Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 161

Questionables: The Writing Process (HaHaHaHa . . .)

Lakshmi wrote:
How do you come up with ideas for a new book? What is your writing process? Has it changed over the years? Do you have a daily word count? Any advice for beating writers block?  I can’t figure out how to plot or outline my WIP. I’ve read the 3 act structure and even tried beat sheets. It gets confusing.

I don’t come up with ideas, the ideas come up with me.  I will do damn near anything to avoid writing.  It’s hard.  I have to work.  I don’t like it.  But then a character starts talking about an idea that my subconscious glommed onto and I tell myself I’ll just write this one bit of dialogue down and pretty soon I’m up to my ass in demons.   Trust me, I don’t go LOOKING for work.  It’s just that sometimes a story grabs onto my leg and I can’t get it off.

At that point, however, I do not go near the three-act structure, or in my case the four-act structure.  I do not do beat sheets or outlines or character profiles.  I definitely do not do a daily word count, that would make me nuts. This is because in the beginning, it’s all discovery.  I don’t know what the book is really about until I see what I’ve written.  Structure is for revising, not for writing.  

I’d tell you what my writing process was if I had one.  Mostly I stagger around trying to find out what the story is about, figure it out, finish the first draft, discover it’s not that at all it’s something else, revise the whole thing multiple times, discover that the something else was wrong, too, and revise again.  My writing process is awful.  I do not recommend it.

Zeba asked:
I find big-scale editing really hard – e.g. ‘does this scene work, does this character work, what happens if I take this out, put this back in etc. So my question is what are good approaches with over-view style review, redraft and rewrites?

First, don’t edit a first draft/discovery draft until the whole thing is done.  

Then, once the whole thing is done, step back and ask yourself, “What is this book about?  The protagonist owns it, what is she pursuing that’s so important to her that it informs the meaning of the book?  How does her character arc inform that same meaning?  What kind of book is this?  Why the hell did I write this thing?”

Once you know the answers to those questions, you know how to rewrite the book to focus on that spine you’ve identified.  Then look at the act structure and the turning points and make sure that they connect to that spine.  Look at the character arcs and make sure they jive with the turning points and connect to that spine.  Look at the conflict and see how it illustrates that spine, especially how the climax reinforces that spine.  

Writing Nita, I got caught up in mysteries and my anger about what’s happening with immigration in this country and about greedy, selfish leaders, and breakfast food, but when I looked at the finished discovery draft, it was about outsiders trying to connect, about very different people becoming a family, and above all about two damaged people falling in love.  So that spine was about connection in a hostile world, about outsiders coming in from the cold.  That meant a lot of stuff could go, and some things I thought were just me having fun—all those breakfasts—were actually part of that people coming together in warmth. With eggs.  

Find the spine, but finish the discovery draft first.  You don’t know what it’s about until you see what you’ve written.  

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This is a Good Book Thursday, March 21, 2019

I’m reading cookbooks (Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halle’s Cookbook) and Nita’s book and some old Nero Wolfe mysteries for comfort, even though in hindsight, Archie needs slapped upside the head with #MeToo. Also a book my therapist recommended, The Body Keeps the Score, that gave me a whole new insight into the Nita book, which I’m still finding mind-boggling. Reading, it’s not for wimps.

How about you?

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Working Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Do you know what one kind of work is? Cooking. Also baking. Maybe we can do food here. I just made some Velveeta Mac and Cheese. Do not do that. As a walk down memory lane–childhood fave!–it was terrible, more of a stagger with the cheese sticking to everything. I knew my mother wasn’t a great cook, but good Lord that’s bad.

So what did you work on this week? Or, you know, eat?

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Questionable Future

Remember when this used to be a blog about writing? Me neither. It’s your fault. You’re not asking me questions.

If any of you have questions about writing craft, put ’em in the comments and we’ll start doing Questionables again. You can ask about publishing, too, but I’ve been out of the game for so long I have no idea what’s going on. My latest book got rejected, that’s how far out of the loop I am. But craft? I can still talk about craft.

But only if you ASK.

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Food, A Rediscovery

I’m toying with the idea of making Fridays “Foodie Fridays” or something less twee, but the last thing I need is to get locked into another Every Damn Week Post (although I will admit that most of the ones we’ve got now just involve finding a picture and saying, “Hey, what did you read/work on this week?” so not labor intensive. Even Cherry Saturdays require minimal research. Happiness Sundays are a bitch, though). And yet I feel an intense need to talk about food, and I’ve seen leanings that way in the comments, too. The problem is, right now food is a problem for me. Or a solution that I haven’t quite arrived at yet. Which pretty much sums up my life.

