It's so hard for me to believe that it's almost September, though the weather -- and the fact that we're home from our annual mini-vacation -- reminds me that it's true.
It's also hard to believe that I've posted so little on the blog this month. It feels surprising because I've actually had a rich writing month -- it's just all been off-blog. The summer turned out to be a good one for reading, pondering, thinking, and poeming; I also managed the rough draft of an essay I didn't plan to write but like a lot (and am pondering what the heck to do with once I revise it). I didn't get much time to work on the novel, alas, though I managed some good reflection times on the back story with my dear husband/creative consultant. I have a sense of where I need to go -- I just need to find the time to do it.
And I'm hopeful I can. The autumn is gearing up to be a highly busy one. Sweet girl/Jedi Teen will be in 8th grade (we start Monday). I'll be working as a teaching assistant and doing a good bit of curriculum writing again as well as staying involved in ministry (church school, missions, afterschool arts). It's a full plate, but I am raring to keep writing and determined to try to keep my morning writing rhythm going even once we move into the busier fall schedule. It's frankly feeling more important than extra sleep right now.
Two other blessings I should mention: our long, long overdue technology upgrade is in the works at home at last. Once we're through the transition, I'm hopeful that will free up much more time for writing, both here and elsewhere. And on a final but profoundly grateful note: my medical tests came back with good news last week. I'm still extra tired physically, but knowing that what I'm dealing with is in the "normal" range of things makes me feel incredibly grateful.
Tired and busy I may be, but I feel read to make these next few months count in terms of creativity and faithfulness. May it be so, Lord! May it be so!
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novel. Show all posts
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Friday, May 10, 2013
Writing from Minor Character POVs: Getting Your Fiction Muscles Working
I miss writing fiction.
I'm thankful beyond words that I am writing as much as I am right now. I enjoy writing reviews and even, in a strange way, boring web content. Writing is writing. I love crafting sentences. I'd rather do it than anything else I do, even the workhorse parts of writing.
But oh, I miss writing fiction. It's not just a matter of finding the time to do it, though that is a perpetual challenge. It's a matter of being able to dive in and do it in the seven minutes here, three minutes there that I can squeeze in. It's feeling frustrated when I only have a little bit of time and discover that a lack of writing fiction over the past couple of weeks has made my fiction muscles rusty. We all know that sometimes it can take a couple of pages to warm up and even get to a place where you're writing anything worth keeping, and sometimes the warm up time is all I can manage.
The other morning I woke up from a dream about the characters in my novel -- the novel I haven't had time to work on for several weeks. Dreaming about characters is a lovely gift to any writer. You wake up hearing echoes of their voices, and if you're really blessed, you've got the contours of a scene all ready and waiting to make the leap to paper.
Dream scenes fade quickly though, and in this particular case, I had "one of those days" where I simply could not grab any space or time to write. The scene slithered away from me. Argh.
When it's been a while since I've been in story mode, I sometimes find that playing around in someone else's story world is just what I need to get my fiction muscles working again. It takes less creative and mental energy than diving into something completely original, but it can definitely provide terrific writing practice.
Yes, this is what most people call fan-fiction, and it can be fun to write it just for the fun of writing it (nothing wrong with that)! But I've been discovering lately that in addition to a mental health break, writing this kind of fiction can be a great exercise in story crafting.
It's especially helpful if you approach a story from the perspective of a minor character. Give this a try the next time you only have a few minutes to write and need to get yourself in gear quickly. Pick a favorite movie or a book, one you know really well, and dive into an already established scene. But dive into it from the perspective of a minor character --- someone who doesn't have a big role to play, someone in the crowd observing the action, someone completely on the sidelines. Maybe it's a character from another part of the story who isn't there in the original action, but whom you put there, eavesdropping behind a door. Maybe it's a character in the original scene who says one thing but looks like they're dying to say something else, and you, the writer, can climb inside their head and think through their unvoiced thoughts and motivations. This kind of writing becomes an exercise in thinking through character as well as plot and tone.
Writing a scene you already know but from an entirely different perspective is a great exercise -- both in thinking through what you want to include, and what slant you want to give it, and thinking through why the original author of a scene wrote it they way she or he did. Once you get going, you may find yourself inventing new scenes for the story -- scenes only hinted at but never shown, scenes that you wish had been there, scenes that must have been there in the skeleton background but were never brought forward.
I'm thankful beyond words that I am writing as much as I am right now. I enjoy writing reviews and even, in a strange way, boring web content. Writing is writing. I love crafting sentences. I'd rather do it than anything else I do, even the workhorse parts of writing.
