Friday Feedback: Pushing Your Idea to New Heights

With Huntley Fitzpatrick at
Eight Cousins Books
where we googley-eyed a lot of covers. Hey all! I had an amazing time at Eight Cousins Books on the Cape, and Bunch of Grapes on Martha's Vineyard last weekend, and somehow a whole 'nother week has gone by. . .

This week, I finally finished my rewrite/overhaul of my manuscript. Now, I've started reading through it trying to figure out if it's good or if it's total crap.

As I've said before, yes, the chasm of not-knowing is that wide. We get too close to the point where only time, and a few sets of more objective eyes, will start to tell.

As I was finishing up the revision this week, I got this great post from this week's guest author/feedbacker, Nova Ren Suma. Honestly, it took my breath away a bit, and made me want to go back in, and try to push my writing more, once again. A thousand sighs when that happens, but, man, do I learn a lot from other authors.

Lovely and pensive Nova Ren.So, if you don't know Nova Ren Suma for some reason, you should. She is the author of the YA novels  Imaginary Girls  and  17 & Gone . We're not only literary agency "sisters" both with Dystal & Goderich, but we're publishing house sisters now, too: her new novel,  TheWalls Around Us , comes out March 2015 from Algonquin YR. Already, I'm hearing some pretty awesome buzz around it. So please add her earlier books, and especially WALLS to your must-read lists! 

So, here you go, you lucky ducks. Here's Nova:
Last week you got some great advice here on Friday Feedback on beginnings, and now I’m here to trip you up and ask, So you have an awesome first few pages… Great! But what comes next?
Some of us (not naming names… though her initials are NRS) have been known to spend weeks, even months, polishing up that novel opening, getting it just so and just right, only to discover that we’ve lost momentum and aren’t exactly sure where our story should go next. This is often the moment when it feels so easy to give up… To set the novel aside… To see what’s on TV or who’s saying what on Twitter…
But wait.
Maybe what you need to do is push your idea to new heights—and by that I mean, sometimes the most excitement moments of writing come when you get creative and do something shocking. When you raise the stakes.
Here’s an example: 
When I was writing the very first exploratory draft of my novel Imaginary Girls, all I knew at first was that it would start with two sisters at a party at a reservoir in the middle of the night. I had a lot of dramatic happenings I knew would threaten their close relationship, but there wasn’t any BIG, WORTHY moment coming at them head-on that would shake things up.
I was writing a scene in which the older sister, Ruby, dared the young sister, Chloe, to swim across the reservoir in the night.
I lost myself when Chloe was swimming. There was backstory I wanted to insert. There was scene description I got carried away with writing. There were memories. There were pieces to Chloe’s character that I wanted to subtly introduce. There was a lot, and for quite a while she was treading water while I wrote my way through them.
Then it occurred to me: Wouldn’t this scene be way more interesting if something active HAPPENED, like, right now?
But what?
Something mysterious.
Something shocking.
Something that would turn this scene—and this story—on its head.
That’s how, on a whim, I decided to have Chloe swim into a dead body.
Everything changed about the story from that moment, through this sudden experiment. It opened new doors. It gave new possibilities. It offered mystery. And it gave me the chance to really raise the stakes and make some exciting, promising story choices.
So here’s my advice to you when you find yourself treading water in your story, not sure where to go next:
·       Make something active happen to throw your character off-course·       Raise the stakes of your story·      Give yourself the opportunity to make interesting choices·       Surprise your character and surprise your readers…·       And you may just surprise yourself

If you want to see what happened with that dead body in the water, you can go read the first chapter of ImaginaryGirls , which was published in 2011. But if you want to see me working through that very same problem in a brand-new piece of fiction, because it's Friday Feedback, now you have your chance.
Here’s an excerpt from a project I’m working on in which I decided to raise the stakes in a scene—possibly with a fantastical twist—and then see where that might take me.
So what do you think? Don’t forget the rules : What works? What doesn't, if something doesn't? And… imagining this comes some ways into the story, would this keep you reading? 
(And, when you're posting your excerpts please remember NO MORE THAN 5 paragraphs if they're short, no more than 3 paragraphs if they're long!)
   I hand over my set of keys, and it’s when my cousin Misha is walking away, descending the rows of bleachers, that I discover this thought inside me. It’s a bad, unbuttoned thought. I want something to keep her from getting to the car. I guess I simply want Misha to stumble on the bleachers and drop my keys so I can take them back, maybe fall in the dirt and mess up her cheer uniform. That’s not what happens.It’s a coincidence, I decide, that the wind comes right then. But is it? A wild, whipping howl grows in force and slams straight into the bleachers, jolting the entire structure. The weather reports had given an all-clear before the game, but they must’ve gotten it wrong. A storm must have been coming, because it’s roaring all around us now. It’s directly overhead.There’s a burst of rain, gushing down on us and then leaving us dry as quickly as it came, but that’s nothing. It’s the continued battering of wind. The wind that overtakes the field behind the high school, threatening to raise the bleachers from the ground and transport them with us clinging into Lake Erie. The wind swirls, and I swear it seems to be centering itself around my cousin in her dark red cheer skirt. It’s like an animal, the way it comes for her. Like it wants to devour her.I watch as she’s taken, lifted from the bleachers into the swirling sky. She’s forced up from the bottom as if her teammates have her feet, but there are no teammates to spot her and there’s nothing under her feet. She climbs into the air, held by nothing, her arms out grabbing nothing, the nothing flapping and slapping at her clothes, trouncing her hair.The bleachers are far below her now, the flashing 0of the home team’s score at level with her bright blond head. She writhes in the wind, and then straightens. She’s suspended, her body frozen, her eyes on me.I find myself moving toward her, my arms reaching up and out for her, but my fingers can only graze the toe of one white sneaker. Then they can’t even latch on to that, because she’s lifted beyond the reach of my fingers, into the rattling, shuddering roar at the heart of the windstorm. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Or wait—have I?I have. 
_____

Nova and I will both be here around 11 EST this morning, and not before, so please don't worry if we're not here until then.
And, as for the ARC drawing last week for Amy's A Matter of Heart, I forgot (see, finishing manuscript), so I promise, I'll go back and do it this week (and announce it midweek!).  Happy writing!

- Nova & gae