Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 18

Pantsing 101: Maps!

We got warm enough not to have jackets in the afternoon.  A clear, pretty day.  I got in a little bit of the Future workshop this morning, but not a lot of time to do much.

Work…since it’s a short week (holiday Thursday and leave on Friday), I’m working at managing everything I need to do so it doesn’t bunch up on Wednesday and make my last day of the week stressful. 

Racing a bit through the climax now.  I’m expecting that I’ll have to do another cycling pass and probably add more setting.  But it really is starting to become, “Get it done, get it done.”  I have a hard stop in early December—actually scary for me.  I’ve had trouble hitting deadlines for novels in the past.  Yet, I knew where I was in this story and am confident I can get it done.  And still worried about it.

And onto the pantsing tip…

Maybe it’s just me, but setting’s hard to do.  It’s one of my sticking points going into a scene.  I’m thinking about what’s coming next and trying to juggle the setting at the same time.  I can’t leave it out because it then feels like I left behind a lot of the characterization.

So one thing to try is making maps.  They don’t have to be fancy or pretty.  They could be hand-drawn or like what I do, PowerPoint (I’ve done PowerPoint in my day job before).  You can jot down details on it like what the character might smell or hear. 

Better still, these can be done at any time.

You could do a map before you start the scene, just to get your mind thinking about it.

Or you could write the scene and before you cycle through again, draft up the map and see if your logic works.

And, you can share them with your newsletter afterward.

Pantsing 101: Know the Tools

Thanks to daylight savings time, the sun’s already up when I take my walk in the morning.  Doesn’t help the temperature. It’s 37 out.  A beech tree in the park is finally changing color, but it’s muddy yellow and not very pretty.  Too dry and too wet this year.  The trees don’t know what to make of it!

I do an errand of running two shirts down to the cleaners for alterations to the sleeves.  The sleeves just need to be taken up about half an inch so it fits me right. The Asian woman who does the alterations is surprised that I’m bothering with it.  I guess that goes to how little people alter some items, evidently expecting them not to last.  I spent extra on quality shirts because I want them to last for years.  Getting them to fit right seems only the proper thing to do.

I write two newsletters for my sequence.

After that, on and off all afternoon working on the book.

I also order a used copy of a book called Food Literacy.

Pantsing 101: Know Your Tools

This is one of those things that shouldn’t impact your writing and can in a major way.

Know how to use your word processing program.

In the early days of the internet, I found a book on getting certified for Microsoft Word.  I doubt if it’s in print anymore, and this was the early 2000s anyway.  Hard to believe it was that long.  One side showed the screenshots, the other hand the instructions. I just followed the instructions when I had to do anything in my day job, taking a few minutes to try out one of the skills as I worked on a document.

I’m glad I did because it gave me a decent background in Microsoft Word.  Even with all the changes to the program, I know what it can do and don’t have to think about it.

Whereas, we have writers who struggle to figure out how to do basic tasks.  If you’re a pantser, that’s now adding an extra payload into your brain.  Need to figure out how to get rid of that extra space between paragraphs?  Add an indent?  Double spacing? 

The last thing you want to do is be in full creative mode and suddenly you need to do something in the program and you don’t know how to.  Then you get frustrated and that messes up the writing. I see it in my day job all the time (they usually asked me for help after pulling out their hair).

These are some of the things you’ll need to know (assuming Microsoft Word)

Bolding text and italicizing textDouble-spacingSetting marginsDumping that extra space between paragraphsSearch and replace (which is a lot more complicated than it sounds.  You can really screw up your document).How to fix TEXT THAT’S CAP LOCKED ACCIDENTALLY.Chapter Headings, which in turn allow you to hop to a chapter.  Handy once your book gets long enough that navigation is trickyAdjusting spell checker and grammar checker optionsAdding a word to the autocorrect feature, because we all have a word we always type wrong.How to do a page breakUse styles.  These are awesome and underused tools.  Editor wants a different font?  Use the style to change it in a few steps.Change font style.  Change font size. Turn off autocorrect features like when it formats something automatically and you don’t want to do that (very annoying, so says my muse).Add a header (especially if you’re submitting to anthologies or magazines).

