Serena Bell's Blog, page 8

The Way Forward

This has been a good week. Exactly why is the topic of an upcoming post, but for now, let’s just say that it’s the kind of week that makes all the work worth it. So I thought I’d write a post about persistence. Specifically, I thought I’d write a post about two different ways of being persistent as a writer.

For many writers, persistence means not giving up on a book as long as they still have the slightest interest in it or energy for it. They write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, until the book is the best book it can possibly be. Then they query and query, and rewrite and rewrite again, because they believe in this story, in this book.

The danger of the stick-to-it method, of course, is that you believe too long in something that’s fundamentally flawed. There are some stories that are not strong enough to sustain a 90,000-word book. There are some characters too damaged for the mainstream market you crave. If you’re too blindly committed to the stick-to-it method, you risk gutting a work of art to create a salable product.

The strength of the method is that it teaches revision, and revision is the most powerful writing tool. Being a good editor—by which I mean a good hacker-upper-of-manuscripts, not a good poker-of-sentences—is more important than almost anything else. (There are a few exceptions. Daily word production. Having a wonderful critique partner. An ergonomic desk set up.) Sticking with a manuscript teaches revision and persistence fast and permanently.

I have the utmost respect for this way of doing things, and many writing professionals will tell you it is the only way to get your first book published. But I will tell you right now it is not my way. To put it in the best possible light, I am always eager for new challenges. This is me not-saying I have a short attention span sometimes. I can rewrite a book a few times, but then I want to work on something else. (This is also why I have a large drawer of unfinished needlepoint work.) My way is to put the manuscript in a drawer and call it collateral damage. I might come back later for another look, but for now, it is road kill in the rearview mirror.

My way is what I think of as the way forward. The way forward is not as obvious as the chipping away at the manuscript until its perfection is revealed, or never giving up on a story’s salability. Sometimes, I wish I were the chipping-away type. Often, I wish I had infinite faith in my creations.

Instead, my “way forward” has everything to do with not getting stuck, no matter what that means. Some days, it means accepting that thirty rejections are not just the first thirty on your way to eighty rejections followed by a surprise, precipitous trip up the New York Times bestseller list. Sometimes, it means rejecting your temptation to decide you suck just because there is no evidence to the contrary. What it always means is that you have to keep going. The path is unclear or impossibly brutal, but the impulse can’t die. You spend a lot of time in one of the two following binds:

One: You are standing at the foot of a path that ascends ridiculously high and ridiculously quickly, a rocky scrabble with an invisible destination at the end. This is the sensation of having to promote a book when you have never promoted a book before. It’s also the sensation of beginning to write a new book.

Two: You are standing in a clearing, surrounded by impenetrably thick woods. You know there is a path that you are supposed to be on, but you can’t see it. The world looks like a wall of woods. Or a wall of words. This is the sensation of knowing a book isn’t working but not how to fix it. It’s the sensation of not-knowing the next scene, or the one after that, or the one after that.

They are different binds. The way to deal with the first is to put one foot in front of the other. The way to deal with the second is to slowly, patiently, work your way along the wall, trying everything that looks like an opening, reminding yourself that there will be missteps, gently, soothingly, talking yourself out of panic. The woods will open. The path will become clear.

Only one thing is known for sure: If you quit, failure is certain. If you stop writing, you are not a writer. What follows from it is that the only way forward is forward. On many days the meaning of that is obscure.  I have no answers, only this advice: put your hands out, nudge your toe forward, greet the next moment.

 

Scrivener Templates (or How to Skip the Blank Page)

One thing I love about Scrivener is how easy it is to create, store, and activate templates. To me, Scrivener means never having to stare at a blank page, because when I start a new project, I have an instruction set for how to ease into the scary writing part.

Here are my Scrivener templates.

How to Write a Novel This is my favorite, of course, mostly because it makes me laugh every time I look at the title. If only it were that easy! This is my checklist of things I do before I start stringing words together—most of the other templates are mentioned somewhere or other in this checklist. The first item on the checklist, just to give me some momentum right off the bat, is “Have an idea.”