Where was I?

Right, food. Here’s the thing: my health has involved me imbibing eight pills a day, one or more of which has killed my appetite completely and created a kind of very low level nausea that means the idea of food was something I avoided. This meant that I didn’t notice I hadn’t eaten until I started to get dizzy, and then I’d grab the nearest thing to hand, usually a piece of bread or some Braunschweiger (don’t ask, it’s an obsession from childhood). Once I realized what was going on–I lost so much weight I’m actually a normal weight for my height now–I realized that I was going to have to something radical: cook. Which I used to do really well.

Back in the dark ages, I got married, and my mother had never taught me to cook, so I was terrible in the kitchen. My ex-husband had some good qualities, among them eating without complaining all of my disasters. After about a month of that, I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m not in school, I’m not working, I’m a smart. woman, learn how to do this, Jenny,” and I did. I studied, I started with the basics, I added sauces, and before long I was stuffing butter under the skin of chickens before I roasted them, making roux that was a thing of beauty, marinating food that practically made my husband weep with joy (or relief, I couldn’t tell). I became, in our small circle, a cooking goddess. And we ate. My god, we ate.

Then things happened and I stopped cooking (kid, job, marriage in hell, etc.). And after that I was a single mom working two jobs and going to grad school at night, so I never picked up the fancy stuff again. There was just no time.

Fast forward decades and now I realize that if I lose another ten pounds, my doctor is going to start sizing me up for an eating disorder (okay, another twenty pounds) and also this is bad for my heart. But this time, instead of studying to get back what I lost, I took a short cut. I started signing up for meal services.

Here’s the good thing about meal services: they send you everything in kit form and give you directions, so every meal is like a mini-cooking-class. Here’s the bad thing about meal services: you don’t get to pick the ingredients so you’re a slave to their tastes, and some of them are just bad. Obviously some of the recipes aren’t going to hit for you, people have different tastes, but then there are the recipes that you look at it and think, “Seriously?” In the past two months, I’ve done all of the following meal services: Home Chef, Gobble, Freshly, Sunbasket, Daily Harvest, Takeout Kit, and Plated. I deleted all but Plated, some in “I don’t think so” mode, and others in “My God NO” mode. With Plated, when they go wrong, I’m thinking it’s a matter of taste, not recipe or approach failure, so I’m sticking with them; it’s such a pleasure getting the Plated box, that I’m indulging myself. Other than that, I’m done with meal services.

But trying all those different meal services did remind me that I love food. Not just eating it, which has been vastly diminished by the no-appetite-low-grade-nausea stuff, but looking at it, choosing it, working with it, cooking it. I’d forgotten that one of the reasons I’d been such a good cook way back when was that it was so wonderful to do. One of the reasons I stuck with Sunbasket as long as I did was that their ingredients were so superb and packaged so well that I just wanted to pat everything as it came out of the box, the way I’d chortled over great ingredients way back when (also their jambalaya was really delicious and they were the service that introduced me to sambal oelek, which is phenomenal stuff). One of the reasons I dumped one of the other services was that they sent me a package of Marzetti Salad Dressing. (That was one of the Are You Kidding Me moments, surpassed only by the first delivery from Freshly which was packaged pre-cooked meals in little Lean Cuisine plastic trays.) I will admit that one of the best meals I got from Gobble was their Osso Buco for which they’d already prepared the meat–if you sign up for that, DEFINITELY get the Osso Buco–but otherwise I like the services that give you all the ingredients, raw and beautiful, and then say, “Cook this.”

And that sent me to food blogs. I was already flirting with Voraciously, the Washington Post food blog, and the AV Club has a great informal food blog called The Takeout, and I hit Epicurious often because it’s a great resource and because my cousin Russ writes for them sometime, (that’s Russ Parsons, former food editor for the LA Times, whom I brag about every chance I get because he is WONDERFUL, and man can he cook), but mostly I just follow my curiosity. I now have one hellacious list of bookmarked recipes and a passionate need to cook again. And think about food. And talk about food.

