ou’ll notice that in my “goals” post for the year I did not mention “update blog regularly” as a goal. That is because there was no way to make it a goal (I originally typed “gaol”–how appropriate!) without interfering with two other goals–writing, and getting through my day job with a modicum of grace.

So here I am with the erratic posting. And today I’m just going to mention that Ornithology–which has been given the temporary title of “The Making of Jenny Keeble”–finaled in NTRWA’s Great Expectations contest.

Aside from, uh, the Golden Heart, this is the first contest I’ve entered these pages in. Notice I do not say, the first contest in which I’ve entered Ornithology–I entered the much older version in one (or is it two? Honestly, I don’t remember because I’ve blocked out the results) contest before. The judges were really unimpressed. So it’s nice to know that the completely rewritten pages have made a difference. Whew. I did not just waste those many hundreds of hours on the rewrite. At some point in the future, I may actually end up posting a blurb and an excerpt. But–that will have to wait until I’m not completely overwhelmed.

Here’s hoping that everyone else has been having a wonderful and productive 2008 so far! I suck at posting, but I’m not really going to get better anytime in the next few months. Maybe later….

  little more than a year ago, I sat down and said, “Ho hum. I shall write a book.” And since everyone up until that point agreed I was a pretty good writer, this seemed like a fantastic idea to me. I mean, if I can put words on a page in a fashion that sounds pretty decent, all I had to do was put a lot of them on a lot of pages. Right? Right?Heh. Yeah, I know.

My first book–that would be Ornithology I–I learned how to write a scene. You can actually see it in the progression of the draft. I have a couple hundred pages of people sitting around and talking and dancing and stuff on a page and at the end I get to pages that start from a hook, go through a major event, and end on a hook. Yay, me!

Of course, you notice there’s that problem of the first 300 pages where nothing happens. Oops….

My second book–that would be Legalese–I learned how to write conflict and plot. I had to do some of those scenes over and over again to make them work, and it’s still far from perfect (I haven’t even thought about revising it yet!). “Ha ha,” I said. “I am a genius! Now I know how to write a book, and nothing will stop me, ever!”

That faint snorting sound you hear is me. Because I turned back to book #1. Now, I have to tell you. There is basically no way I should have revised Book #1. Nothing happened for 300 pages. There was little external conflict, and not a lot of internal conflict. This was a book that should have been kicked under the bed and chalked up to a learning experience. But I didn’t want to do it. I liked my hero. (Heroine, I realized–not so much. Note to self: “clever” is a character trait, not a character.) I really liked my heroine’s brother. And I wasn’t ready to give up this story.

I really should have given up. Last May, I wrote an intro that totally changed my heroine. It was fantabulous. It was perfect. It was something I sat on for two months before coming back to it and realizing that it sucked, too. I tried again in June. And September. By the time October had rolled around, I’d written maybe 30,000 words, here and there. New intros. Scenes in the middle. Just testing out ideas. None of them worked.

In mid-November, I got the idea. The perfect idea. I wrote five pages. They were the first five pages I sent to my critique partners, who said, “I love it!” I did, too. And so I started rewriting.

Of course I deleted those five pages, in case you were wondering. I kept . . . um . . . 300 words from the original version.

And rewriting this book was a huge breakthrough for me, too. Because I was forcing myself to do it fast enough that I could really feel the pace of the book. When it dragged, I dragged. And I finally figured out that pacing is not a rheostat, to be turned up and down by adding or removing words. Pacing is about connecting with the reader. Those first 300 pages I’d written in the first draft? The pace was slow, sure. But I couldn’t have deleted words to make it better. No way. Without fierce conflict, it’s hard to pace well. And if you have a section of your book where the conflict is slow, you need to either (a) punch it up significantly, or (b) drop in a paragraph of tell and move on, because nobody cares.

And sometimes, the way to make a scene pace faster is to slow it down. The conversation that’s critical to your black moment isn’t going to mean a damned thing to the reader if you delete all your heroine’s emotions to make it read faster.

Sure, words can slow you down. But as a general rule, if your words aren’t doing work, you delete them. Words are not a speed bump, put in to make your reader get to the story slower.

All this makes me wonder what I’m going to figure out on writing my next book.

Does anyone have any startling breakthroughs they’ve made? I’d love to hear them!

s what FedEx says of Ornithology.

Yikes.  This last week has been crazy.  I’m hoping to sleep a little for once!

 But after that, it’s all revisions, all the time.  The good thing about entering the GH is it gives me a very firm deadline for when I want my revisions to be done–something I wouldn’t have otherwise.

What do you use for motivation?  And is anyone else as tired right now as I am? 

‘ve converted my progress meters to page-count bars on the right. I tend to write very loosely, for whatever reason, and so I’ve decided to go by page count instead of word count. Yay.