Male Interview & Female Interview These are two separate templates, a blending of Karen Wiesner’s Character Sketch templates and Ruthie Knox’s interview questions for characters. Sometimes I do these at the beginning and sometimes I do them when I get stuck in the middle and sometimes I do them when I’m revising. But usually I do them all three times.

Character Setting Sketch & General Setting Sketch These are pretty much verbatim from Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in Thirty Days method—one helps me define the larger setting, like a small town and its characteristics; the other helps me nail down settings that are character specific, like workplaces and homes. I do a bunch of Character Setting Sketches, one for each character with an arc.

Research List When I first start working on a new story, there are a million things I don’t know, and if I stop to try to figure them out, I get hung up and lose track of what interests me about the characters. So I just make a list of what I need to know later. I’ve also found that I usually need to know about two percent of what I think I need to know, and if I save the research for later, it spares me and my interview subjects a lot of pain.

Summary Outline This is a Karen Wiesner concept, too. It’s a list of scenes I know are going to happen, in order. Karen Wiesner’s plan calls for a lot of sketching out of scenes, but I’ve found that doesn’t work too well for me. I’m more a pantser than a plotter. I need to put all the right pieces in place to make the plot turn out well, but if I know too much detail about scenes that are coming, I get bored and become inflexible about listening to the characters and going with the flow.

GMC for H&h I got this from Ruthie Knox, who I think got it from somewhere else online. It’s a boiled down version of what makes the hero and heroine tick (internal goal-motivation-conflict, the engine of character arc) and what drives the book (external goal-motivation-conflict, the engine of plot)

Six-Stage Plot Structure Also Ruthie. A way of mapping GMC onto Michael Hauge’s six-stage plot structure. If you know the engines of arc and plot, you can probably figure out what has to happen, more or less, at each other turning points in the book. I didn’t use this template last time around because I realized I felt more comfortable mapping it onto a horizontal timeline that I sketched on blank paper. (And the beauty of Scrivener is that if I’d scanned that timeline, I could add it to my research folder and stare at it any time I wanted.)

Hauge Plot Outline A slightly more evolved version of the six-stage plot structure. To be honest, I rarely get this far in my own planning process because at this point I am so eager to start writing that I want to scrap the planning and go-go-go. Which I usually give myself permission to do. But if I’m still rolling, I do a:

Plot Sketch This can sometimes morph into a synopsis, but I also have a template for:

Synopsis But I never use it because the thing that works best for synopses is giving yourself no more than ten minutes to write them. Twenty if you’re really slow. This is also, as far as I’m concerned, the only way to write cover copy. The more you think, the worse it gets.

I’d love to hear about what templates you use when planning a novel (and/or other tricksy things you love to do with Scrivener).

 

 

Working Girl (and Lizards and Hamsters)

I’m a bad boss.

I give more negative feedback than positive, frequently telling my team they’re lazy, behind, unimaginative, or doomed.

When I give positive feedback, it’s narrow and limited. Great job this morning! I say, when I should be telling them they’ve kicked butt every day for two years with dismal pay and grim working conditions. Who else, after all, would work for free, two to six hours per day, with interruptions at unpredictable intervals? (And with a bad boss?)

I grant vacation days unwillingly. I make them check email and social media even when they’re theoretically not working.

Sick days and personal days are almost unheard of. To qualify for one of those, you have to be barely functional. Cross-country moves and a month-long near-constant barrage of visiting family? Work later and get up earlier, you lazy bums!

I ignore the signs of burn-out. Mental health days are for wusses. Press on, team! Wrists hurt? Dictate! Throat hurts? Drink more water! Butt hurts? Stand up!

You, over there. Are you slacking? If you can’t actually put your hands on the keyboard, at least you should be thinking about work. Did you just start to relax? Stress up! Surely there’s something useful you could be doing.