It all adds up.  And if you’re working around a day job, you want as little friction as possible.

Subtleness in Fiction

Hard to believe it’s so dark out at 7 AM and tomorrow it will be daylight.

I struggle to take a walk today, and it’s much later.  The daytime temperature is in the low 50s and the sun is beautifully bright.  But the wind chill knifes it all down.  Still, I get three miles (which isn’t as far as it sounds) and wander by a local house that puts up a fabulous Christmas display. I always thought they hired someone to come out and do it in a day.  But now that I’m paying attention…

It’s going up in pieces.  The owner erected an arbor-like frame over the walkway.  Lights are already up on the porch’s sloping roof.  Santa peeks out from the far end of the porch roof.  Snowflake lights line the edges of the lawn.  I’ll be watching it now to see how it develops over the rest of November.

Afternoon, I wander in and out of the story, thinking, too.  One of the problems with being a pantser (more pants) is that sometimes, if you know another one is coming after this one, it’s easy to overthink what you need to put in the first one to hint at the next one.  When I was doing a very early version of Rogue God (when it was called Miasma), my inner critic jumped in during the writing and was like, “You need to add this and this and this for the next stories.” It dragged me away from the actual story in the story.

But something does need to be in the story to connect the series.  It’s not like the old TV series where, when the episode ended, it reset everything.  I think we’ve overbalanced on the 13 episode stories, and it’ll eventually balance back to stories that resolve in each episode but have something in it that connects to the next one and makes it feel like a part of the whole.

That’s one of the things I’m noticing in J.D. Robb’s books.  I started reading them right from the beginning.  I was reading them to absorb how she did the details and I also picked up on those connections.  In one book, there’s a throwaway line about Dallas never having a mother (probably Book #21).  Bang in Memory in Death, a woman shows up and says, “I’m your mother.  Aren’t you going to welcome me home?” 

It’s often very subtle and not obvious until you read the next book.  This is what studying a writer looks like, not picking apart sentences for flaws.

It’s Friday!

I did my walk, tried not to freeze.  Very cold out now, surprisingly early. It’s usually Thanksgiving before it gets cold like this.

I got through nearly another lesson on the Future workshop.  At lunch, I do some file cleanup. Mostly deleting.  I’m reducing my 20% by tackling clutter, which is both files and paper.  I do this more often at work.  At home, the electronic stuff tends to get neglected (time’s gotta come from somewhere).

Most of what I did was fast deleted.  I saved a lot of clipart or old photos.  I looked at some of it, though, “Nah.”  Gone.  Some were in two different places.  Sigh.

I use the PARA method, both for home and work.   I had to go back and read through some of it after I’ve used it for a while.  Ended up rearranging my home files a bit (the Areas and Resources are a little tricky).

No pantser tip today.  I’ll have another one for Monday.

Pantsing 101: Nibbling at Characterization #nanowrimo2021

This is a day where the week crept on me.  I’m suddenly going, “Wait, it’s Thursday?  How’d that happen?”  I end up just getting some Twitter and the post below done.

I set a copy of all my files to dump on an external hard drive.  There have been some stories in the news about ransomware lately.  Everything I have is on OneDrive and I pay for automatic backup.  And I’m doing one more that’s disconnected from online.

Tonight is my writing meeting.  That’s always a lot of fun, though I miss the in-person one we used to do pre-COVID. 

Onto pantsing:

If you want to jump on board with working on your characterization skills, I have a launch point.  There’s a huge iceberg under it.  Once you begin this, it’ll make you realize how much you don’t know.

Every time you open a scene, anchor it in the setting through your character’s voice, using description.  You could probably do 2-3 sentences.  Sounds, sights, smells if you can, but use your character’s opinion of what they’re experiencing.

The challenge of this is that most writers are taught to write description as a separate entity.  A description exercise might tell you to describe an outdoor market and get the five senses in—but omit that a POV character should be behind that.  Instead, the writer ends up with such lifeless description that everyone then says to keep description to a minimum because it doesn’t move the story forward. 

