Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 135

On a Creative Roll

I must be in a really creative phase because last night I dreamed a plot for the next Rebel Mechanics book. The dream wasn't actually about that world. It was something I was doing in an entirely different setting, but during the dream, Dream Me thought to myself that this would make a really exciting Rebel Mechanics universe plot. Then as I was waking up, remembering the dream, I started seeing it playing out in that universe.

Though I still need to finish revising this book, but at least the latest Shiny New Idea is in the same universe I'm working in now, and it's not adding yet another fictional universe to the collection.

I'm in the really tedious part of the rewriting, where it can take me a couple of hours per chapter as I pick at it and try to remember that I need tension and emotion. I can tell the parts I wrote when I was in a tension-averse phase. Since this part is so tedious, it's also time consuming. I'm doing half-hour on, half-hour off cycles. That seems to be just enough of a break to stop me from going into autopilot or "whatever" mode but not enough of a break that I break the spell and step out of that mindset and world. This is where music is coming in handy. I got the "learn to play harp" book I ordered from Amazon yesterday, and that makes for a perfect break. I'm still doing something creative, it's physical, so it works as a distraction, but I can still be thinking about the story.

So, today's plan will be half an hour writing, half an hour harping, all afternoon and probably into the night, depending on how things are going.

I may sound like I'm griping, but this is one of my favorite phases of writing. It's difficult, but the results are so rewarding.

Not Ready for Prime Time

I was reminded of why it's seldom a good idea to dive in and start writing that shiny new idea as soon as it hits you. I wrote out everything I knew about the new story yesterday, and I only filled a sheet of notebook paper, in spite of feeling like I'd seen the whole movie in my head. What I have is an idea with some details. I don't have a full story. For one thing, I don't know who/what the antagonist is and what the antagonist wants. I don't know what the real story goal is. I know the immediate goal of the protagonists, but I don't know the bigger picture goal that they'll develop after they learn what's really going on.

However, that doesn't mean my mind isn't eagerly playing with this idea, which made editing difficult yesterday. I'd be trying to focus on reading the book I'm working on and looking for places to add oomph, and my mind would trail off to "and what if this was what was going on …" in that other idea. By the end of the day, I'd added a page to my brainstorming. I suppose it's a sign that oomph is needed if my mind wandered away like that.

It's still not ready to write, though. This sort of thing was what delayed the start of my writing career. Maybe I could have been one of those teen phenomenons if I'd focused better, but I had a bad habit of getting a great idea, starting to write a story, then having it fizzle out about two chapters in because my great idea was only a concept, not a real story. Then I'd get another idea, etc., until I had a file of first chapters that never went anywhere because I had concepts, not plots.

Now I need to focus enough on the current project to finish it. Then I can move on, either to the next thing I had planned or maybe to more work on this. Doing some real work on it will either make it take on a lot more life or will prove that it's not ready for prime time so I can go back to other things and let it gestate some more. Strategically, this isn't what I need to be writing right now. It really should come after the next thing I have planned.

So now I have at least nine fictional universes of my own trying to play out in my head. Some are quieter than others, but all of them pop up and demand attention every so often. And that's not even getting into other people's fictional universes that I find myself analyzing and trying to fix (which often generates a new fictional universe of my own when analyzing and fixing give me new ideas).

I've designated this weekend as "get my life together" weekend for bookkeeping, taxes, house cleaning, etc., but I may make my play time be some brainstorming in this new universe, with hopes that this will make it shut up and go away for now.

Shiny New Ideas

I got the first six chapters revised yesterday, but that was the easy part because that's the section I submitted to the publisher, so I'd already done a lot of work on them. Now I'm in the part that hasn't been worked over all that much, so it will take a little more effort.

However, the first thing I need to do today is a big brain dump to clear my head because last night I was hit by a story idea. This wasn't one of those little "I'd like to do something like this" notions. It was fairly fully fledged, with characters, backstory, situation, conflict, goal, and even scenes and chunks of dialogue. It was like getting smacked upside the head with a doorstopper fantasy novel. By the time I went to sleep, I'd seen about half of it as a movie (with bits of narrative woven in). When I woke up, I had even more details and more scenes.

