Lisa Batya Feld's Blog, page 14

Year to Date

And the latest in the ongoing saga of my writing life...

2012 Stats (as of 12/31/12):
Stories Circulating: 12
Rejections: 105
Sales: 2

I'm happy about the fact that I sold another story and poem this year, but it's frustrating that so many of the stories I was circulating last year, which I had worked so hard to polish for my MFA thesis, are still being shopped around. These are stories I really believe in, and it's hard to see them rejected over and over. But I have high hopes for them in the coming year.

Next year's stats will probably look very different because I'm changing both what I write and what I'm doing with my writing. When I started writing, I was a natural novelist. I trained myself into writing short stories because it would be easier to practice various story elements over and over again, and it would be easier to get other people to critique short stories. I haven't written a novel since I was 19. Then, 6 years ago, I changed to only writing mainstream literary short stories rather than SFF because I wanted to learn everything I could from my MFA program and that meant writing only what the professors liked. And for the past two years, I haven't written a word, I think becase I'm so divorced from the kind of writing I really care about.

But this year's NaNoWriMo has convinced me to get back to my first love, writing fantasy novels. That means in the coming year, the number of stories and rejections are gradually going to drop to almost nothing as I finish sending my old stories to different markets and start focusing on novels. Books take longer to write, and my plan is to self-publish my first few novels as e-books, which means no rejections to tally, and the sales will begin to mark sales of e-books to individual customers. It's going to be an exciting year.

Nano wrap-up

The first couple of weeks of Nanowrimo went pretty well; I stayed on target despite being sick and working late, pounding out the wordage and using weekends to catch up. I even managed to write something like 4K while flying across the country on no sleep. Twice. In 36 hours.

But I knew that when I got home to my folks, I was going to need to choose between connecting with them or withdrawing to focus on writing. I chose human contact: I've got a lot going on right now that I needed to talk through with them, and it's the first time in a long while that I've gotten to see my aunt, and even longer since I've seen my awesome cousins. I wanted to be present for all that.

And then I flew home on Monday and had to pound through the work week, and I knew there was no way I could make it to 50K, so again, I focused on catching up at work and transitioning back in a good way.

So I finished off the month with 29,410 words and the following realizations:

1. My 18-month dry spell is over.
2. I am a natural novelist and I have now re-learned how to pace a longer story. I am getting off short stories cold turkey, starting now!
3. I have more spare time than I think I do.
4. This is not the end. I'm already back at work on the novel this weekend, and I think I've worked out a good word quota for real life so I can write a good chunk every day and still do things like make dinner.

Feels good.

Nano, week 2

Week two, the demons came out to play. I spent most of the week sick with some kind of virus, unable to focus enough to write much, and on the remaining days I had to pound out the wordcount to stay on track and try and build up a little buffer for birthday/Thanksgiving, when I really want to spend my time with the people I love. And when you have to work fast, you tend to stick to what you know. So my subconscious, in looking for complications for my main character, started pulling out some of the darker chapters of my life, and when I realized this, I realized that in order to make it believable and keep my main character sympathetic, I had to show what was so appealing about that situation, why a reasonable person would stay when they were that unhappy. Trying to balance between those two points authentically, showing the problems and building the tension while still showing the appeal, made for some very dark days.

And now, going into week three, I have the opposite problem. My character has earned herself a respite where she gets to try building something healthy (which will then be threatened by the situation she's running from), and I don't know what that looks like for her. I have to show her succeeding at things I'm still struggling with, and I'm not entirely sure how to do that authentically. I'm really curious to see what emerges.

The shape of things

I'm driving to Starbucks to grab some breakfast and work on my novel, and I keep going over it in my head: is my plot strong enough to keep a reader's interest? Is it building to a climax, steadily ratcheting up tension?

I start thinking about the classic Algis Budrys seven-point plot, the symmetrical upside-down V of Shakespeare's plays and the slanted, upside-down V of Cinderella that diagram that classic understanding of plot:

1. A person
2. In a place
3. Has a problem.
4. They try to solve their problem
5. And fail
6. Repeatedly
7. Until they finally succeed or fail beyond recovery.

