Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 65
November 9, 2022
Oh, Hell, I Forgot Working Wednesday
SORRY!
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ve been distracted here. Have a post to comment anything you want on. I’ll get get Good Book Thursday set up.
REALLY SORRY!
November 8, 2022
Pacing: I Might Have Been Wrong
I’ve been working on cutting the first act of Lavender (too slow) and dropping in and out of reading The Thursday Murder Club, which has been illuminating.
The thing about The Thursday Murder Club is the pacing. It’s slow, but measured, releasing information while reveling in character. The point of view shifts not just from character to character but from first to third limited to third omniscient, which should annoy me because it slows the pacing and creates distance. But it also means that you can drop out any time and then rejoin and find something really fun to read without forgetting the plot, or at least any part of the plot that you care about.
Which made me think about pacing in a different way. My take has always been “as fast as possible” which I constantly fail at in the beginnings of my novels. But The Thursday Murder Club has me reconsidering because it’s such a pleasant murder mystery. I don’t care who killed Tony Curran, I don’t even care if he, she, or they is caught. I just want to read about all these people manipulating each other over lemon drizzle. It’s restful
Which is not the same as boring or dragging which is what Lavender’s first act does.
I think part of the reason the Murder Club works is that switch of PoV’s. But it’s also the vivid characterizations. These are not cute old people and crafty cops, these are vibrant human beings having the time of their lives (even the cops). I just want to read about these people together. I think the parallel to Lavender is the Liz/Vince relationship. The more they’re together, the more the book works. Obvious solution: Cut stuff that isn’t Liz and Vince together or at least pare that back. It’s not “It’s the romance, stupid,” it’s “It’s the people together sparking off each other, stupid.”
Oh, right. Fiction is character. I knew that.
Okay, I don’t think I was wrong about the mechanics of pacing–higher stakes in shorter acts–but I think I might have been wrong about reader response. What if it isn’t about the action/events, what if it’s about getting to the reader’s idea of the good parts, anticipation, and what if the longer that’s drawn out, the more frustration the reader feels? And if the good part is solving the mystery, then The Thursday Murder Club probably won’t work for that reader, but if the good part is watching these people finagle and plot, then it’s gonna work just fine for readers like me.
So maybe we just have to get to the Liz and Vince scenes faster. I’m cogitating.
Your thoughts? (Like I had to ask.)
November 7, 2022
State of the Collaboration: Good News! Bad News.
Good news! Bob has given up harassing me about zombie Viking pirates.
And more good news: He put his dog Maggie into the new Rocky Start story, which I am 100% all for. So I put Mona and Emily in. And then . . .
And then, much later . . .
So good news: The zombies have evidently left the building.
Bad news: Now I have months of parrots and dolphins to deal with.
November 6, 2022
Happiness is Falling Back
I am of two minds about Daylight Savings Time: Springing Forward is not my fave, but I love Falling Back. Picking up that extra hour of daylight in the autumn is a lifesaver for me because I have a major problem with SAD (working on that now). So today I am cheerful and on wheels because I just got a bigger morning.
How did you fall into happiness this week?
November 3, 2022
State of the Collaboration: Rocky Start
Just to keep you all in the loop, Bob and I decided to delay starting the next collaboration until after Christmas because we have so much individual work to do. So I wrote a scene just to get my character on the page last week, not really starting the book, and he wrote a scene to get his guy, and then I did another scene so we’d have the meet, and now I’m pretty sure that when we look back to when this one started, we can use Nov. 1. Working title is Rocky Start, although I am still fond of Rose and the Guy Walking the Appalachian Trail with His Dog.
ETA:
We’re also building the character list. Well, I’m building the character lists–names, roles, placeholder pictures, etc.–which annoys Bob:
This is a Good Book Thursday, November 3, 2022
I started The Thursday Murder Club and I love it so far. I’d been avoiding it because I was afraid it would be full of quirky-cute geriatrics, but instead it’s full of quirky savage geriatrics, which is definitely my demographic, so it’s just hitting the spot.
What did you read this week that hit the spot?
November 2, 2022
Working Wednesday, November 2, 2022
How the hell did November get here so fast? I wasn’t through with September. Oh, well, today I am Kondoing my kitchen: I’m looking at the broken pink ice cream dish I never really liked and telling it that it can go. I am organizing all the utensils I keep flinging different places. I am establishing a place for all my small appliances and working through them one by one to see if they really are going to make a difference or if I should put them in a box for Krissie to play with. (My gut feeling is “put them in a box” but I’m going to try every one of them.) And then there’s the burned out stove I’ve been ignoring; I hated that before I caught it on fire. So today, I get savage in my kitchen.
What are you working on savagely (or gently) this week?
November 1, 2022
State of the Collaboration: New Book, New Fights
So while we have agreed not to start writing a new book yet–I have Nita to finish, he’s doing publishing stuff–we are talking about what might be in the new one, Rose and the Guy Hiking the Appalachian Trail with His Dog. I know you all have been wondering what we’ve been talking about (if you haven’t been, keep it to yourself, I need my illusions) so here are parts of the conversations we’ve been having:
Sadly, Bob does not appreciate my sense of humor. He did finally name his guy:
But the important thing is that Bob is still trying to make me crazy, even though I’m COOPERATING.
