Moving Forward

My characters just finished a big battle with the bad guy and they won this round. I've been itching to keep going but... I haven't perfected my plan.

Since this is a second draft, that I've changed the trajectory on, I don't want to waste effort doing something in this chapter that doesn't move the plot forward. I have taken the outline I revised and sketched out the chapter as I suggested, but I noted that there's no action in the chapter. Nothing happens. It sets up several items for later resolution, but nothing happens in the actual chapter.

Now, can't have that.

The current chapter is a switch of POV from the male hero (Étienne) to his wife (Basilie). They have all contributed to the successful defeat of the bad guy (Galen).

Basilie has sustained some superficial wounds. The point of the chapter is to establish changes in behavior for Étienne, and to clarify Basilie's mindset regarding her soon-to-be born child, and finally, to establish some family history for Basilie.

This entry isn't necessarily about how I decide to resolve this, but to point out a realization I had of how many of my writing processes are physical. Under doctor's orders, I can't go ride my bike. I can't go shopping. And most painful to my process, I can't listen to my iPod and dance around like a lunatic.

Which leaves naps. Sometimes, when I try to go to sleep, the emptiness of my own head allows new ideas to pop in. Especially if I have been trying to think like that person for a while.

So what would Basilie do after a big fight? Should I pick her up in the ER? I'm going to have to write it out and try different things... But it's also like the way I cook:

Sometimes I look at the ingredients I have and contemplate all the ways to combine them until I hit a successful mix. But sometimes, I can be sitting, eating something completely different and get struck by lightning.

Last night I was thinking about chili, thawing in the fridge. I remembered we had pie crust and chicken and broccoli and various soups... and I had a eureka moment: POT PIE.

And sometimes, writing works the same way.

Major Plot Revision

Any writer who's approaching a deadline, whether imposed by someone or yourself, should know that it's always best to let a work rest for as long as you can, then review it, then revise it and send it.

In daily newspapers, you're lucky if you get 15 minutes to walk away from it.

In weeklies, you can build a day or two into a story's timeline to give it time to breath.

A synopsis is no different.

In this case, a friend asked to read mine. He's sent me the suggestions and I haven't opened the email yet because even though we had lunch and I know some of what it says, my fragile ego can't bring myself to open it.

(That is a BIG run-on, consider it reflective of my nervousness in this project.)

We're talking about Allegheny Beast. Over laughs and pizza, my friend Bill, my husband and I brainstormed changing the "villain" from the oh-so-cliché evil military compound to a paramilitary operation outside the government, or an evil pharmaceutical company, or a terrorist cell plotting biological weapons.

This is what is must feel like to work with a team of writers on a TV show. The ideas get bigger and better.

Now, why on Earth would I take a finished manuscript I had planned to submit to a major romance publisher's paranormal imprint and decide at the last minute to change the villain?

This isn't "let's make a few edits" or "tweak a character," this is major overhaul.

Yep, I'm crazy that way.

Like it wasn't enough to flip-flop genre, let's change characters too.

Such is the artists' life: You can't run from the impulse when your gut and your heart agree you'll have a stronger, more marketable manuscript.

For the record, this is not the same as the perfectionism I feel when I try to get Étienne's "frenchness" right in the Fashion and Fiends series. This is a change that improves the marketability of manuscript, not just me trying to be authentic.

Managing projects

My work on the werewolf short story was stalled by the 18-page essay I did for my take-home final in my French history class. Last night our critique group met, and it was only four of us, with three of us presenting chapters. I presented Chapter Seven of Courting Apparitions.

The beauty and agony of working with other writers in a critique format is when other people are right.

I leave these critique meetings feeling energized about my craft, but when they articulate problems that either I didn't notice or I thought I had fixed, it can be demoralizing. That is part of the process. And once you establish a relationship with your critique group, you learn to lean on certain members to find certain things.

You can rely on me to nitpick about tight sentence structure. One member of our group is what I like to call a visual reader, because she seems to visualize every detail in her mind and will let you know if anything seems out of place or confusing with the logistic flow especially with moving people from place to place. Another member seems very into verbs.

They also have opposite tastes when it comes to some things, which is good, because it shows how some readers will like what another reader doesn't.

But mostly, they start poking around in a chapter talking about the tension and the action and sometimes I realize, I've missed the boat as the author. That my text, which so clearly has a mission in my mind, has fallen completely flat on the page. Other writers will know what I mean when I say that sometimes you write something beautiful, with no particular flaws except one: it doesn't move the story forward as you intended. Then, the reader might ask, "Did I miss the point?"

As an author, I've had several experiences where people said this about a scene. So, I look at it and I read it. Removed from the creative impetus that spurred it, I no longer remember why it seemed so perfect. I cannot say why I wrote it.

And so it must go. The scene gets deleted. Or, as might happen with this manuscript, characters get deleted.

Yes, I am starting chapter 14 of Courting Apparitions, my second serious full draft, and my critique group has pointed out that some characters aren't adding anything.

So, they are between Chapters 7 & 8, and I have made the decision to remove Helen. But I'm not going backwards now. She will no longer exist from this point forward and I'll fully remove her in the next draft.

Hopefully we fix Pierre and Jules. There's been some rustling that they don't belong, they feel extraneous. They shouldn't be. They earn the right to be salvaged. But poor Helen, she's gone.

No matter what your project, you have to be willing to dismantle something that's not working, no matter how beautiful it looks.

Outlines

I hate outlines.

When I work on a first draft, I hastily scrawl something that could pass for an outline as I go. It's more of a "I can't forget to do this later" list.

When I progress to a second draft, I outline the first one and what happened and rearrange the events as needed.

But sometimes that's hard and not as clear cut as I'd like.

I received iWork version 9 for Christmas. I purchased the original version of this software when Mac Minis came out about five years ago. The Mac Mini has since died, but iWork keeps going strong. With my latest MacBook, I didn't want to sully it with any Microsoft products. Just a goal of mine. And since Pages, the Apple version of Word, imports and exports as Word docs and PDFs, there's no reason I can't use it. Plus we have Word on our old iBook, so I can check the formatting of the file before I send it off to anything official.

My hatred of Microsoft is fodder for another day.

iWork includes three elements: Pages (Word), Keynote (PowerPoint) and Numbers (Excel). My original version (1.0.2) did not have Numbers. So I decided to play with it, partially because I keep hearing how other writers plot in spreadsheets. I prefer random scraps of paper, but I lose those pieces of paper, so I thought a computer document might be good.

I started with a simple chart of the old manuscript:
Chapter -- Character -- Item done really well that I'd forgotten about -- How to use

On my second worksheet:
Chapter -- POV -- Summary

On my third worksheet for the current revisions:
Chapter -- POV -- Summary -- then tabs for each character and plot theme and what happens in those various items in the chapter as I get the revisions done

My four worksheet:
An exact replica of page 3 except this one is for chapters I haven't revised yet and what I want to put in them

I'll keep you posted how it works.