I’m a bad boss, and here’s the thing: I’ve got to quit it.

You know how they say you should be as kind to yourself as you’d be to a well-loved friend? (And you know how hard it is?)

I want to run this team—me, my lizard brain, the workers in the basement, the hamsters on the treadmills, and all the other critters on team Bell—like the best boss I’ve ever had, not Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.

So, starting tomorrow, Team Bell is getting a real vacation. The hamsters, the lizards, the dudes downstairs, and I are going to the beach, where we are not going to work, and, more to the point, we are not going to hate on ourselves for not working.

When we come back from the beach, and the next slew of visitors arrives—nearly two straight weeks of them—we are going to enjoy them, not see them as an obstacle to productivity. The lack of childcare? It is not the universe thwarting us, it is an opportunity to throw ourselves into mothering for a few more weeks before school snatches the kiddos away and tosses them into the fray.

Perhaps, if I am exceptionally kind to myself and my team, if I am loving and give myself space to think, if I really relax for a few weeks before the school year kicks into gear—perhaps my mental health will even improve to the point where I can stop talking about myself in the plural.

Cultivating the Patient Mind

Patience is not my strong suit. I dislike tasks that are intricate, that require precision, that require sustained concentration. I get particularly cranky with projects that take a long time to complete.

This is, of course, why I’m a writer. Writing is the perfect training and testing ground for someone who needs to become more patient, and the universe, in its infinite wisdom, has given me the compulsion to write, so that I am forced on a regular basis to confront my weakness.

When I’m left to my own devices, my impulse is to write in the way that requires the least patience. I like to draft fast. I like to work too much, until I hurt myself, so I can get a story told as soon as possible and it doesn’t hang over my head. I don’t like to revise, and I particularly don’t like to revise carefully and thoroughly and in multiple layers until I’ve got things just right.

So writing is a constant battle for me between tearing through stuff at top speed and what I knows the writing needs, which is care and concentration and a willingness to go in and over and over and confront what I’ve got on the page.

The best way I know to force myself to be more patient is to make rules for myself. I stole my writing-process rules from Ruthie Knox. (I learn a lot from Ruthie, partly because she’s brilliant at what she does, and partly because she’s brilliant at explaining what she does, which not everybody is.) Ruthie uses a three-pass process for writing a new draft, in which she first lays down the sentences and paragraphs of the scene, then fills in what’s missing—all the blocking and emotion that got left out of the first pass—then smoothes out the words. It works well for me, because it forces me to slow down and pay attention. I can’t declare a scene finished simply because I’ve put the words on the page. I can’t declare a scene done until it’s good.

I’m revising a book now, and its biggest problem—often my biggest problem—is the beginning. So I rewrote the beginning, and then my Impatient Brain wanted us to be done. Like DONE done. And my new Patient Brain that I’m trying to encourage, the one that doesn’t let me get away with that stuff, had to explain that even though the beginning was the most messed up part, the whole book has to be revised so the new beginning fits with everything that comes after. Patient Brain explained to Impatient Brain that it’s just like writing one scene after another—each one needs three passes and it seems like it’s taking forever, but then you look at what you’ve produced and discover that you have one perfect scene after another, lined up to make a whole, entire novel. See, Impatient Brain? Patient Brain says. You can do this.

Samantha Hunter told me (wisely) that gardening and writing are a lot alike. I’ve been doing a lot of gardening since I got here, because I’m intrigued by the fact that things grow aggressively well in the area where I now live. I killed everything I tried to grow in the Boston area. Some of that was the sheer misery of the climate, but I believe patience was a problem there, as well.

A number of different people have told me that they don’t think you can garden until you turn forty (Which I haven’t. And never will.). You don’t have enough perspective. You don’t realize that it takes several seasons to establish something, or that a plant that starts small can grow and flourish and take over. You don’t realize that you have to cut back to grow perennials big, or that you have to tear down to a little stumpy bit to nurse a shrub back to health.