Plus it makes it looks like I’ve done more. In reality, I really only have a few scenes to write in Book One, and then it’s revision time. As for Book Two–the progress bar is about right at 25%. I’ve gotten through 20% of the plot, and I’ve written 5% of the nonlinear scenes.

Yes, this is all futile. So, what mathematical tricks do you employ to make it look as if you’ve made progress? And do you manage to fool anyone?

he lovely India Carolina, my CP and very good friend, now has a blog and a website. You probably remember her warmth, her charm, and her lovely writing from FanLit. Visit!

In other news, I just have to wrap up a few loose odds and ends now. Whew! I’ve had time to think about Book One. I revised my synopsis and figured out how to fix a problem in the middle of the book and the end of the book. And I finally figured out what had stumped me for ages. The first meet between my hero and heroine is wrong. It doesn’t work. The mechanics of the meet are fine, even though I agonized about those for ages. But the substance of the conversation–written well before I had really let either character get into my head–doesn’t work with the two anymore. It needs to be rewritten. Not revised; rewritten entirely from scratch.

Okay, I can deal with that. But at this point I have a plan. I’ve realized that the boring little bits in the middle don’t work because they aren’t telling a story, and I finally figured out that there is a story there–an interesting and important story–that needs to be told. It’s good to finally “get” the book again.

So what about you? Do you love India’s new site? Do you have any exciting new beginnings, or ends to share? Let me know.

ricka mentioned that I should save all my deleted fragments. But that gave me a better idea. Why not let you all see some of them?

Here’s a scene that I hated to delete. I hadn’t planned to delete it. But I started from the top. On revisions, it was obvious that the scene started too soon. After all, she gets up and gets out of bed–not particularly important, right? And then she goes downstairs. Yawn. So I started deleting the first few paragraphs, looking for the start of the scene.

But in order to find the start of a scene, you have to figure out what the scene does for the book. And unfortunately, I had to admit that the answer in this case was: nothing. Nothing at all. So I deleted the scene. It was all setup for the scene when the boys come visiting, after all, and that scene is much more fun if the reader discovers the flowers at the same time the hero does. So sad, but goodbye.

Enjoy!  The scene is after the jump.
(more…)

‘ve been spinning in circles on revisions for Ornithology, mostly because I had this really nasty problem.

Plot A was originally going to be the plot of the book. It became quite clear to me when I first started writing that Plot A couldn’t possibly sustain the length of the book. But B and C happily stepped in, and Plot C took on a life of its own, aided by bizarre recalcitrance, in such a way that Plot C almost looks like it was planned, even though the motivation for Character D didn’t come in until very near the end of the book, and resolution E was added last-minute. Still, there are scenes that have been there from near the beginning–not just from near the beginning, but that were written around the time I wrote the first two chapters–that make it look like resolution E was planned all along. All hail the almighty pants.
In any event, there are still remnants of Plot A still stuck in the book. And the problem is, they’re grafted in well and tight. I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with them. I can’t tug it out entirely, or the rest of the book unravels. But if I leave it in, it’ll look like a misshapen monstrosity with two heads.

I finally figured out how to deal with it. Unfortunately, it will require me to rewrite my first chapter. I’m going to lose a huge number of lines that I really, really loved. Ouch. Ouch, and ouch. I want to hold onto them so badly, but it’s just structurally wrong. It’s not fair. It’s really just not fair. Not at all.

Excuse me while I beat my head against the wall yet one more time. Then I will go and cut. Sigh.

he biggest lesson I learned writing my first book is that you can’t craft a story, or even a scene, if you’re writing towards a resolution rather than a hook.

What do I mean by that? In the first book, I figured out what problems were arrayed against my heroine, figured out how to get around them, and wrote towards that moment when the problems were resolved. It turns out, of course, that some of the resolutions I had weren’t completely satisfying. Both my critique partner pointed this out to me, and I grumbled to myself for half an hour or so about how it was FINE, and DON’T BOTHER ME and all that stuff. But the truth was that the resolution wasn’t very satisfying because the problem wasn’t very hard. And I realized this a little bit later, and then I whined to myself a little bit harder, and I said, “But if I make the problem hard there’s no way to solve it!”

So imagine you’re faced with a castle and you’ve got three men, one of whom can barely wiggle his fingers. You’ve got to stop the wedding and kill the man with six fingers, and you’ve got to do it now. It’s not possible. And you say to yourself, “If only we had a wheelbarrow!” “What I wouldn’t give for a good Holocaust cloak.” Buh. Right. I am, in fact, the author. It’s actually quite, quite easy as an author to solve problems your characters have. All you have to do is recite the rules, and boom. Problem solved.
The rules? Ah yes. The rules.

1. The character must solve the problem him or herself.
2. In a way that’s true to the character of everyone involved.
3. And it has to be a real problem. None of this: “Oh, you said goats? I thought you said BOATS. Never mind then.”
4. The problem presented should be one that the character must have grown to overcome. If presented with the problem at the beginning of the book, the character should not be able to solve it.

