Sharon Lee Beatty

Still moving, just not very fast.

 Found a new trick. I’m writing scene “sheets” where I identify:

• the event,
• the function of the scene,
• the goal of the scene,
• the structure of the scene, which includes the beginning conflict, the complication that raises the stakes, and the resolution (whether the goal is achieved or not and what the character does about it–generally should leave the character worse off than before)
• the closing question(s): the scene should raise at least one clear (new) question in the reader’s mind

Anything that doesn’t have those elements clearly spelled out isn’t a scene according to Darcy Pattison. It might be a sequel–the place/time where the character reflects on what just happened. Or it might be a segue–bridging two scenes. Or it might be something that shouldn’t be there or should be fixed.

So far I am finding that my scenes are clearly scenes. There’s one sequel of some length (couple of pages), and it is clearly a sequel. The exercise has helped me tighten up the scenes, though. Especially the part about leaving the reader with a clear (new) question. I am making those less murky.

So, now I need to get past process and begin editing. I’m guilty of using process to procrastinate, I fear.

Well, I’m moving again. Not very fast but picking up steam.

Early December I thought through Xiao’s passions and goals. What would he as part-dragon be thinking about the current political state? How would he as a Chinese man (even if he is an open-minded Chinese man and one who was a childhood friend) relate to Kimi? And how can I avoid giving away his dragon nature too early in the story without making it an “out of the blue” thing near the end? I have answers to all of those things now. It is just a matter of rewriting some text.

However, in thinking through Xiao’s character (and Kimi’s voice), I see that I need to rewrite the last third of the book (again). Sigh. But even in its latest form I wasn’t content with it. I think the new ending will scratch my itch. I’ll start fixing the voice issues with the rest of the manuscript first. Oh, yes, I want to add back the visit to the pig farm. It will feature in the end.

Blue funk continues.

Went to this absolutely phenomenal weekend retreat in early November. It should have snapped me out of the doldrums, but it didn’t. In fact, while it stimulated some part of me, it sabotaged me the rest of the way. I felt honored to be selected to attend once I realized just how awesome the attendees were, but it scared me to be considered up to that level.

FEAR OF FAILURE.

That’s what my sister called it. Fear of success is another way to put it. I would never have thought I had it in me: a side of myself I never would have expected to see, at least not quite so graphically. There’s nothing subtle about this at all. I am terrified and there’s no easy to blame excuses. Bald, plain terrified.

I need to figure out how to get over this. Maybe it is good that it has hit me now: so early in the game. If I hit this after my first sale and couldn’t follow through with the editors it would be a great deal worse. I know I’ll find a way to cope–I always do–but it sure has knocked me flat on my butt in the meantime. 

Blue Funk — Have done next to nothing. Not like me. Blame it on the meds. Easier that way.

Apologies for the long break.

In preparing for an upcoming retreat, the instructor is giving us some warm-up exercises on sentence structures. We started into long, complex sentences. Here were my contributions.

Just because I’m on vacation doesn’t mean I can’t work on my book. The stateroom is equipped with a nice work table and an Ethernet jack. What more does one need?

I entered all the revisions I made during my first pass of edits. Twenty plus chapters worth. I still need to go back to the beginning and redo the start (again). But I think I’m getting there. Writers Group was much happier with my latest restart. Get that together and I can start the next pass at a whole book edit. There’s certainly a lot of weak writing to clean up.

Off for now. See you back in Everett in a couple days.

Wow! A real page-turner that goes all the way to the end. It won the Carnegie Medal, and it is clear why. It’s been in the UK for a couple of years but just made it over the pond this spring.

For those of us old enough to remember, it is like The Twilight Zone. Strange. Weird. In an intersting way. Like many of the Twilight Zone episodes there are elements that defy normal reality, but like them they are told in such a plausible way that the reader accepts the oddities. And not only accepts them, but is drawn to them, wants them to be real.

The story begins with a call from a mysterious boy who seems to know too much about the young girl he has called. Their strange intertwined relationship fills the story and takes the young girl (and we readers) on a mystical chase through a small English community. The journey passes familiar mileposts: what it means to be a teenager, what it means to suffer loss, what it means to have your parents separate, what it means to live in a small town where everyone knows your story, and how destructive prejudice and lies can be.

