Susanne Dunlap's Blog, page 8

Woman power, 1903

I did it again. Started writing and got caught up in a wonderful line of research. My heroine of the WIP in real life loved to play basketball. This started me looking for what she might have been wearing while she was playing, and I found treasures, treasures, treasures!

It’s easy when we imagine the past, especially women in the past, to think of only the preserved, public personae, the photographs and portraits in evening dress, or in the first decade of the twentieth century in the obliga...

Avoidance

Yes, I’ve been avoiding writing. My mind is so caught up with a million different things. Such as building and tinkering with this Web site. That’s constructive, right?

Here are a few of my favorite things to do instead of write:

Research Ride my bicycle Fix my Web site Read Clean the house Do laundry Daydream

Sadly, there are more. And yet, when I get going, it’s like no other feeling on earth.

Honestly, getting that first draft down on “paper” is torture for me. Any suggestions to avoid a...

The dreaded pitch

So, you have a finished manuscript. You’ve polished and prodded and written and rewritten and finally you think it’s ready to find a home in the world. Congratulations! Not everyone can do that, sustain a story over 80k or more words so that there’s a coherent beginning, middle, and end; where your characters have faced obstacles and grown; and  where everything ends up as it should—happy, sad, or in between. It’s hard. Really, really hard to do that.

But the process isn’t over yet. In fact, ...

“Why don’t you self-publish?”

It’s a question I get frequently when I bemoan the fact that I haven’t had a book published in five years, despite writing several that I (and my agent) think are good and worth publishing. [Full disclosure: I did put two e-books of unpublished manuscripts up on Amazon and basically forgot about them for years! One was a sequel to The Musician’s Daughter that readers kept asking me for, and that I’d written as the option book after TMD, but my editor wanted something different; the other was...

Linear Writing

I’ve often thought about writing out random scenes, things that I see my characters doing, or events I know my characters will interact with at some point in the story. It’s pretty easy, in fact, to make a list of those scenes, and soon it becomes obvious which ones will make it into the story and which won’t. Some will be separate chapters, others will be folded into another, or perhaps comprise a memory within a scene that takes place later.

But that’s as far as the process of thinking spat...

The Coronation of Edward VII

Originally scheduled for June, 1902, it was postponed because the Prince of Wales had acute appendicitis, and had to have surgery. The heroine of my WIP attended the coronation when it eventually took place on August 23, 1902. Remarkable to have film records of the event! An intersection of my finished manuscript, and the one I’m just starting on now.

I thought I knew about early cinema

I was never a true aficionado, but I’d watched my share of silents: D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin etc. While doing research for my two existing (unpublished) novels that take place around 1910 in New York, I was astonished to see just how much filmmaking owes to pioneers who worked not in Hollywood, but in New York City and its environs, and in Paris.

Of course, everyone knows about Edison and his developments. His plant in New Jersey, with its famous Black Maria studio, crops...

Of Corkboards and Thinking

I’m circling around the new WIP. I’ve populated Scrivener with index cards of random scenes, and written one of them (sort of). Still not sure where the story begins, although I think I know where it ends. This one’s conflict is tough, because it’s mostly internal.

What I mean is that it’s not so much the external barriers that prevent my protagonist getting what she wants, but the internal ones—although the prevailing social mores are obstacles as well.

New territory for me.

Editorial sticker shock?

If you’re an aspiring writer and you’ve explored options for working with a developmental editor, or a story coach, or any of the other titles people give someone who is going to help you scrub and polish and tweak and twist your story into decent shape, you’ve probably experienced sticker shock. I know I have.

However. I’ve done a bit of editing myself, and this I know for certain: it’s hard work, and it takes a lot of time. And a good editor, someone who really helps you dig through and see...

Story vs. Plot

In my constant reading about and studying the craft of writing, I had an epiphany sometime over the summer. I can’t remember where it occurred, what I was reading, but I finally understood the difference between STORY and PLOT.

STORY:

Essentially, what happens, and change is always involved. The main character starts out being a racist, has an experience that changes him, and ends up with someone from a different race as his best friend. (Oversimplified.) As Randy Susan Myers would have it, t...