Once you set up those relatively rigid rules, the right solutions become rather obvious. And so I made the original problem intractable. I took away the person who she could turn to to solve the problem, if only she got the nerve up. I took away the safety net, the thing in the background that every reader would see and say, “Look, you don’t need to throw your life away. Just step over there.” And then I forced my hero to solve the problem using the tools he knows best.
Having figured this out at the end of my novel, I’ve finally realized that I wrote the book exactly backwards. I started off with the solution. But the solution isn’t the book; the problem is the book. The solution is what wraps everything off, but a great problem with a lame solution is a better book than a great solution with a lame problem. (Think: The Stand by Stephen King.) This is not to say that I advocate lame solutions, of course. But you cannot have a great solution in the first place without a great problem.At this point, I started thinking–again, as pressed by a critique partner who pointed out that all my scenes started way too soon–about what a scene was supposed to do. Silly me; I thought scenes were where things happened. Nope. Not at all. Scenes exist to set hooks. Nothing else. If there’s a scene that doesn’t set a hook in it somewhere, that’s a scene you can delete from your book.

At this point, I’m looking at my first book and shrieking, “But how else will I tell everyone about X!” Yeah–not the problem. Expository scenes–no good. They all have to go. There is no place for an expository scene in a novel. I’ll tell the reader about all that when I have the chance. i just need to work it in somehow. Working it in to a scene that has a hook is way better than working it in anywhere else.
So I have a lot of work ahead of me, but it’s exciting work, because I can now see all the places that I screwed up. I still have one subplot problem I’m
thinking through. I’m still shocked though, at how little I knew when I first started writing. There’s no other way to learn, though. You can buy all the books you want, attend all the workshops out there. But until you write it wrong, and see the wrongness staring you in the face, you’ll never get it.

What’s the most important lesson you ever learned from your own writing?

ne of the things I’m worrying about in revisions is voice.  I have two main point-of-view characters, and I have to say that I’ve been foolishly letting their voices elide into each others.  And so I’m making lists now, on the second time through, of characteristics of speech.  Subtle things that distinguish one character from another.

For instance, one of my characters speaks very precisely.  He’s not even allowed to think the words “thing” or “what have you” or “such like” or any of that.  He identifies everything in detail–at least in his head; he’s a bit more shy when he speaks aloud, a problem he deals with as the book goes on.  And as the book goes on, his outward language starts matching his inner thoughts more and more.  If he can attach a quantity to something, he will.  “Five” is better than “some.”
Another character is — well, he’s fluffy.  He’s not stupid, but he has his own brand of special logic.  And so for him, everything’s about imprecision.  He uses the word “thing.”  He weasels.  He makes sweeping statements that character number one would shudder to hear.
Yet another character is lovable but–at least until near the end–very selfish.  And so everything she says (she doesn’t get a point of view) needs to subtly indicate that she only sees the world through her eyes.
And yet I have to do this without being too heavy-handed.  I hate it when authors set off a character by giving them one thing that they say over and over.  I don’t want to hit my readers over the head with the differences between characters; I just want to make it subtly obvious that they’re quite, quite different.
So what do you do to set your characters apart?  Any tips?

o I’m planning revisions. I know that thing up there says 85%, but pay it no mind. I really only have a few connecting scenes to write, and besides, that number is of no moment because if you look at my page count, it’s pretty high. Like over 400 pages. That’s what I get for not writing densely.

“Revisions” at present means “cleaning up the first 9 chapters, up until the first inflection point.” This is a point where there’s a purely . . . internal crisis for the hero. The problem is that now that I’m rereading it, I can tell that it’s slow. It’s really slow. And I have already made all these notes about things I need to include for continuity’s sake. So I got out a notebook and pen and made a list of scenes and what they did to advance the plot.

Pain. I have a scene entitled “arrival of roses.” What does it do to advance the plot? Uh. What does it actually do? It’s funny. It introduces a secondary character who disappears from the book entirely. And it was a blast to write. It would be a blast to read. Except . . . it doesn’t do anything to advance the plot. I read through it this time, knowing what the plot was, and I thought: “This is slow.” Yup. It gets deleted. And it’s so painful, because it was fun to write. But it doesn’t do anything. Nothing at all. I’m just wincing.
And that’s just on the macro level. I’ve started leaving comments for myself, saying, “Gee–is this really the twentieth time she’s whined about this? Good God.” And nearly every scene should have the first four to five paragraphs lopped off. You know that part of the scene that starts with someone thinking? Yeah. That part. My characters think too much. My characters can have a five sentence conversation that spans four pages because somebody is thinking way too much. Yup. That happens all the time. So for the next week or so, that little meter will run backwards. Backwards represents progress. I think.
So what about the rest of you? What’s the most painful thing you’ve ever had to delete?