But the book is really about life and death and powers greater than our own. And as the book says: that’s a mystery each of us has to solve on our own.

Rating: 5 stars

I’m unstuck. At long last. And the fix had been right there all along. It was a little voice chirping in the void. And I had ignored it.

It kept making noise when I asked the basic questions: Who is Dory? What makes her unique? Why should I like her? Why should I want her to succeed? What’s wrong? Who or what is in her way?

I was making it too hard. Once I listened to the little voice, the answer was obvious.

GOOD NEWS

My application to the fall SCBWI retreat was accepted. I’m going. I was sure I wouldn’t be accepted. The questionnaire asked for all sorts of things I had to say “no” to. My hope was that my writing sample was strong enough. Something worked. I am looking forward to the long weekend in November so that I can work with pro’s and fellow writers on improving my skills and can glean more about the writing business from those who are a lot farther along this path than I am.

I’ve been distracted. Let me count the things I can think of to do when I am avoiding doing something that’s hard or undesirable.

• Read the newspaper (afterall, there’s the presidential race that’s heating up)
• Watch the Olympics (how often can you see someone like Michael Phelps break all the records?)
• Read my favorite hockey blog (the season is right around the corner)
• Check out the catalogs that come in the mail (I really do need a nice pair of black pants)
• Prepare complicated meals (eating on the run isn’t good for your health, everyone knows that)
• Going to the grocery store (my room was really looking drab without flowers, and I have that new vase…..)
• Doing laundry (it’s been awhile since I washed the bath mat, you know)
• Catch up on old e-mails (the ones I’ve been skipping for weeks, by now they must be really important)

Still, I haven’t hit rock bottom yet. There’s still a ways to go before I’m forced to do the thing I’m avoiding:

• Cleaning the bathroom (thank goodness there’s lots of things I try to avoid–my bathroom would never get cleaned otherwise)
• Sorting through clothes to put together a Goodwill box (seeing the box sitting there is so annoying)
• Mopping the kitchen floor (when was the last time I did more than wipe up a spill?)
• Vacuuming (I am allergic to dust, of course) Do you see a theme forming here?
• Washing the mattress pad (doesn’t get done nearly often enough)
• Writing e-mails to far away friends and family (good thing they don’t count on my writing weekly)
• Scrubbing the shower walls (the spots on the wall jumped out at me when I showered last)
• Napping (ah, another theme–by now depression is having a hay day)

Gotta run. There’s a pre-season hockey game at 11 and after that a minor league baseball game. I should get home in time to fix dinner. Maybe after dinner, I’ll wash that mattress pad.

Made the first pass through the book. Ironed out some plot holes and character arcs.

Working on my third attempt at the first few chapters. Second version was better than first but still not good enough.

That’s because I’m not getting it about beginnings, how to make a character jump off the page. And that’s because I’m forgetting that characters aren’t real people. They are larger than life. If people want reality, they’ll step outside their front door. Readers want gooder than good, badder than bad, more spiteful than spite. Mostly they want their protagonist to have an enemy. I seem to thrive on man against himself kinds of conflict. Well, that’s deadlier than dead unless that conflict has a strong, tangible focus. Symbols that themselves are representative of the conflict. Bad hair days. Ketchup on your favorite white blouse days. Your dog died days.

Most important, characters that are their own worst enemies can’t seem pathetic. Talk about deadly. There can be pathetic characters. But only as secondary characters and even they won’t hold interest very long. Pathetic characters HAVE NO ENERGY. They don’t move the plot forward. They don’t make you want to turn the next page. In fact, they make you want to put the book down. The reader doesn’t want to identify with a character who is a loser.

So why did I write a protag who was a loser? OUCH. That’s why my first time through I tried to start with another character. And why I turned all the attention in the rewrite to another character–one who is more intersting.

Okay, so now what? Can we say U-N-D-E-R-D-O-G? The pathetic character has to have a goal. A tight, tangible goal, and real, tangible prods toward that goal (not just some lofty ideal). In addition to the goal, there needs to be people preventing the character from achieving it. But the character has to be on her way out of the pit with a real, solid opportunity for redemption. At least at the start. The character can screw it up later on her own. Then you really do want to turn the page to see when they finally wake up. BUT IT CAN’T START THAT WAY.