You’ll need to do all five senses every 2 pages, which you can use the setting for.  Yes, including taste. The POV character’s continuously interacting with their setting, just like you do in real life.  So you can circle back a little later and 2-3 sentences more. 

Character’s crossing the street.  A truck chugs past, spewing bitter smoke (if you haven’t guessed, smell can veer into taste).

Character describes someone he is meeting with:  Sherbert sheath dress, ice pick silver heels, cloying perfume.

A mouth-watering smell of hot dogs burning on a grill makes your character veer off his intended path, reminded he forgot lunch again.  Hot smoke billows off a sizzling grill, hot dogs lined up dress right dress. (If you caught it, two details sneaked in to tell the reader about your character.  He’s focused, and he was in the military.)

Once your muse starts playing with this kind of stuff, you’ll find it’s a lot of fun.  Because discovering who that character is through what they experience is ice cream with chocolate and sprinkles for the pantser.  (Grammarly wants “More pants”).

References to read:

Dwight Swain’s Creating Characters: How to Build Story People. Writing and Selling Your Novel from Jack Bickham (he learned from Swain)Dean Wesley Smith’s Depth workshop[image error]

Pantsing 101: Why Are Pantser Stories “A Mess”? #nanowrimo2021

On my walk this morning, my first reaction was “It’s freezing.”  Checked temperature.  Yesterday, the high 60s.  Today: 37.  Brrr!

Packed in some time before work on the Futures workshop.  It’s opportunities, so it’s pretty interesting. 

Cold all day.  I’m sure it heated some but it never felt like it. 

Evening work on the book.  The timeline change helped a lot.  It forced me to think and change something that was creating issues. Still a bit slow going. Maybe my brain needs to thaw.

Onto the pantsing part of this:

The way you hear it from other writers and developmental editors, pantsing a story is the worst thing ever because the stories “are always a mess.” 

Reason #1:

Look at who’s telling you this.  The developmental editors want to sell you a writing system. Pantsers are bad for business.

Many new writers hear things and pass them around as fact, often without any more evidence than they heard from another writer.

But you’re probably thinking, “My story is a mess!” So…

Reason #2

All that writing advice.  Nearly every bit of writing advice you find online or in the writing reference books is done from the assumption of outlining.  It’s not interchangeable with how pantsers write.  Nor can you separate the outlining parts and use what’s left (I tried.  It was ugly).

It does make that much of a difference.

Reason #3

Craft.

Everyone has some craft issue they need to work on.  The problem with pantsing a book is that the process puts a magnifying glass on craft issues.

And it may not be the structure that everyone preaches at pantsers (because they can teach it through outlining).  The skill is characterization.

Characterization is a building block of story and is connected to every part of it.  Without characterization, you don’t have structure.  Without characterization, you don’t have setting.  Without characterization, you don’t have story.

So if the characterization is weak, other parts of the story may not work.  The structure given by doing an outline would shore it up, make the problem less obvious, but it would still be there.

If you want to get started on your characterization skills, hit Dwight Swain’s: Creating Characters: How to Build Story People first.

Pantsing 101: Pantsers and the Ending #nanowrimo2021

I voted first thing in the morning.  My neighbor was there—one of the election officers.  Didn’t leave much time before work.

After work, I realized I needed to adjust my timeline a little.  I was creating more headaches for myself by leaving it the way it was.  Now I’m trying to think of what talking heads would say if they saw a superhero.  Everyone’s got an opinion, even if they know absolutely nothing!

And onto Pantsers and the Ending.

Endings are hard to get right for pantsers.  A lot of times, you get to the end and the creative side decides “The story is done,” and somehow that ending got botched.

Problem #1: General writing sources do not teach how to end a story.  So let’s get one myth out of the way: The climax of the story is not the ending.

The climax is the part before the ending.  So if you end on the climax, the story will feel unsatisfying, though readers won’t be able to explain why.

The actual ending is called the validation.  You see it a lot in TV shows.  NCIS is good at it.  It’s that little piece at the very end where the characters wrap up one of the personal stories.  In the TV world, it’s called the tag.