But I don’t think I can handle Food Fridays. Especially with that name. Although I could just put up posts that say, “So what did you cook/bake/eat/drink this week?” and let you all have at it, you guys are good at that. Even if you don’t cook, you must eat, so we’d all have something to talk about. I don’t know. I’m conflicted. I think I’ll go make something while I think it over. I have a meal kit for Steak Frites, but maybe I’ll save that for tonight and just do a goose liver sandwich. Or try to eat the sweet and sour chicken from last night which has WAY too much sugar in it, which completely drowned the Cippolini onions, but I forgive Plated for that one because the barbecued chicken (they didn’t send BBQ sauce, they sent vinegar and sugar and tomatoes and herbs and I made my own and it was heaven) was fantastic. Hmmm.

Food. It’s my latest obsession.

What do you think?

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Food is Happiness

I’m obsessing about food lately and I realized that my new found interest in it is making me happy. Which of course reminded me of Proust and his damn madeleines, although I do love madeleines, and all that food-as-memory stuff. I’ve been having a fraught time lately, and I just realized that the reason I’ve bought Braunschweiger three times in three weeks is that it reminds me of my relatives shoving fat on bread at me in times of stress. Also Braunschweiger (aka liverwurst, aka goose liver), although sounding and looking horrible, is delicious. I’ve even found a pate recipe using it to so I can upgrade my obsession persona from German peasant to snooty upscale German peasant.

Where was I?

Right, madeleines and memory, food is happiness. The right food at the right time in the right place? That’s ecstasy, but just food in general, well prepared and right in front of you? Come on, that’s always smile-worthy.

How were you consumed by (or just consumed) happiness this week?

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Cherry Saturday, March 16, 2019

This week is Universal Women’s Week, which occurs in Women’s History Month. I would write more about this but it all occurs during This Is Jenny Sucks At Blogging Month. Apologizing again, profusely.

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Outtake: Max Gets Shot. Again.

So I don’t think this is going to make it into the book. Have an outtake. (Chloe is Button; Nita thinks of her as Button but Max thinks of her as Chloe. This is Max’s PoV.)

When Max came to, he was lying on the big table in Hell Bar, Chloe and Jeo were bent over him, and there was blood all over the bar.

“What the hell, Chloe?” he said, trying to sit up.  “Is that my blood?”

“No,” Jeo said.

Chloe held him down.  “Stay down, you’re hurt.”

“I know I’m hurt, you shot me–”

“No,” she said, and Jeo shook his head and said, “She was in here with us when we heard the shot.  It wasn’t her.”

“Fuck.”  Max pushed Chloe’s hands away and sat up.  It hurt to sit up, and he was still dizzy as hell. “What is this?” 

Jeo shrugged, and Max looked past him to Mammon.

Mammon’s façade was down and he was as pale as a green guy could get.

“You okay, boss?”

“You saved my life.” Mammon took a deep breath.  “Again. Max, my boy, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You’re welcome.  So who have you pissed off enough to want you dead this time?” Max said, trying to feel the bandage on his shoulder.

Chloe batted his hand away. “Stop touching that.  You got winged in the same place I got you, so it’s kind of a mess, the bullet took out a chunk of you, but it went through so not as bad as it could be.  .”

“I got shot,” Max said to her.  “It’s bad, okay.”

Chloe patted his good arm. “But you’re strong and brave and it won’t bother you at all.”

Max glared at her through the dizziness.  “I’m weak and cowardly and I’m going to whine for a week.”

“I know,” Chloe said.  “I was just trying to give you something to aim for, personality-wise.”

He shook his head, which was a big mistake, dizziness-wise.  “What the hell is going on?”

“Somebody’s taking out the competition,” Jeo said.  “They’ve been trying to kill Nick and Nita, somebody came after Rab and me today, and now somebody’s taking shots at Mammon and possibly you.”

“Moloch,” Mammon said. “That bastard.”

Max looked back at Mammon. “You’re grounded.  From now on you do not go out at night.  In fact, go back to Hell and let me finish up here.  But lay low when you get there.  I can’t save your ass in two places at once.”

“No, no, I have to help you close those gates,” Mammon said virtuously.

Max looked back at Chloe, who looked concerned for him.  And really cute, not that he’d ever tell her that again.  “Thank you for bandaging me.”

She smiled.   “Oh, sure.  Any time.  Especially if I’m the one who shoots you.”

Max groaned and lay back down. He was stuck on Earth with Mammon, who had a plan, and somebody else, whose plan was to end Mammon.  

And Chloe Button.

“Crap,” he said, and passed out again.

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This is a Good Book Thursday, March 14, 2019

I’m still re-reading oldies but goodies because at this point, comfort is the name of my reading game.

What did you read this week?

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Working Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Hello, fellow workers! I am currently working on a book that will shortly be . . . not in ten thousand pieces.

What are you up to?

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