Take, for instance, Cinderella. Did she really have to grovel and clean and bow to her step sisters? Of course not. She could have gone to a nunnery, run away and joined the circus, gone to work at a rich man’s house as a servant. So what keeps her from being pathetic? A goal. She wants to go to the ball. She will do anything to go to the ball. The step-sisters prevent her from going. Conflict. Being a groveling servant isn’t conflict. It is pathos. That’s how the story starts–the invitation to the ball. After the ball, she goes back to being a pathetic character. But now we can tolerate it because we’ve seen she can be someone wonderful and we are rooting for her to do it again. We want to turn the page to see what it is that finally lights the fire under her butt.

So, back to the keyboard to make Dory an underdog: Someone with a goal who is facing insurrmountable odds to achieve it. And only one of those enemies can be her own self-image. Bring on the bad guys, the ketchup, the dead dog.

Gayle Lynds was the keynote speaker at the PNWA summer conference this year. She said something that struck home.  About being an author:

“You’ll know you have crossed the Rubicon when you would rather write than read.”

Within the past three months I made that crossing. I continue buying new books to read and the pile of unread books is getting taller and taller. The time I used to spend reading before going to bed has shrunk both so that I can stay up longer writing and so that I can get up earlier to write before starting the day with my paying job.

I also noticed that the quality of my writing took a big step forward at the same time. At one of the agent interviews at the conference, an agent was interested enough after the pitch that she asked if I had the first few pages of my book. I did. She read them carefully and then told me that it would need a rewrite–the protag voice was just not there. When I went back into the book to make the changes, I saw quickly what she meant. I saw other signs of weak writing and ended up scrubbing the first 100 pages, cutting ten of them by tightening up the writing here and there.

I realized that I was looking at the writing in a different way and seeing weaknesses I hadn’t noticed before. Part of it was that I hadn’t looked at the story in some time, but more of it was that I was able to keep my eye on story at the same time my eye was on mechanics, sort of like being able to drive and pay attention to the mirrors simultaneously.

Her words encouraged me. Crossing the Rubicon–the river dividing the unpublished from the published–is the river I’ve been trying to cross. I’ll just keep writing and we’ll see if I am really there.

Okay. Okay. So it’s been a few days longer than usual.

I’ve got news, though. The 2008 PNWA conference was wonderful, as usual. Top sessions:

• James Thayer. “Top 10 Novel Writing Mistakes.” Well, it was actually 6. But he also have 6 top dialogue mistakes, and then two more bonus mistakes. I am guilty of several from time to time and a couple more often than that. Good way to take me up a notch in my skill as a writer. He has two web presences. One as author: www.jamesthayer.com. The other as a professional editor: www.thayerediting.com. Based on his presentation, I would say having him edit a book would be a great learning experience. I’m going to give it serious thought.
• Wayne Ude from Whidbey gave two fantastic presentations on point of view. Exceptionally clear and supported by examples from classics. He’s thinking of turning it into a book. He should. He has a real knack for making the information accessible (immediately useful) and not just presenting theory or rules.
• Blake Snyder. What can I say? A phenomenal speaker–funny, motivating. But more than that, his way of viewing story is direct, easy to apply. I sat through his talk thinking about my own stories. For the most part I could identify the specific stages in the plots’ development. In a couple cases, I think I wait too long to make a point. And in one case, I think I skim right over something vitally important. (I feel another rewrite coming on.) Buy his book, Save the Cat:  http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/1932907009/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217022060&sr=8-1. It is only 180 pages and the most important part is only 30. And, yes, it is on screenwriting. But where else is story reduced to such a tight form? It will be the best $20 you ever spent.

The agent/editor interviews went well, except that I was a nervous wreck and still don’t have the concept of pitching down very well. However, Morning Song is a great story and it almost pitches itself. I just need to stand back and stay out of the way. I have three submissions to prepare. One of the agents had some pointed comments about my beginning (yes, she asked to see the first fiew pages and reviewed them right there). I’m making those changes and will get the three submissions out this weekend.