With any luck, my gardens will teach me more of what I need to know about cultivating words.

Revising, and Other Acts of Faith

Last week, I wrote—of the brutal experience of revising a novel—“It’s neither the best of books, nor the worst. It’s your book, and the only way forward is through it.”

I’m revising the beginning of my novel now. This must be what parenting a teenager is like. I take body blows to the ego, then pick myself up and rededicate myself to the job of loving the crabby, smelly, and pimply mess with the same mindless devotion with which I loved it when it was plump and edible and helpless. Or some less overextended metaphor, but you get the gist. Ouch, and— So. Exhausting.

I’m also now less than two weeks from the date on which a large band of movers descends on my house and stows all my possessions in cardboard boxes. Some people have suggested this is not the time to undertake a large-scale revision. They are so right. Other people have suggested this is the perfect time to undertake a large-scale revision. They are also right.

I will say this about revision. There is no perfect time, just as there is no perfect time to have a child. It is never the right time to thoroughly disrupt your way of looking at the world, to unsettle yourself and remake yourself. You just wake up one morning and are more ready than not to do it. So you do. (This is how I have made all the monumental decisions in my life, including the one to move three thousand miles. I woke up one morning and the incomprehensible seemed manageable.)

I have to believe that revising a novel and moving across the country have this in common. On the morning before you begin, you have something intact and reasonably neat. On the morning when the movers arrive or you tear out the first perfect brick of the original literary structure, you have the appearance of complete and utter chaos. It seems highly improbable that things can ever be put back in their proper places. Everything that happens over the next few weeks or months is an act of ridiculous, lunatic faith. You set one word next to the other, you put one foot in front of the other, you remove one item from its cardboard shell and begin to rebuild a life.

One day, you realize that you are on the other side of chaos, and the thing you have made is better than the thing you tore apart. And you are stronger because of your strange willingness to believe against all evidence that it would be so.

 

Three Steps to Revision

I am revising the novel that I mostly refer to as my third. Or, “the dating coach book.” I had forgotten the whole revision roller coaster. During the DM marathon with Ruthie Knox yesterday that caused Twitter to cut me off for violating the 250-DM-per-day limit, I enumerated the steps involved in revising a novel:

Step 1: Love your book too much to ever change it.

Step 2: Hate your book so much you can’t see the point in fixing it.

Step 3: Realize that you had the bones of a pretty good story and every book needs a hard-core going-over once perspective has been gained.

(Sometimes there is a lather-rinse-repeat effect, too.)

I had also forgotten that revising = acknowledging how much I learned since I wrote the draft.

Here are some things I have learned since I drafted this book:

1)   If, early in the writing process, you think, ‘I wonder if this major, impossible-to-remove plot point, is going to be an issue for the vast majority of romance readers, and thus editors and agents?’ that is a good sign that the major, impossible-to-remove plot point is going to be an issue. Over and over and over again. I’m not saying scrap the book, but just know that no matter how hard you try, you will not be able to make that issue go away. Maybe it will become what’s special and unusual and delightfully wonky about the book, or maybe it will be something reviewer say you have “handled well,” but it will never disappear.

2)   The rules that govern beginnings of novels (see this post, Ten Things I’ve Learned about Beginnings) do not trump the rules that govern good writing. In other words, just because a scene theoretically portrays your heroine as sympathetic, and allows some leisurely time for settling in, doesn’t mean it’s allowed to lack a scene goal and be drowning in interior monologue.

3)   There is a difference between Inside Out and Outside In.

This was my Ah-ha moment for this book. When I went back to reread it, I was shocked by how underdeveloped the characters were on the page. And when I went back to what I knew about the characters, I was shocked by how little it was. More to the point, I was shocked by the kinds of things I knew about the characters—more or less only those things that I’d been forced to figure out to serve the plot of the book. I knew my character’s jobs. I knew their internal conflicts and the wounds that had set those conflicts in motion. I knew how old they were and where they’d met (it’s a second chances story) and, loosely, why they’d parted ways.