So basically, nothing has changed. Except I got a blog post out of screenshots again. And now you can talk amongst yourselves about anything you want. See? Everybody wins.
October 30, 2022
Happiness is Doing Good Work
I’ve been working on Nita and the thing is, I really love this book. It’s flawed, it needs help, but I did good work in this book. And Bob and I did good work in the Liz-and-Vince books. This isn’t the go-out-and-brag kind of public congratulations that’s all about selling things. This is quietly looking at what I’ve done and knowing that even if nobody else ever sees this, I’ve worked hard and made something good, a private but very satisfying happiness: This is what I do and I’m good at it. Self-confidence porn. Since usually I’m very self-critical, this is extremely happy-making.
How were you good and happy this week?
October 29, 2022
Revising Scene: Nita’s First Scene AGAIN
I started Nita in 2016 (I think) and there’s a page in the Works in Progress menu here that shows six revisions of the first scene, one for each year from 2016 to 2021. (Don’t read all six. If you’re curious read the first and last one, reading all six will make you hate the book.) So now it’s 2022 and this is the last damn time I’m doing this because it really does get to the point where I’m washing garbage.
So here’s my method for revising scene.
I do not do this for every scene in the book. It would make me insane. But there are two times I need this kind of analysis. One is for a scene that just is not working but that I know I can’t cut. Like the first scene in the book that introduces the protagonist. The other is for a major scene, a turning point, that has to be absolutely precise in what it’s doing. Like the first scene in the book that introduces the protagonist. So here we are, using the “analyzing a scene by beats” method to fix the first scene in the book that introduces the protagonist.
About beats:
• A scene is a series of beats. A beat is unit of action, a unit of conflict.
• In cause and effect linear fiction, each beat follows the last because it’s produced by the last beat.
• Each beat is of higher intensity than the last to build expectation and to keep reader interest.
• Each beat is (usually) shorter than the last to increase pacing.
• And the last beat ends the scene’s conflict and throws the reader into the next scene.
So the first thing I do when revising scene is figure out the beats.
Since this is not my first time revising this damn scene, the beats are pretty clear. I thought.
Protagonist: Nita
Protagonist Goal: Go into Hell Bar to find out who’s afraid in there and fix it.
Antagonist: Button
Antagonist Goal: Keep her drunk partner from damaging her career and Button’s by feeding her coffee to sober her up and keeping her in the car.
What the scene needs to do:
Introduce Nita with the hopes of attaching the reader to her
Introduce Button with the hopes of attaching the reader to her
Foreshadow Nick with the hopes of making the reader want to see him, and especially to see him and Nita meet
Foreshadow the Nita/Button partnership
Set up suspicion about Something Bad going on
(Please note: I don’t think about ANY of this during the first drafts. This is revision stuff.)
BEATS FOR NITA’S FIRST SCENE:
1. Nita tries to make it clear why she has to go into Hell Bar even though she’s had too much drink and she’s in pajamas, Button politely disagrees. Beat is 471 words, ending with Nita trying to get out of the car and Button saying, “Wait.”
2. Button argues more directly against getting out of the car, proposing an alternative. Beat is 604 words, ending with Nita trying to get out of the car and Button saying, “Wait.”
3. Nita is getting out of the car when a patrolman and a detective both arrive to stop her while interacting with Button, showing the difference between them while moving the plot with back-up for Button and stronger conflict for Nita, who really needs to get into that bar and save somebody. Beat is 1311 words and ends with Button saying “Wait.”
4. Nita tells Button she understands why she doesn’t want her in the bar but she has to go in and tells Button to leave her. Button refuses, cementing the partnership. Beat is 280 words and ends with Nita heads for Hell Bar, not waiting, and Button following.
Problems:
• The first and second beats are the same, don’t escalate
• Beats that are over a thousand words are too long; making the pacing is too slow, so beat three needs to be split into two and should be anyway because of two interruptions.
• As written, this does not foreshadow the romance which is the main plot of the book.
• That third “Wait” should escalate. Maybe “Wait,” “Wait,” “WAIT.”
So the plan is to:
• Combine the first two beats..
• Cut and split the third beat to be increasingly shorter and more intense.
• Make Nick more of an (unnamed) presence in the scene so the reader begins to anticipate the meet.
• Fix that third “Wait.”
• Cut this in general. We need to get to the Meet.
The easiest way to do this is to open four docs, one for each beat, and work on each beat as if it were complete in itself. Button’s “wait”s are the turning points, ratcheting up the conflict, and the last beat ends with her not saying “Wait,” but following Nita into the bar instead.
Easy peasy. (Screaming inside.)
I’ll put Scene One 2022 up on the WiP page as soon as I get it done. Don’t hold your breath.