Whether they take the manuscript on or not, I was favorably impressed by both Regina Brooks and Minju Chang. They are sharp. They know the YA part of the industry. I felt comfortable with both of them. So I’ll cross my fingers and hope they ask for the full manuscript.

Ciao

P.S. If you want my notes from the presentations, pop me an email: sharonbeatty@comcast.net

Here’s the plan…

I need to improve my editing process just as I improved my writing process. I have started this cycle a bit rocky already and am going every which way, but I know I need to be in control. I had a strategy but wasn’t sticking to it. Yesterday I had a breakthrough, and I think I see my way clear.

As I wrote I recorded “issues” on slips of paper (all the 6×9 legal pad size–improvement from last book). So first thing I did was organize my issues pages and put them in three piles: character/structural issues, simple one and two spot fix issues, and a third category that is a big harder to describe. These are things that span the arc of the book as “globals”–things like make voice of three characters more unique, put in physical attributes of characters, drop in intentional anachronisms.

My intent was to start with the character/structural items first: no sense editing things that are going to change anyway. But it turns out that was too vague a guideline. I needed more of a structured process. Last night’s AHA! moment was when I realized that what I had just done was what I should have been doing all along. I had taken a cluster of chapters that naturally went together and looked for the BIG problems, and found that character changes (even killing characters) were a lesser order of magnitude for the most part. Giving and taking away lines is peanuts compared to slicing and dicing chapters into new pieces. So I started looking for pacing. Places where the storyline sags. Places where whole scenes need to be added or deleted. The big cut and paste exercise. I floated above the words and dealt with the scenes as a puppeteer might, and  I quickly saw where I needed to fix things.

So now the plan is to finish going through the whole book this way. Assessing each chapter for its punch. If it is just picking words and phrases that add tension, cutting a character out of the scene, etc., I’ll mark them and move on. This first pass is the stuff BETWEEN chapters. If I stick to that this pass should be pretty effective. And pretty fast.

Next pass I will deal with the character issues.

I know it is gauche to quote your own works in some circles (unless you are giving a reading, of course). And it may be bad taste to quote your drafts. But sometimes I write something that simply must be quoted.

These two fall in the category of marvelous typos:

• She said every cheep word she knew.
• Wearing a patchy bear, he ….

Senses. 5 senses. Five.

Okay. I admit it. I’m a master of one. Maybe two if you count speech as sound. Pretty weak there.

Argh.

Touch I think I can manage if I concentrate on it hard enough. There might be a half dozen places or so that I could drop touch into the current novel without trouble. If I think about it. Which is the problem.

But taste and smell? Not only do I not think of them when I’m writing, but I can’t imagine how to squeeze them in without the result being terribly contrived. It doesn’t fit into dialogue very well. How many opportunities do you get to say, “Damn, Paul, that crap you gave me tastes like gym socks”? (What do gym socks taste like, anyway?) And how many times can somebody walk by a newly mown lawn? In fact, these two examples are the point. I think other people have trouble putting all the senses in, too, because so many of the examples are worn out cliches. And when they are cliches, they lose all of their punch. At least to me they do. They just become a few more meaningless words on a page. I don’t dwell on them, linger over them, swirl them under my nose like the bouquet of a great wine, let them test my palate to see if they fill me with the remembered comfort of pizza or oatmeal. See what I mean?

Part of the challenge in handling these two is that they are ephemeral: right brain experiences, not left brain. Sure, scientists can quantify taste: they can make soy bean paste taste like lobster. But for most of us, taste brings back memories of the times and places we associate with that taste. And since not all experiences are universal, particularly these emotion-laden ones, how can we begin to guess what a reference to the smell of curry will conjure up in a reader’s mind? The expience of eating ice cream will not conjure up feelings of joy in a person who is lactose intolerant, nor the smell of roses be the right touch for a person who is allergic to them. So are we dealing with another form of archetype? The archetype that honey is something we all like even when many of us don’t? Just like the archetype of the tatooed motorcycle rider who might actually be a bank VP and a really nice guy?