But I had no feel for who they were. And when I say feel, I really mean feel. Everything I knew was thinky. Informational. Something you could list. What was missing was my sense of who they were—what kind of physical presence, what kind of person. How it would feel to be in a room with them. How I would feel about them.

I realized I had never known them, which meant—the key disaster—I had never loved them.

I’d built them from the Outside In, instead of the Inside Out. I’d put them together out of spare parts, plot Tinkertoys, instead of starting from my own emotions.

So I have my work cut out for me. I have a book that works on many levels. It’s well-plotted, full of hot sex scenes, and sometimes even compellingly told. But large swaths of it are arid, because I didn’t love my characters, so there’s no chance the reader could, either. Now I need to go back and reconnect. Or connect for the first time. How would it feel to see and smell and hold this man? Why does she love him? What is so charming about this woman that you would want to be her, inhabit her world, despite the wounds I’ve given her? How can I get that on the page?

I have to love them on every page, and I have to make the reader love them on every page.

It’s a lot of work. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Welcome to Step 3. This book you’ve written? It’s neither the best of books, nor the worst. It’s your book, and the only way forward is through it.

 

 

 

I Read Fifty Shades of Grey, and …

Are you familiar with Jim’s Journal, the late 80s comic strip by Scott Dikkers, co-founder of The Onion? Jim reacts—or really, doesn’t react—to everything in his life with an understated, unemotional style, as in the comic where he observes, “I went to college, and it was okay.”

On the airplane home from my soon-to-be West coast hometown, I read Fifty Shades of Grey, and it was okay.

Actually, it was better than okay. It was an easy, pleasant read, perfect for a long plane ride. It was sexy and entertaining. But I was mostly struck by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t amazing or revolutionary or life-changing. It wasn’t unique or wonky or genre-busting. It didn’t scream “praise me,” “worship me,” “scorn me,” “fear me,” or “ban me.”

In fact, it was pretty ordinary. Ana, the heroine, is young for a romance heroine, and the book is in her first person POV, but those are about the only things that make the book unusual for its genre.

I’ve heard people complain about the quality of the writing, but I thought James did a good job with the depth of POV, simplicity of language, and consistency of voice. It’s not sophisticated writing, not flowery or particularly distinctive, but it’s solid and accessible, and that’s something I admire. (I was finished with Ana’s “inner goddess” by about quarter of the way through the book, but that image is unrelenting, so we’re all stuck with her.)

Christian is rich and alpha, powerful and hot, a completely mainstream romance hero. The only thing that makes him at all unusual is his kinkiness, and frankly? At least in the first book, which is the only one I’ve read, he’s just not that kinky.

One thing that bothered me about the book—and I haven’t read other criticism of the book, so this may be the oldest news on earth—is the fact that Christian’s kinks are portrayed as the result of childhood damage. They’re something Ana needs to lead him away from. I’m talking out of alternate orifices here, but I’m guessing that if you’re sub or dom, that feels wrong, like books where someone is “converted” away from homosexuality—as if it’s a curable affliction and not just the way you are.

James does seem to at least partially acknowledge this issue in book one; it’s clear that Christian sees his kinks as part of him, while Ana sees them as evidence of damage. I’d like to see this split played with and addressed even more, which is part of why I’ll keep reading.

The other part of why I’ll keep reading is that I can’t stop. I like the characters. I am well and thoroughly sucked into their romance, and the sex keeps me turning the pages. It’s not the most amazing sex I’ve ever read, but it’s emotional and tied into the plot, and I think the contention that the book is porn is absurd. Fifty Shades is an erotic romance—well, strictly speaking, the first book is NOT a romance, not taken on its own, but the trilogy is—and it’s a pretty good erotic romance. And that’s really all it is. Which is a compliment. Seriously. With all the fuss one way and the other, the book could easily have disappointed me. But I read Fifty Shades of Grey, and it was okay. In the best possible way.