But oh, I miss writing fiction. It's not just a matter of finding the time to do it, though that is a perpetual challenge. It's a matter of being able to dive in and do it in the seven minutes here, three minutes there that I can squeeze in. It's feeling frustrated when I only have a little bit of time and discover that a lack of writing fiction over the past couple of weeks has made my fiction muscles rusty. We all know that sometimes it can take a couple of pages to warm up and even get to a place where you're writing anything worth keeping, and sometimes the warm up time is all I can manage.
The other morning I woke up from a dream about the characters in my novel -- the novel I haven't had time to work on for several weeks. Dreaming about characters is a lovely gift to any writer. You wake up hearing echoes of their voices, and if you're really blessed, you've got the contours of a scene all ready and waiting to make the leap to paper.
Dream scenes fade quickly though, and in this particular case, I had "one of those days" where I simply could not grab any space or time to write. The scene slithered away from me. Argh.
When it's been a while since I've been in story mode, I sometimes find that playing around in someone else's story world is just what I need to get my fiction muscles working again. It takes less creative and mental energy than diving into something completely original, but it can definitely provide terrific writing practice.
Yes, this is what most people call fan-fiction, and it can be fun to write it just for the fun of writing it (nothing wrong with that)! But I've been discovering lately that in addition to a mental health break, writing this kind of fiction can be a great exercise in story crafting.
It's especially helpful if you approach a story from the perspective of a minor character. Give this a try the next time you only have a few minutes to write and need to get yourself in gear quickly. Pick a favorite movie or a book, one you know really well, and dive into an already established scene. But dive into it from the perspective of a minor character --- someone who doesn't have a big role to play, someone in the crowd observing the action, someone completely on the sidelines. Maybe it's a character from another part of the story who isn't there in the original action, but whom you put there, eavesdropping behind a door. Maybe it's a character in the original scene who says one thing but looks like they're dying to say something else, and you, the writer, can climb inside their head and think through their unvoiced thoughts and motivations. This kind of writing becomes an exercise in thinking through character as well as plot and tone.
Writing a scene you already know but from an entirely different perspective is a great exercise -- both in thinking through what you want to include, and what slant you want to give it, and thinking through why the original author of a scene wrote it they way she or he did. Once you get going, you may find yourself inventing new scenes for the story -- scenes only hinted at but never shown, scenes that you wish had been there, scenes that must have been there in the skeleton background but were never brought forward.
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Jumping Back Into Story: Beginning With the End
On this third day of the new year, I’ve been cleaning, organizing,
lesson planning, enjoying time with the sweet girl, and generally trying to get
well (still congested, still coughing). Now that end of term grading is done, I’m
also trying to get back into the writing groove, but it’s taking a little
longer than I anticipated.
What is it that makes jumping back into something creative
so hard sometimes? Writing is the thing I love to do beyond all else, and yet
when it’s been a while since I’ve regularly written – especially fiction – I
can find all manner of things to put off the jump.
I used to think it was because my writing muscles weren’t
well exercised. That may still be true, but it’s less true than it used to be
since I do other kinds of writing regularly even when I’m not actively writing
stories. Still, there is a different part of the brain (and hands) involved in
writing non-fiction and even poems, so lack of regular exercise may still be
part of it.
For me, I think it’s more often the realization that my jump
can never be as deep as I’d like it to be. Although I’ve gotten better at
writing in small spurts, out of necessity, I still write stories best when I
can dive and dive deep for long, long stretches of time. That time is scarce at
best and non-existent at worst some days. Knowing that I can’t give the time
or attention needed makes me feel like I'm always “holding back” when I
start. When you know there is a good chance you will be interrupted seven
minutes in (and twelve, and sixteen, and nineteen) it’s just harder to leap
with abandon.
Some of my hesitation may also come from the simple fact
that I cannot shut a door. My writing space is in a corner of our living room.
Even late at night, often my best writing time, when everyone else is in bed,
there is still something that feels not private enough about the space. Add in
that my crowded desk is cluttered with books and papers connected to all the
different hats I wear in family and ministry, and it sometimes just doesn’t
feel like the writerly space I need.
But enough whining. I am here to say, on the third day of
the new year, that I need to dive back into story soon. And today I found a
fascinating blog that provided me with some creative ideas to jumpstart my WIP. One of the most audacious ideas I found there was the suggestion that I write my story's final chapter now. Yes, now, when I am nowhere near writing the actual end, and when I don't know everything I need to know yet. The mere idea of doing this scares me in a delightful way. I think I must feel a little bit like my ten year old did when she recently managed a 25 foot rock climb in a gym. When she landed on her feet at the bottom again, she clutched at her heart and announced "That was terrifying...AND awesome!" I suspect writing my last chapter now would feel just like that.