So is mastering the ephemeral senses more a matter of being a student of the archetypes? Hmmm…..

So, how to fix this? “Everyone” says you have to use all five senses to captivate readers. I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I’ll accept the point for now, since I admit I might just be in denial.  What I’m going to try to do, is to note examples of smell (I’ll start there) in the books I read for the next month. And I’ll see how many I find. It’ll be a little like trying to find how many Waldos there are in a maze: I’ll probably read right over many of them. But I’ll really try.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

The book is done. Well, the first draft is done. I beat my goal by a month and here I was thinking I was going to miss it by a month. I should have made it just about on time, but I got a bit manic and blew through the last eleven chapters in five days. Yes, that was a bit crazy. But I think the last half of the book is going to need less editing than the first half which I spent almost two months on.

One month of thinking. Two months of research. Two months of writing (which should have been three or four). Now comes the rewriting. In writing the last two books, I spent as much time editing as I did writing–a year on each. So if that holds true and I can get to a polished manuscript in five months (or even seven), I will have met my goal of a book in a year.

What worked?

• Working straight through. Kept continuity of thought, details, direction from chapter to chapter without having to go back and do a lot of rereading.
• The level of outlining–basic objectives of each chapter, and in a few cases events. But not scenes. I thought through those just as I began writing. Knowing the objective of the chapter and what had just come before I could pick the best approach to presenting the needed information. The scenes organized themselves naturally at the time and I didn’t waste a lot of time laying out and then revising scene notes.
• Having outstanding character sketches. I used the physical attributes some and will do more so in the editing to come, but the most helpful of all was the detailed insight into the characters I got from doing the archetypes and tarot. Odd way to go, I suppose, but it worked. Part of that was looking into the Goal, Motivation and Conflict of each character. My characters walked off the pages with the first chapter and never let me down. I knew them inside and out. At the gut level, the motivation level. And I think that is a whole lot more important than a bunch of silly details like what their favorite color is. Those come along when they will in the story, note them and go on.
• Having a high-level arc of the story. That’s the hardest for me to do. I wrote brief chapter summaries of key events and then walked all over them when I actually started writing, but that combined with the GMC laid out the basic conflicts of the story and the events that would best show them.
• Letting the characters and events go where they wanted to (within reason). Having my objectives for each chapter down, though, gave the freedom to modify plot points or character roles without messing up the rest of the story.
• Not getting hung up with chasing down details, like did I get the eye color right. When I was in doubt, I marked the passage with [] so that I can search and go find them when I’m editing.
• Part of not getting hung up with things was writing down on slips of paper the threads I dropped and need to go back and pick up. Note it down and move on.
• Not letting myself reread and edit real time. I pretty much never went back more than a paragraph or two.
• Writing on the computer. I had been a die-hard long hand writer, using my typing in the manuscript as the way to do the first editing pass. Never again.
• Turning on my iPod. It made my office a pleasant place to be in the evenings and on the weekend and not the same place it is on the workdays. Facing the opposite direction helps, too. Butt in chair is hard when you don’t want to be in the room.
• Hump season for sports–hockey done and baseball hadn’t started. Will need to figure out how to manage hockey games and writing.
• Doing my research up front, but trying to keep myself from going too far. Mostly just looked things up when I got to them and needed them. Ended up dropping some of the research I had done earlier as it is. Even so, I suspect I am guilty of the dreaded info dump in a few spots. Just in time research is possible on the web. I know some people turn up their nose at Wiki’s. I live by them (but I usually don’t stop there).
• Having a great writers group that made me prepare submissions at the beginning when I was getting a slow start.
• Getting their feedback on the first couple of chapters fast so that I didn’t perpetuate problems and so that I could insinuate new threads the group picked up on as underdeveloped opportunities. Don’t want to write 400 pages on a bad starting premise.
• And loving words, ideas, and the process of putting them on paper. That always helps.

How is writing like sports?

You were afraid I’d never ask. Ha! What it all boils down to in both is speed, agility, and balance.

While you might not think of golf as a sport requiring speed, in reality it is all about speed–controlling the speed of that little white thingey, especially while putting. Hockey, baseball, tennis, soccer, basketball, football, track and field, swimming. Speed, agility, balance.