But then I start thinking about how I tried to find another fairy tale to plug into that model when I taught it to a class. I had a hard time figuring out how to grid The King of Cats or Sleeping Beauty. Who is the protagonist trying and failing to reach their goal in Beauty and the Beast? What do you do with a story like East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which changes goals partway through? How about Ender's Game, where a major point is that the protagonist's stated goal turns out not to be the actual goal? What about the branching plotlines and protagonists of Lord of the Rings?

Maybe that classic V isn't the only shape to show the structure of a plot. Maybe you need nesting dolls to diagram 1001 Nights, or a firework exploding and converging for Lord of the Rings. An Escher drawing for Rashomon. A hedge maze. An ouroboros.

I'm not the first to think this way. Some of this is coming from musings by Cory Doctorow I'd forgotten for ages, and I'm sure he wasn't the first, either. But right now, when I'm trying to write this novel, it's helpful for me to recognize that while it's important that my plot keep moving, it doesn't necessarily have to keep pushing forward in a straight line.

On forests and trees.

This probably surprises no one who has read my writing, but while I value plot deeply and explain the techniques pretty well to others, I have serious trouble doing it myself. Which is to say that outlining my NaNoWriMo novel is freaking hard.

I thought of a nifty idea, talked it over with my friend Trai, mulled it over some more, and wrote out a half-page summary of the beats of the story. Felt pretty smug about it, too. I knew everything that happened, and it had a beginning, middle, climax, and end.

Then I sat down and tried something I've never done before. I tried to apply Jim Butcher's basic plot structure to that outline: The character takes action or someone takes action against them, the character reacts emotionally, processes what just happened, and decides how to respond. That decision raises the stakes and propels us into the next action. (Technically, it's Jack M. Bickham's structure, but I feel like Jim Butcher explains it much better and reveals its amazing flexibility.) When I applied this structure to the outline I had written, sure enough, I discovered that my outline relied almost exclusively on emotion and processing, some decisions, and almost no actions. It wasn't clear why the characters were being drawn along certain tracks, and the scenes didn't flow naturally. Worst of all, considering that the novel centers around a love triangle, the lack of action/reaction meant it wasn't clear why the main characters liked each other or why they chose at a certain point to shift their affections.

So now I'm back at the drawing board, rewriting my outline and trying to make sure there's a sturdy trellis of plot to hold all that emotional weight. Trying to make sure that the actions the characters take are interesting, sympathetic, consistent with their personalities, and drive the reader eagerly towards the climax. It's uncomfortable and frustrating as hell. I have to keep telling myself it's a necessary skill and I'll be grateful when I finally figure it out.

Atonement

Every year around this time, I go through a little crisis of faith. See, after Rosh Hashanah, the new year, comes Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (a friend of mine once described it as "aw, you brought me flowers, how sweet -- okay, what did you do?").

Now, the rule is that before you can ask forgiveness of God, you have to ask it of the people that you've hurt over the past year. And atonement doesn't just mean rote apology; ideally, you have to change your behavior, make reparations, in some way undo the harm or make sure it won't happen again.

I have two problems with this. The first is that more than half the people I'm close to are not Jewish. So I have to think every year, "Okay, do I risk making this person uncomfortable by involving them in a foreign religious ritual, or do I decide that this part of my faith should just be a rote ritual I do with my family that doesn't affect the rest of my life?" If the person is important enough to me, I usually at least try, and try to couch it in terms that they'll be less uncomfortable with: "I know this seems odd, but it's a part of my faith, and I like to use it as a chance to check in with the people I care about, and you're one of them."

The second problem is more difficult to overcome, and every year it brings up a lot of tension for me. The problem is that most people I'm close to are really happy with our relationship, and the question of whether I need to make reparations to them just brings a smile to their faces. And then, rarely, there are the really troubled relationships where either I've hurt this person and they do NOT want to talk to me or they've hurt me and aren't sorry and I do NOT want to open myself up to the kind of abuse they might unleash on me. So it often feels like the only times this ritual is really warranted, it's just going to cause them or me more pain without leading to constructive change.