The cool thing is that this idea would fit with what my agent has suggested would be good for me to do, but fixes my issues of why I haven't felt like doing that would be something I'd be good at. It's a trope reversal story, which I think is a lot of fun.

But it's not ready to write. I may have a sense of the main characters, the situation, and the plot, but it needs more detail and specifics. I need to finish the book I'm working on and one more before I'm anywhere near ready to work on this. Since this is the shiny new thing, my brain wants to play with it. That's why the first order of business will be to write it all down, everything I know so far. That will preserve it and get it out of my head.

Oh, but I think it will be so much fun.

I'm not even sure where it came from. I was reading one of the Norton Award nominees when it hit me, but that book had nothing in common with the thing I came up with. There's a bit of imagery from something I saw earlier this week that may have triggered it. Maybe it's something that's been lurking in my subconscious for a while, and these things just brought it to the surface. I've had big ideas smack me upside the head before (like the Enchanted, Inc. series), but few of them have come as fully formed as this.

Now I guess I'm extra motivated to finish the projects I have planned. This one may move up in the queue from other things I was thinking about doing.

The Once Upon Stilettos Reread -- Chapters Three and Four

It's re-read commentary time again (mostly because original thought is escaping me). Today I'll cover chapters three and four of Once Upon Stilettos.

I have to say that re-reading this book has become a total nostalgia trip. I'm remembering the process of writing it and all the stuff that had been living in my head before I wrote it. In a weird way, this book was kind of like my own fanfic for my own series. I'd written the first book but didn't want to invest time in writing a second until I knew it would sell, but I was still making up stories in my head in that world. Selling the book and a sequel gave me the chance to write those stories down. The whole book didn't come from that, but there were a lot of scenes that had their origins in daydreaming about these characters.

So, chapter three really gets into the plot about the mole within the company, which allowed me to play with all the corporate life tropes. One of my early descriptions of the series was "Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter and goes to work with Dilbert." I didn't get to do quite as much of that as I wanted in the first book, so this plot let me go crazy with all the stuff I remembered from my corporate life (and I was doing freelance work at the time I was writing it, so I was still embedded in corporate America). There was the office grapevine more powerful than the CIA, where everyone knew everyone's business. I slipped in the reference to Merlin reading Who Moved My Cheese? because my original concept of the character, before I decided he was Merlin, was a wizard who'd been out of commission for a long time and who was getting re-oriented by reading modern business books. I didn't go quite as far with that as I originally planned because Merlin turned out to be too sensible, but my plan had been for the boss to go from management fad to management fad, depending on which book he'd just read. That was based on my corporate experience, where it seemed like we had one company retreat a year in which they presented a whole new plan to make us like our jobs more and do our jobs better based on yet another management fad.

Then there was the introduction of the frog boss. That was a nod to the cover art. I fell so in love with the businessman frog on the cover of the first book that I wrote him into the second book. I had a draft of the cover for the first book while I was writing the second one, so I was inspired to write him in as a character.

Chapter four was my sneaky way of working in some quasi-romantic scenes between Katie and Owen when they weren't actually romantically involved. I'm a big fan of the slow-build romance, and having Katie be dating someone else allowed me to develop a strong friendship between her and Owen. I think that also worked with his character, where he was too shy to ask her on a real date, but he could manage "hey, wanna grab dinner?" on the way home from work. And then readers got to see lots of the two of them together and bonding. I did have a specific diner in mind. It's near Union Square, and I ate a meal there when I was researching the book.

Digging In

I made it through Easter weekend. My reading on Friday night went well. I didn't stumble over any words, and no one took a cell phone call and walked away while I was doing it (like happened in my nightmare). I spent Saturday in a frenzy of cooking and house cleaning before collapsing to read and then go to bed early. Sunday, I woke before my alarm, so I was weirdly alert all morning for the three services I had to sing in.

