Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 260

And now back to work . . .

Krissie just left, Toni should be home in New Orleans by today, and I’m back in bed, which isn’t as slothful as it sounds because that’s actually a healthier way to write than sitting at a desk all day. Okay, and because I need more sleep, but still we worked hard this weekend, so no guilt. It’s amazing how much we accomplished, how many blanks we filled in, how much ground we covered, especially when you consider how much time we spent shopping and eating. So here’s what worked for us this weekend:

POST-DISCOVERY SCHEDULING: This was the time to meet. If we’d gotten together any sooner, it would have been a waste of time and money, but because we’d socked away six weeks of intensive discussion, brainstorming and discovery, running into walls and doing detours, solving problems and discovering our characters, we had a massive amount of data that needed organized, and you can do that quickly when you’re in a small living room with four white boards, four dogs, and a third party who says, “Uh huh,” a lot. We also knew the big things we had to get down–the turning points, the laws of magic, the antagonist’s escalation, etc.–so we could work for four hours, go out for lunch, come back and say, “What’s next?” without missing a beat. The prep for this kind of meeting is crucial.

CHANGE OF SCENERY: I think going somewhere else to talk about something new is just smart. Krissie and Toni did that while I stayed home, but just having them here is a change of scenery for me. The context in which we do things changes those things, so changing the context meant looking at things in a different light. The best example of this happened when we were talking about the geography of Monday Street, how it’s the lowest part of the city, the land that it’s on sloping steeply down to the water so that the street behind it is a full story higher. We’re trying to visualize it as we walked down to the lake at the bottom of the property here (which is NOT EASY so another breakthrough was “forget reclaiming the stone steps and just put in all new wood steps”), and I’m thinking how Monday Street is a semi circle off the main street because the coastline is uneven there, and then we get back to the house, Toni goes back to the hotel, and it hits me: I live on a semi-circle off a main road because the shoreline of the lake I live on is uneven, and my house is way at the top of the hill. So I e-mailed Toni and said, “You know the church yard on Monday Street? We just hiked it.” I could have written that whole book without realizing I’d modeled Monday Street on the geography I was sitting on if we hadn’t walked down to the lake. (Big props to Toni for risking her life and limb to do that.)

WHITE BOARDS: I went to Home Depot and bought four 2′x4′ white board pieces for ten bucks each. They’re not framed or fancy, but they meant we could think out loud while organizing thoughts and keep an ongoing record we could both see.

(Here’s a typical but by no means only possible white board outline:

)

It’s that “both see” that’s key. We can keep notes in our computers and both look at the screen, but the white boards meant that we were looked at them and each other, not staring into another damn glowing rectangle. It also meant that we could each see how the other worked, which is key because Toni and I have never written together. And it gave Krissie a chance to see the world and what we’ve done with it so she’s familiar with it when she wants to write in it later. Which brings us to . . .

KRISSIE: Having somebody who knew the original world, who had a familiarity with the world as it’s developed, and who plans to write in it in the future meant that we had a sounding board who was already invested. She became a touchstone–”Does this make sense?” “Is this any good?” “Is this confusing?”–and that was a huge help because this world is complex as all hell. I’m okay with that–hey, worlds are complex–but I wasn’t okay with “confusing.” At one point, I said to her, “Is there too much stuff in this book? Because there’s a lot of stuff in here,” and she said, “No, it’s just rich.” One of the many lovely things about Krissie is that she tells me the truth, so if she says something is okay, I stop worrying about it.

So those are my conclusions: Do the prep, change the scenery and walk the terrain, use white boards, and invite Krissie.

Also, make bunnies, but that’s a different post.

ETA: A different plot outline.

Threadcakes

Threadless, one my fave T-shirt places, runs a cake contes called Threadcakes that invites bakers to reproduce one of their T-shirts as a cake. And it’s amazing. Krissie, Toni, and I are busy right now, and we apologize, so to make it up to you . . .

have some cake:

Their T-shirts are great, too.

Patience, Grasshopper

Toni and I have both hit moments of panic this week. We’re not sure how the story works. We don’t have the acts figured out. My antagonist disappears at the midpoint. How does person X know this about person Y? WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN AT THE END??????

Another good thing about collaboration: as long as everybody doesn’t panic at once, there’s always somebody there to talk you down. The big reminder here is that since both Toni and I are rabid rewriters, we just need to get this stuff down on the page. We’ve done an amazing amount of work in six weeks in the discovery alone, and the pages we’re writing are rough but they’re good. They’ll rewrite just fine. As for the rest of the book, we’ll find out a lot of that stuff as we write it. The first draft is discovery, too.

So it’s Take A Deep Breath time. Of course we don’t know exactly how the rest of the book is going to go. We’ll get there. Here, have a cookie.

Krissie and Toni are arriving at Squalor on the Lake tomorrow, so there may be some blog silence while we whoop it up work on the book. But we will not be panicking. We will be at one with the universe of the book, or at least the parts of it we’re pretty sure about. Everything will fine.

There will be cookies.

Nothing Happens Nowhere, Part 2

So once I had the church elevation done, I kept fiddling with it. Added the rest of the shops. Figured out how the churchyard looked. Added the Warehouse for Toni’s characters. Added the Wild, which is going to be a big setting for Toni’s character. And so now this . . .

is this:

It’s funny how much this helps me follow my characters around the story. Oh and thanks to the people who suggested tattoos, barbershop, bookstore, and pharmacy.