An example of a good validation is a TV detective who gets shot in the climax and he’s hurt pretty bad.  In the tag, we see him in the hospital, looking much better and arguing with the nurse.  The viewer knows he’s okay.  This tells us, the viewer, the story is done.

An example of a bad ending: The hero is trapped in a car that went off the side of the road.  He’s seriously injured and can’t call for help.  The story ends with another character racing down the hillside to find him. (If it’s a TV show, they probably ran out of time.)

Once you start looking at the ending of shows, you’ll see pretty fast what works and what doesn’t.

A validation/tag has a time jump after the climax.  It also ties into the beginning of the story in some way.  It can be a summary.

Problem #2 for pantsers?

We get to the end of the story and the creative side is like “I’m done” and doesn’t quite do a few extra steps. So:

Let the story sit for a few days.  That’ll give you brain time to process the story, and also to reduce the resistance of your creative side whining, “But it’s already done.”
Read through the entire story (and probably fix more typos).
Cycle through your ending, fleshing it out.  If you’re using cycling when you write, your ending won’t have gotten any cycling passes.

For more information on Endings, Dean Wesley Smith has both a lecture on Endings and a full workshop.  I’ve had the lecture, so if budget is an issue, it’s a good place to start. A friend who took the workshop said it was pretty good and helped her understand what she was doing wrong.

Pantsing 101: Research and the Pantser #nanowrimo2021

Okay, today I finally said “Enough!”  I roamed around Grammarly enough to turn off some of the nonsense stuff.  Still gave me nonsense stuff, but I had to run a spell-check to find all the $^&*# typos!  They were becoming a serious distraction.  I spelled one word wrong so often I added it to Word’s autocorrect.

I stopped checking for typos while I was cycling on this book because it was introducing my inner critic to the cycling.  But that fix caused different headaches, so I’ll have to think about what I want to try instead.  This book was also the first one I drafted in Word.  The rest of the books were done in Scrivener.  But I got so frustrated with the problems from it—Word is at least more stable.  When I replaced my computer, I didn’t bother to reinstall Scrivener.

But I’m happy now.  I weed-whacked my way through about 300 spelling errors.

Time for the Pantsing Tip: Research!

Research is one of those things that confounded me (enough that I’ll eventually be doing a book on it).  Everyone tends to treat it like it’s college homework, or lovingly spending a year before writing the book.  For a pantser, it’s a challenge.  If you don’t know where your story is going, how do you research?!

Hmm.  Grammarly’s suggested substitution for pantser was “more pants.”

When I did Rogue God, I did the research before I wrote the story.  I researched the setting in every book I could find at the library, bought some, and even went to the University of Maryland.  My creative side bounced around all over the place and I thought there would be a painting and an art auction in the book.  So I researched auctions, found these auction books at the library sale, thought I might attend one.  I researched paintings as well, and forgery, and art theft.

Then I made first contact with the story.

Used none of the research.

The key for pantsers is to start with things that you already know.  I suppose that’s “Write What You Know,” a horribly misinterpreted piece of writing advice.

Basically, it’s anchoring your story around something big that you’re already an expert in so you’re not building research from the ground up.  For example, when I did my GALCOM Universe series, I started with my military experience.  Then I used a recent cruise I’d taken as more experience.  From there, when I wrote the story, research became when I needed it, and usually not that much. 

Writer Tamara Pierce was the guest of honor at a con I attended.  She talked about reading about the medieval knights as a child, and all that reading became expertise that you see in her Tortall books.

Everyone is an expert in something.  Even if it’s just the city where you live.

For this one, you can get a lot more information on how to do research the way a prolific professional writer and non-outliner does it by checking out Dean Wesley Smith’s Classic Research in Fiction Writing.  He doesn’t mention it as a requirement, but since I’ve taken both workshops, I think you’ll need the Depth one first. 

Fantastic Fantasy for Fall Giveaway

For November, I’m participating in the Fantastic Fantasy for Fall Book Giveaway. These fantasy books will be available for free November 1-30.

There’s a mix of epic, urban, sword and sorcery, and secondary world fantasy. If you’re looking for a new author, this is a great way to find more books to read (books are like potato chips!). Please share if you know of someone who’s interested.