Now I think it's caught up with me, along with some allergies. I'm giving myself one last day off. I'd thought about going up to Oklahoma today for a few days, but they started talking about bad storms there and here on the day I would have been driving home, so I thought I'd do better staying home. I'm planning to do a minor outing and some errands this afternoon, then do some serious planning for the work I'll do the rest of the week.

I'm on the draft where I really dig into each scene and figure out how to make that scene better -- more description, more action, more emotion, better words, fewer words, tighter dialogue, etc. One thing I've done in the past was find a theme song for each scene -- a piece of music that speaks to me about the scene or that conveys the emotion I want to convey -- and I use that to test the scene. When the scene makes me feel the way the piece of music makes me feel, it's right.

So, today's work will probably involve re-reading the first few scenes and picking theme songs, and then I'll sleep on it and then dig into rewriting tomorrow. Having the music and the scene in my head will allow me to create a vivid mental movie that may tell me additional things that need to happen.

While I may add a lot of stuff in this phase, I also lose a lot because there's a tendency to brainstorm in the writing and talk around something until I settle on an outcome. I can cut to the outcome, or there are times when some dialogue echoes thinking, and I can cut the thinking.

This all sounds pretty tedious, but I generally enjoy it because I'm not having to worry so much about what happens next, and I can feel the story getting better.

I Dreamed a Dream

Crazy weekend is upon me, with a church service tonight and three on Sunday. I have a reading in tonight's service, and I had an anxiety dream about it last night, which is weird because I don't generally get any kind of stage fright for reading or speaking, only music. In my dream, I was trying to do the reading for someone, and then someone else approached that person and they started a conversation while I was trying to read. I held my place and waited for them to finish before resuming. And then it happened again, but that time I just walked away while they were talking.

Come to think of it, that sounds more like anxiety about not being heard or listened to than about the act of reading itself, and I doubt it's really about this particular reading. It's probably more career-related, feeling invisible and unheard in the industry. At any rate, I still need to practice this reading a bit before tonight.

I also dreamed about school book orders, probably because I placed an Amazon order yesterday. That's almost like the adult version of a book order, only instead of getting a poster when you order a certain number of things, you get free shipping. A good chunk of my childhood and teen library came from school book orders. It was like Christmas when the order came in, but then I had to go through the whole school day before I could get home and dig into my new books. Now they arrive on my doorstep, or sometimes in my mailbox. This order wasn't so much "fun" reading. I got a book on playing the harp and a book on music theory, since I never learned much about keys and chords and that's pretty essential for using a stringed instrument as accompaniment.

The rest of the weekend, I will be reading frantically because I want to read as much as possible from the Nebula Awards ballot before the voting deadline next week. I may not get to all the novels, but I can at least try to read a little and keep reading the ones I like. I'm finding it interesting how many of the novellas, novelettes, and short stories on the ballot use first-person narration. I don't think I've seen that much of it before. As someone who loves first-person, both for reading and writing, I like this trend. And at least one story I read yesterday influenced some of the imagery in last night's dreams. There was a vividly described dress in the story, and I dreamed I was trying to make it.

Wow, last night was big on vivid dreams that stuck with me. Alas, no solid story ideas in any of them. Like I need more story ideas.

The Once Upon Stilettos Reread -- More About Chapters One and Two

I'm picking up again with the Once Upon Stilettos author commentary re-read. In case you missed it, here's part one, which was mostly about the background of the story and the title. I have it on my to-do list to compile the entire commentary for Enchanted, Inc. and add it to the web site, but I'm not sure when that will happen.

Since part one was mostly about the title and the background, I'll do more about chapter one and then also cover chapter two.

So, the date with Ethan … When I was working on the concept for this series, before I started writing it or even had a firm plot outline and specific characters developed, what I had in mind was a number of potential love interests for Katie, and over time maybe one would turn out to be Mr. Right. I didn't want to do an outright triangle, and I didn't want her going back and forth, but I liked the idea of her having a few men in her life who were potential love interests and letting her do some casual dating before one became the obvious winner. I envisioned shipper wars on message boards and people declaring themselves "team whoever."