And now for something completely different . . .

Because you must be getting sick of all this discovery stuff.

And because I’m a fool for Minions:

Nothing Happens Nowhere

Eudora Welty said, “Nothing happens nowhere,” and she’s right: setting is huge in storytelling. The place, time, and people observing the action aren’t just wallpaper, they have a big impact on what happens in the scene. Add building your own fantasy world to that, and things get complicated.

One of the things I’ve been doing for the last several years for the important buildings in my stories is floorpans. I want to know how the characters move through their spaces, and I can’t do that until I see how the spaces are laid out. In this collaboration, one of the most important settings is the church where my protagonist is secretly living. It’s not just her home, it’s also the site of some fairly large action sequences, so everybody had to know how the church was laid out. But for the first time, instead of a floor plan, I did an elevation, a plan from the side, because most of the action in this building is vertical, not horizontal. It’s another one of those discovery exercises we’ve been talking about. As I draw the plan, I can see how the different levels work, what Cat has to do to get up and down them, and how the general typography works. Toni’s character doesn’t have many scenes in the church, but she has enough that she needs to know what’s in my head, and because I have to put it on paper, I know it much better now myself.

Back to Basics: Ticker Counter

I’m putting this here so I have a URL for my word counts. Hey, all the posts can’t be winners.

Ticker Counter: Nano without the hassle:

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THE MONDAY STREET STORIES

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THE PARADISE PARK STORIES

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Writing: It’s More Than Typing

Many years ago, I used to imagine what it would be like to be a writer. A writer would sit in his or her study, gazing out at trees or a nice lake, drink some tea, and then start to type. “Chapter One.” A couple of weeks and many gallons of tea later, he or she would type “The End” and send the manuscript off to the publisher, and then sit looking out at the trees or the lake, full of accomplishment and caffeine.

I wasn’t completely wrong.

I’m typing this looking out at the trees, and there’s a lake down there somewhere (I live at the top of the hill) and there’s definitely tea in my future and probably cookies (I should have fantasized cookies) but everything else was wrong. For one thing, I’ve written over twenty books, and I’ve never typed “The End.” That’s probably because I never let go of a book, I’m still editing on the galleys, but still, who types “The End”? Isn’t the fact that there are no more words enough of a clue? No? Okay, fine, type “The End.”

So I’ve made some discoveries about writing in the twenty-three years I’ve been doing it. One is that a lot of writing isn’t writing. It’s staring into space a LOT. It’s doodling on a pad of graph paper or in Curio to see where everything goes. It’s pasting pictures together. Mostly, most importantly, it’s listening to the voices in my head once all that other stuff I’ve just mentioned makes them come alive. After that, it’s just transcription and revision. The key is knowing when to stop staring into space and start typing. You need to learn when the “not yet, not yet” in your head is because the story isn’t quite there yet (give it time), and when it’s just fear shutting you down (you’ve given it enough time). Getting to the stage where you’re not just planning the story, you’re dreaming about it night and day, when everything you see and hear sticks to the story and gets sucked into it (sticky time), when the story world is more real and more compelling than the real world, that first part is crucial.

But after that, you have to type. (Or write long hand, we don’t judge.) Welcome to National Typing That Story Month. How’s your NaNo starting?

Edited to Add:

Ticker Counter: Nano without the hassle:

Cherry Saturday 1 1 2014

It’s National Bat Week. Adopt a bat.

No, this time I’m serious. The bat population is being hit hard by disease and wind farms (nothing against wind farms, we need those, too). Build a bat house and watch your mosquito population drop. Or just help others do the good work by adopting a bat at the Adopt-a-Bat site or by hitting the Save the Bats site for more information and good works.

We lose the bats and the bees, and we’re toast, folks. It’s not just because they’re cute.

NaNoWriMo Is Not the Name of Pocahontas’s Sister

So NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow–I hate that abbreviation but what are you going to do?–and millions of people will sit down and start to type. Since I’ve been writing a lot lately, I thought I’d give it another try this year, but although I can find my dashboard on the website, I can’t find the place to put in the word count. It hasn’t started and I’ve failed. Then I thought I’d cut and paste their explanation of what NaNoWriMo is. Couldn’t find it. Either I’m inept–a strong possibility–or their website needs work. So I went to Wikipedia:

National Novel Writing Month, shortened as NaNoWriMo (na-noh-ry-moh),[2] is an annual internet-based creative writing project that takes place during the month of November. NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel from November 1 until the deadline at 11:59PM on November 30. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to get people writing and keep them motivated throughout the process. To ensure this, the website provides participants with tips for writer’s block, local places writers participating in NaNoWriMo are meeting, and an online community of support. The idea is to focus on completion instead of perfection. NaNoWriMo focuses on the length of a work rather than the quality, encouraging writers to finish their first draft so that it can later be edited at the author’s discretion.[3] NaNoWriMo’s main goal is to encourage creativity worldwide.[4] The project started in July 1999 with just 21 participants, but by the 2010 event over 200,000 people took part – writing a total of over 2.8 billion words.[5]

There you go. Write 50,000 words in November and . . . I forget what they do for you. Writing 50,000 words should be reward enough.

So who who’s playing this year? And what are you writing? Tell all.