I think this year I've been pretty lucky, in that I've been working on those relationships already, so there's some groundwork laid. But I think I need to change the question I'm asking. Instead of, "Is there anything I've done in the past year to hurt you," I think it needs to be more mutual, something that says I'm willing to listen to whatever they want to say, but also leaves room for me to respond, to talk about the hurts *I* need to let go of.

Tisha B'Av

For my non-Jewish friends, this is kind of the Jewish version of Friday the 13th, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, the Inquisition expelling the Jews from Spain, etc.

Some years, I connect with it more than others. But every year, I can't help but remember the Tisha B'Av when I sat with Mom on the tayelet, reading Eicha while looking over the Old City, bracing ourselves to fly home for my grandmother's funeral in the morning. Struggling, at eleven, to understand and respond to all the different layers of grief and connection in that moment.

And one of the things I like best about the holiday, aside from that annual, emotive reading of Eicha, is the story of Kamsa and Bar Kamsa, the idea that what brings about destruction is the senseless hatred that we need to eliminate from our own hearts as well as from the world at large, that hurting a friend or embarassing a neighbor can cause as much damage in the long term as remaining silent about the torture of prisoners. It's an opportunity to rethink some of the ways I interact with the world.

Mind playing tricks

I had a strange, vivid dream last night that I'm not going to bore you with, but one small tangent of the dream was that (while running through a hotel trying to find the con artists who just ran a speed-dating seminar), I checked back in with a webcomic that I used to love, Valentine-like Hearts, and discovered that they were doing REALLY well, and actually had a movie coming out! Very exciting.

So I wake up, eager to check back in with this webcomic and see if they really do have a movie coming out, or at least catch up on what they've been doing in the past couple of years, only to do a google search and discover that there is no such comic. At all.

Now, this is kind of weirding me out, because I KNOW that this comic exists. I know that I spent something like two days going through their backlist a few years back. But the more I think about it, trying to remember those two days, the more I realize that this webcomic is actually a VHS anime that was in someone else's basement IN ANOTHER DREAM a few years back, where I was trying to rescue Uri from an evil campus with cobblestones streets and way too many rhododendrons.

This kind of thing actually happens to me every couple of years, where some aspect of a dream is consistent with a previous dream and because I have previous memories of the situation, the dream feels more authentic. It becomes hard to check my memories and remind myself that, for instance, the Cthulu-esque nightmare I just woke up from isn't real.

Am I alone in this? Or do other people have these kinds of serialized dreams, too?

Life lived backwards

When I was a kid, I often ended up reading books out of order. Madeline L'Engle's famous trilogy wasn't helpfully numbered; I had to make a guess as to which book came first, and then readjust when my assumption turned out to be wrong. I had no idea how to get my hands on the first Nancy Drew, and all my comic books had asides in them referring to events in previous issues. And that was okay. It matched my understanding of the world, that I was late to the party and had to pick up the threads of adult conversations that had been going on long before I arrived. But I think it also helped me become a writer: I had to infer or imagine what had come before, what was going to happen next, and then see if I had the satisfaction of being right or the delightful surprise of being wrong.

It's not an experience we get much as adults; we can always acquire book one, or buy the complete season on DVD. With one exception.

When I discover a new blog I like, whether it's a comic series or just someone describing their life, I usually have to start with the most current entry and slowly work my way backwards. Often, there isn't an option to skip to the beginning directly, and there's no way to scroll through all those pages to click to the beginning without seeing snippets and having things spoiled anyway, so you might as well read your way backward. Realized goals become crazy fantasies. Dashed hopes give way to months of anticipation, deepening the sadness. A yearly ritual slips back to reveal an epiphany five years before. And over the days or weeks as I move backwards, I have time to consider what else might have come before, what I haven't been told yet, what I might never be told. It forces me to think, to participate, in a way that most entertainment doesn't. It feels good to wake my brain up after a long hibernation.

Birkat haGomel

JAY IS HOME SAFE!!! I am so incredibly grateful and relieved.