Here’s a list of the 36 amazing authors:

A.J. FlowersAlex MavenAmy CampbellAnthony ChristouAurora WeissBeth GrayerChris LowryChristina HagmannEmily FlowersF.R. JamesonJ.D.L. RosellJamie DaltonJane M WisemanJason DoroughJoanna WhiteJorma KansanenKris MazeKyra HallandLady DaeLisette MarshallMarie JudsonMichaelbrent CollingsNicholas P. AdamsR. G. RobertsS.G. PrinceSamantha KroeseSandra LinelizSimon WilliamsT.L. ThorneTaylen CarverTc MartiTc MartiTracy Cooper-PoseyTrisha LynnVivienne Lee Fraser

Pantsing 101: Cycling #nanowrimo2021

I spend part of the morning watching the next workshop on Futures, this one on Opportunities.  Part of the lesson is thinking about opportunities available to me and opportunities I’ve passed on.  It’s to identify places where we have blinders, but also to think about why we either accepted or passed on opportunities.

I think about the ones I’ve passed on.  The last few years, it’s been science fiction conventions.  It’s not good when the panels veer off topic into politics.  If I spend $500 on the weekend (hotel, tickets), I want fan or writing stuff, not rants about politics.  But I revisited this and submitted panel suggestions to a media con.  I also submitted them to one I was on previously.  Crossing my fingers I stay away from politics.

I end up procrastinating on writing by submitting three stories.  One is to a call where my inner critic is saying, “You don’t qualify.”  It requires most of the writers submitting have an extensive fan base.  I’m still working on mine.  They are letting in 1-2 writers who don’t fit that requirement, so I’ll let them reject me.  Who knows? They might accept anyway.  Opportunity.

I spend the rest of the afternoon on and off, working on the story.

Onto the first Pantsing Tip….Cycling

What’s the difference between cycling and revision?

Revision is trying to fix the story after you’ve put it all together.  Like adding way too much salt to your meal and then trying to fix it you’ve cooked it.

Cycling is making changes to the story as you write it, much like a chef who tastes the cooking meal and adds more salt, tastes again.

It is very hard for writers to wrap themselves about because they’re wedded to the idea of revising.  But revision is always done by inner critic, identifying problems and fixing them, sometimes tossing out entire scenes and rewriting them. 

Cycling happens when you’re writing along and bam!  You get an idea of how to solve a problem that’s been nagging at you.  Like the one I’ve been having with the low point chapters.  I realized I needed to add something about five chapters back to tie things together.  It’s not a lot, but my creative side kept nagging at me that it needed something more.

So I move back to the chapter, read through the whole thing to remind me of what’s in it.  I might decide also to add more setting if I find any places where I didn’t quite do enough.  I’ll also fix any typos if I spot them (they breed like rabbits).  I find the spot where I need to add more.

Then I cycle through the chapters that follow, reading through them.  Do I need to add anything to tie the thread of what I’m doing through?  I find some spots, few sentences here and there.  Not a lot. Probably spend more time spotting typos!

See, if I’d written through to the end with this broken, then revised, everything following would have been broken.  My subconscious would have likely nagged at me the entire time during the writing of it that there was a problem.  I would have gotten to the ending and just felt like nothing worked.  Once I dug into the revision, I’d find the problem, and now I would be rewriting whole chapters to fix the problems.  Each of those changes would break other things.  Or, you can’t unsalt the meat once it’s been oversalted and cooked.

Keys to Cycling:

No tweaking.  Resist. The. Temptation.  Tweaking is your inner critic getting involved.  He’ll tell you that sentence needs to be fixed, and that one, and that one.  No.  Just leave it for later and if you see there’s a true problem, you’ll fix it then (you probably won’t even remember what was wrong).
If you start getting negative—you know, ‘What was I thinking?  That’s terrible!”—stop.  Take a break.  That’s your inner critic.
When in doubt, leave it alone

Another common use for cycling is to add more setting, more description, more five senses.  Those are huge character-building techniques, so use them often!