But the idea is resonating with me. Perhaps because a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I sat down and worked on plot points for my WIP -- moving from the end to the beginning. So I already feel as though I've been building from that perspective in my mind.
Thursday, June 07, 2012
Visual Book (for my Work-in-Progress)
I read a wonderful idea the other day that has me very inspired. The suggestion I spotted online, from a fellow writer, was to create a "visual book" on the fictional world of your current work-in-progress.
Now the fun thing about this idea is that I've been doing it for ages without really realizing I was doing it. And not just with the current WIP. I remember many, many years ago now (about 25 of them) working on a novel and finding myself drawn to the look of a girl whose photograph I saw in a catalog. She looked the way I imagined my main character looked, so I cut the picture out and tucked it inside my writing folder.
It seems even more crucial when you're creating a fictional world and characters that look noticeably different than your own. My current story, a mid-grade fairy-tale, is set in a fictional land and in a setting I call "roughly medieval." I have some mental time guidelines I'm seeking to follow, in terms of what centuries I'm drawing inspiration from, but since it is a fictional place and I'm not setting it in a very specific year, I'm not sweating tiny inconsistencies regarding language and fashion. Still, I have some very decided opinions about what my characters look like and what kind of landscape they're adventuring in.
A few months ago, when I was in a sort of writing fever on this particular story, I spent about a week working my way through an enormous library book I got on hold. It was a book of castles and it was almost big enough to be one. I could have happily crawled inside and lived there anyway! I went through pages and pages of photographs before I finally found "my" castle. And when I found it, I knew I'd found it. That simply was it -- where my four princesses and their mother lived.
The terrific thing about the world wide web is how easy it is to find other photos once you've got a baseline one to work with. Armed with the name and location of the castle, I was able to find more photographs of it -- in different seasons, from different angles. It is still a castle one can visit today and I found a site with pictures of some of the inner rooms. I got a feel for the spiral stairway and the stonework. It has truly helped me to understand how the characters would walk through these spaces and how living in such a place might make you feel.
I've also collected a photo of a dress that I'm sure Princess Serenity wears to an important event in the story. And I've drawn Queen Harmony -- partly based on a figure in The Chronicles of Western Fashion (a book that has helped me think through clothes).
So I've been playing with this idea for months really -- saving photos to individual computer files within the larger file folder that contains my actual story drafts (and back story matter, lists of names, etc.) What had never occurred to me is the wonderfully simple idea that I could pull it all together into a "visual book." That's what I'm planning to do now -- print these things out and put them in a binder, one I can flip through when I need visual inspiration or just a reminder of the physical spaces my characters are walking through or the weight and drape and color of their clothing.
And now that I've cottoned onto the whole idea, I just can't stop. I've started looking for other images related to my story. Una, Princess Winifred's white horse, is important -- and I've had a real sense in my mind of what she would look like. So I've begun hunting down images of white horses online.
It's a delightful exercise -- and I suspect will be a very helpful one.
Now the fun thing about this idea is that I've been doing it for ages without really realizing I was doing it. And not just with the current WIP. I remember many, many years ago now (about 25 of them) working on a novel and finding myself drawn to the look of a girl whose photograph I saw in a catalog. She looked the way I imagined my main character looked, so I cut the picture out and tucked it inside my writing folder.
It seems even more crucial when you're creating a fictional world and characters that look noticeably different than your own. My current story, a mid-grade fairy-tale, is set in a fictional land and in a setting I call "roughly medieval." I have some mental time guidelines I'm seeking to follow, in terms of what centuries I'm drawing inspiration from, but since it is a fictional place and I'm not setting it in a very specific year, I'm not sweating tiny inconsistencies regarding language and fashion. Still, I have some very decided opinions about what my characters look like and what kind of landscape they're adventuring in.
A few months ago, when I was in a sort of writing fever on this particular story, I spent about a week working my way through an enormous library book I got on hold. It was a book of castles and it was almost big enough to be one. I could have happily crawled inside and lived there anyway! I went through pages and pages of photographs before I finally found "my" castle. And when I found it, I knew I'd found it. That simply was it -- where my four princesses and their mother lived.
The terrific thing about the world wide web is how easy it is to find other photos once you've got a baseline one to work with. Armed with the name and location of the castle, I was able to find more photographs of it -- in different seasons, from different angles. It is still a castle one can visit today and I found a site with pictures of some of the inner rooms. I got a feel for the spiral stairway and the stonework. It has truly helped me to understand how the characters would walk through these spaces and how living in such a place might make you feel.