And then I started writing, and the character who was barely on my radar suddenly became obvious. But I didn't want to go there too soon, so in the ending of the first book and the beginning of this one, I let Katie date someone else, just so we'd have the comparison (and because Owen was way too shy to make a move so soon). Ethan was my idea of the "good on paper" guy. They had a lot in common, and he was the kind of guy a mom would rejoice to see with her daughter. But having some common background and the same magical status doesn't mean it will work out in reality. He's not a bad guy. They just aren't right for each other. That's what I was trying to show in that first date at the wine tasting. He's perhaps trying a bit too hard to impress her, and it utterly fails because this isn't the sort of thing that does impress her. She just finds the whole thing a bit silly.

The wine tasting is somewhat based on an event I went to not too long before I wrote this book. There was a fancy wine shop in the neighborhood where I went to church, and they donated a wine-tasting party for a fundraising auction. One of the choir members bought it and invited the choir. They went through all these wines and then handed out order sheets so you could buy them. I like wine, and I do drink it, but I couldn't honestly tell the difference between most of them at that tasting, and I never could taste all those flavors they said were in there. I could catch things like honey and pear, but not oak or coffee. I went through a few ideas of what kind of date Ethan might have come up with for an impressive first date, but most of them would have required a lot of research to get right, and then I remembered the wine tasting.

Meanwhile, this scene serves to remind us about the magical immunity and how it works while hinting that something might be wrong with Katie's immunity. I didn't plan it at the time I was writing it, but I realized after the fact when I was doing revisions that the wine fit thematically, since potions that change behavior or perception were so important to the plot of the book.

Then we get the meat of the main plot near the end of the chapter, where we learn about the possible mole within the company.

Problem Characters: The Charismatic Villain

I'm continuing the discussion of problem characters, and I think I've run out of them, so I'm open to questions or suggestions on either this topic or other writing topics you want me to address. The final (maybe) problem character is the Charismatic Villain.

This is another one of those "problems" that doesn't sound like a problem. A good villain can do a lot for a story. You want your villain to be interesting and memorable. It's only a problem when your villain doesn't quite fit with the story you're telling. If you've got a great villain with a sympathetic backstory that almost justifies his actions, lots of snappy dialogue, and all the good scenes while the heroes are either bland or fatally flawed, then it's not going to be very satisfying when the heroes defeat the villain. Or if you fall so in love with your villain that you can't bring yourself to defeat him and decide to redeem him instead, that's a problem if the redemption is out of proportion with his evil. You also have problems if readers are cheering for your villain to win and that's not the story you're telling (you'll probably always have at least a few villain apologists, but I'm talking about the general readership).

The problem is that villains are fun to write (and many actors say they prefer playing villains because they're more fun to play). You can let them say and do all those things you might think about but would never do. You can go all-out without worrying about whether they're still sympathetic. So what do you do if you've had a little too much fun writing your villain, and you find that your beta readers or critique partners like your villain more than your heroes -- and that's not what you want?

The first thing to do is do more work on your heroes. I addressed that earlier in talking about the good guy as a problem character. Heroes don't have to be boring (and I tend to think that writers who say that heroes are boring are lazy or untalented because that means they're either not trying or are doing it wrong). Heroes can have sad backstories and complex motivations. They can have funny lines and great scenes. Give your heroes the same care and development as you give your villains, and that will take your story to a new level. One classic example of this balance is the original Die Hard movie. The villain (aided by a brilliant performance by Alan Rickman) was so charismatic that in a way you found yourself sometimes cheering for him, but the hero (aided by Bruce Willis's snarky charm) also got great lines, got to be clever, and had a sympathetic story. Watching these two great characters go head to head was what made this movie so fun.

Or you could consider shifting the perspective. If you really love your villain and that's the best character in your story, maybe your villain should be an anti-hero protagonist, and either he gets to win and achieve his goals or he fails and is defeated by the good guys, and it's tragic. This is what you often see in gangster or crime spree stories, where the characters we're following would usually be the bad guys.