But then, so is writing. I don’t care what anyone says, one novel every ten years is a hobby. If you are writing every day (or almost every day), over ten years that’s what? Thirty words a day for a goodly sized novel. Not everyone has to do a novel a year, but that is a desirable rate for a commercial novelist. Speed. You might as well not write at all if you aren’t agile. If you want to follow an outline slavishly, then write non-fiction. Nothing against outliners, mind you. I write outlines. But I also chuck them when they quit going where the story is going. And the authors at every conference I’ve attended, at least those who even start with outlines, say the same thing. But what happens is you either bend the words to the character or bend the character to the words. Either requires agility. And do I need to say anything about balance? Not that I always achieve it. So far I’ve written books with great dialogue, wonderful characters, excellent prose, and a storyline that isn’t compelling enough to get an agent’s attention (though I keep hoping). Common writing mistakes: Too much information. Too little information. Too much tell. Not enough show. Shallow characters. Characters so extreme as to not be believable. Too much schmaltz. Too little emotion. It is all about balance.

So. All that being said. You can certainly see why I’m going to spend this evening at a baseball game. I’ll be studying the science of speed, balance, and agility.

Oh, yes. I forgot the last thing they have in common. The passion to win.

I am not going to make my August goal at the speed I am going. I keep thinking that I’ll start to speed up now that I’m not having to stop and research something in every chapter. But that doesn’t seem to be happening yet. Some of the speakers at conferences suggest not stopping to do the research, but to just mark it and keep going. I think I’ll try that next time around. This time I think I’m barely doing well enough to not edit as I go. But it is working.

The one thing that I did that is proving to be really smart is something Ann Tobias and others have suggested. I made pretty thorough notes about my characters, including their relationship with other characters and the strengths and weaknesses of their personalities. I even went so far as to draw a map of the relationships. I also drew a map of the region. I used floorplans of an existing castle, labelling how I intended to use the rooms, and for key rooms I even laid out the furniture.

I also plotted it out fairly well–a good, long paragraph on what needs to happen in each chapter. I didn’t outline the scenes, though. I think that was a good thing. I am able to stick within the objectives I drafted earlier but arrange the scenes that work best from what has gone before. I am finding that people and plot items are changing, but they are changing in small ways and I am able to keep up with them by making small notes on my character and plot pages.

So now all I need to do is pick up my speed, and that will happen if I don’t skip days. I must do at least two pages a day. It still may not add up to the two chapters a week that I’m going to need to do to finish my first draft per schedule.

Anyway, Chapter 11 is done. That was this weekend’s accomplishment. Twelve chapters to go.

What can I say? Another great book. This collaboration between two outstanding writers is wonderfully inventive. It’s a great concept. They matched the multiple worlds structure of the altiverse with a different approach to the multiple identities that might occur. Joey, Jai, Jay, J/O, Jakon, and so on. Both male and female variants. Different paths, different futures. Different talents, different approaches to life. And of them all–one endearing, special entity with the determination to save the altiverse (and his friends).

This is a collaboration that really works–a worldscape worth visiting again. I hope the two are planning on sequels. 

Rating: 5 stars

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061238963/InterWorld/index.aspx

And when, do you ask, are you going to finish your own latest story? I’ll get right back to it–just as soon as I finish this post. Promise.

Another great find. Unlike anything I’ve ever read except perhaps Chocolat (the movie). Wonderful characters, hints of magic, and a surprise at the end (a couple of them). A boy on the lowest rung of the lowest ladder of life falls under the influence of a mysterious stranger. The stranger sets up shop as a pawnbroker in a small town which is under the thumb of a tyrant. While the pawnbroker pays fairly for people’s cast offs, his specialty is buying people’s secrets. The boy assists him by recording the confessions in a black book. But like Chocolat, the apparently innocent actions of the stranger begin to change life in the small town.

The publisher is an imprint of Holtzbrinck that I have never heard of: Feiwel and Friends. I recommend buying the book in hardback. The presentatin of the book and its black-edged pages is special.

I want to get my hands on The Bone Magician is due out soon.

Rating: 5 stars

http://us.macmillan.com/author/fehiggins