in place before I left in Mid September. Instead, my boss is offering me part-time work, a job share. The thing I asked for first, before I decided to resign, and they told me couldn’t be done!
I felt so strongly about needing to leave. Giving myself time to explore writing full-time, really focus on that. Though the finances worried me. The fact that unless I sold straight away, and maybe even then, I knew I couldn’t afford more than six months of full-time writing before I’d need to find at least part-time work. Also, being back home and seeing how things were with my parents had got me knowing that I need have enough money to go back twice a year, if possible. And I would love to buy a little doer-upper house in a country town, to have a foot on the ground in Australia.
I’d asked for that in my Morning Pages the last full day I was there. Then I had this offer. It felt like an answer.
So, I’ve made a decision. I’ll take the part-time position, and delay giving myself what I’ve dreamed of, writing full-time. It’s a dream, and a good one, but I’m not ready for it yet. I need to develop my writing further first. I need to be more ready. I need to be in a better position financially.
I’m not giving up, by any means, just modifying my goals. Doing it more gradually, a staged withdrawal from the Day Job. I’ll only need to go two days a week. Yes, they’ll be two very long days, and I’ll still have the commute, but it’s only two days a week. That means I have five days not at the Day Job. The balance has totally shifted. If I can’t write more with five days off a week, I won’t in seven days, either. I can’t use the Day Job as an excuse once I drop my hours. And I will still be earning enough to support the household, just. No money for many luxuries, but just enough to get by on.
Maybe even enough for the one luxury I really want- that little house in a small New South Wales country town I like a lot, about four hours drive from my parents. It will need to be cheap. It will need to be rented out to help pay the mortgage. But there are a couple of possibles I want to look at when Arthur and I go back again next month on our planned holiday (tickets paid from by last year’s Qantas cancellation debacle!).
In the meantime, I have a new writing goal. There’s a new story idea that keeps nagging me, but I promised I’d finish at leat one of my older stories before I start anything new. Time to stop adding to the long string of unfinished stories I’m trailing behind me. The truth is, I’ve never truly “finished” a story. I’ve only finished first drafts, and I’ve started far more of those than I’ve seen through to The End. I’ve never edited and polished an entire story, only partials. That needs to change.
So, I decided.
I’m rewriting a previously rejected story entirely, taking on board the advice I’ve had about what needs doing with it. It was quite rightly rejected. In effect, I subbed first draft. It’s quite nice first draft, I edited as I went for language. But it’s still hardly better than cleaned up first draft. What I left out fixing was story structure. And good old Goal Motivation and Conflict. I had relationship blocks, but not convincing ones. My heroine had no reason for doing any of what she was doing. No reason to keep rejecting the hero. The start was too slow moving, the pacing too leisurely, the emotions just not deep enough.
I do believe in the story and the characters though. I know they deserve better. So, I have a goal. To rewrite and polish polish polish the first chapter, do a synopsis, and send it off for the Harlequin Romance Fast Track, by April 23.
I need to get moving on that!