Or maybe if the villain is who you sympathize with the most, he could be a kind of bad boy hero and the star of the story, with some worse villain as the antagonist. You'd probably want to dial back the atrocities with this or with the anti-hero if you want audiences in general to sympathize with this character, but you can retain the troubled backstory and the snark.

Another option is the redemption arc -- let this character see the error of his ways and turn to helping the good guys against some worse villain. Then readers can be happy when team good guy wins because their favorite character is on that team. A well-done redemption arc can be a powerful story, but the redemption has to be earned and in proportion with the evil.

What it mostly comes down to is that you want your ending to be something that most of your readers will be happy with, and that means having the right characters be in the right place to have the right outcome that will be satisfying.

Life in Order

I finished my draft Friday evening, and now I get a week of getting the rest of my life back in order before I dive into the serious editing and polishing. That starts today with reminding my parents what I look like, so I need to throw a few things in the car and go.

The rest of the week, I have choir, Good Friday and Easter services, an Easter egg hunt, and dance class. Meanwhile, I got my loaner harp yesterday and am having fun learning to play it. I've managed to tune it and to play one song (badly), but I think I'm picking it up faster than I did the piano. I'm using the same book and the same music, so perhaps the piano was what started training my brain for this. This is a smallish Celtic harp, not the full concert harp. It's somewhat portable -- has a carrying case, and all -- so I could bring it to local events to play, but I wouldn't want to try to fly with something like this.

Regular activities will resume later in the week, but for now, my parents are going to start wondering when I'll get there.

Writers I Know

Now I'm down to revising the part of the book that really needs rewriting. I feel pretty good about the rest of the book up to this point. It needs fine tuning, but I think the story works. I hope to finish the rewrites tonight or tomorrow, and then I'm giving myself a kind of spring break next week. I'll visit my parents, catch up on business stuff (like finishing my taxes and doing massive amounts of filing), muck out the house, and maybe even get some fun in, though that may be tricky to arrange, as it's Easter week and being in the choir means that's busy time. And then after Easter, I'll do a serious editing pass, when I dig into each scene to make sure I'm conveying everything that needs to be there, touch up the descriptions, and tighten the wording.

I gave myself a little time off from the rewriting last night (since my brain needed a break) to watch my recording of the recent production of And Then There Were None that aired on Lifetime this week. They seem to be picking up what A&E did in the 90s in airing the big British productions that PBS doesn't get. Earlier this year they did a good War and Peace miniseries. This was a two-parter that was very well done, if a bit grim (it follows the book rather than the stage play, so if you're familiar with Agatha Christie, you know what that means). The cast was excellent (though it took some getting used to seeing "Poldark" clean-shaven and with short hair), and it was very atmospheric. I love those "there's a house party in a remote place, and people start dying" stories.

Sunday night is going to be a night of "writers I know on TV." Jane Espenson wrote this week's Once Upon a Time episode, and while I haven't met her in person, I've interviewed her via e-mail and wrote an essay for a book she edited, so she's at least aware of my existence. Then my friend Paul Cornell (who's written for Doctor Who) wrote the episode of Elementary that's on Sunday night, which is a new schedule for that series. Paul's one of my convention buddies, and he's even ridden in my car, which led to something of a slapstick routine. My car doesn't have automatic anything, so I find that the easiest way to unlock the door for a passenger is to go to the passenger side with my key and unlock it. Due to a combination of Britishness (since they drive on the opposite side) and gentlemanly manners (not being used to a lady going to open the door for a gentleman), when I went to unlock the passenger side, Paul then went around and tried to get in the driver's side. I'm not sure how we did it, but we went around on that a couple of times until I finally told him that if he really wanted to drive, maybe I'd let him, but he had to be able to do a stick shift with what would be the wrong hand for him. In his defense, this was at the end of a convention, and he was very tired. So Sunday night, I'll get to applaud his credit appearing on the screen.

Now the skies are getting darker, which means it should be good writing weather for me, as long as we don't get the kind of hail they got elsewhere in the area yesterday morning.