I've also collected a photo of a dress that I'm sure Princess Serenity wears to an important event in the story. And I've drawn Queen Harmony -- partly based on a figure in The Chronicles of Western Fashion (a book that has helped me think through clothes).
So I've been playing with this idea for months really -- saving photos to individual computer files within the larger file folder that contains my actual story drafts (and back story matter, lists of names, etc.) What had never occurred to me is the wonderfully simple idea that I could pull it all together into a "visual book." That's what I'm planning to do now -- print these things out and put them in a binder, one I can flip through when I need visual inspiration or just a reminder of the physical spaces my characters are walking through or the weight and drape and color of their clothing.
And now that I've cottoned onto the whole idea, I just can't stop. I've started looking for other images related to my story. Una, Princess Winifred's white horse, is important -- and I've had a real sense in my mind of what she would look like. So I've begun hunting down images of white horses online.
It's a delightful exercise -- and I suspect will be a very helpful one.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Writing to Elgar
The family is on the way home (yay!) and I've spent this ultra quiet Saturday gardening and cleaning. In this last bit of time to myself, I'm trying to dive into some writing...specifically working on my mid-grade fairytale again. No, I didn't finish all the work I needed to do during these past couple of days, but enough to give myself a little writing break.
Reading over the manuscript yesterday -- the back story that's not quite complete and the first three chapters I wrote in January/February -- I have to say this. I like it! (Whew!) Taking two months away from the project has been really hard, and I'm still not sure how the summer is shaping up and if I'll have any significant time to devote to writing it again, but oh, I've missed these characters and this story. Now that I've dipped my toes back into the project, I guess I can call it a WIP again (work in progress)...
The other thing that's making me smile is how much I associate listening to Elgar with writing on this manuscript. I wonder if other writers do this -- have a particular composer or piece of work that seems to just "go" with the writing on a particular project? My whole winter was steeped in Elgar, especially the Enigma Variations (though I am starting to love some of his other work dearly too) and that's when I was doing most of the writing on this story. I associate Elgar so much with this story that I have named the fictional river near my castle the River Elgar.
Alas, I had to return a couple of the Enigma versions I've been enjoying to the library, but I now own a couple as well (okay, three to be precise). Today I dug out the Bernstein, which I tend to listen to less than the others. It had been a while since I'd played it, so I found myself puzzling anew (ah, the great mysteries of life) why Bernstein slowed the tempo down in the Nimrod movement so drastically. Seven minutes! As my husband pointed out when he first heard it, it sounds like a slow sunrise. He's right, it does. And while I don't find it totally absurd as some music critics do -- there's something so majestic and beautiful in the music that it manages to find its way through even this drastic sort of re-interpretation -- I confess I am completely puzzled as to why he did it. Grandstanding? Playing? Experimenting? Or did he really think there was something inherent in the music itself that called for this kind of slow, languorous, cat-like stretching? The question has me really curious. I suspect it always will.
Writing to Elgar again...no matter what conductor, it just feels good. Among other things, it's helping provide me with continuity of mood when I dive into this story, and that's no small thing considering how long it's been since I've worked on it.
Reading over the manuscript yesterday -- the back story that's not quite complete and the first three chapters I wrote in January/February -- I have to say this. I like it! (Whew!) Taking two months away from the project has been really hard, and I'm still not sure how the summer is shaping up and if I'll have any significant time to devote to writing it again, but oh, I've missed these characters and this story. Now that I've dipped my toes back into the project, I guess I can call it a WIP again (work in progress)...
The other thing that's making me smile is how much I associate listening to Elgar with writing on this manuscript. I wonder if other writers do this -- have a particular composer or piece of work that seems to just "go" with the writing on a particular project? My whole winter was steeped in Elgar, especially the Enigma Variations (though I am starting to love some of his other work dearly too) and that's when I was doing most of the writing on this story. I associate Elgar so much with this story that I have named the fictional river near my castle the River Elgar.
Alas, I had to return a couple of the Enigma versions I've been enjoying to the library, but I now own a couple as well (okay, three to be precise). Today I dug out the Bernstein, which I tend to listen to less than the others. It had been a while since I'd played it, so I found myself puzzling anew (ah, the great mysteries of life) why Bernstein slowed the tempo down in the Nimrod movement so drastically. Seven minutes! As my husband pointed out when he first heard it, it sounds like a slow sunrise. He's right, it does. And while I don't find it totally absurd as some music critics do -- there's something so majestic and beautiful in the music that it manages to find its way through even this drastic sort of re-interpretation -- I confess I am completely puzzled as to why he did it. Grandstanding? Playing? Experimenting? Or did he really think there was something inherent in the music itself that called for this kind of slow, languorous, cat-like stretching? The question has me really curious. I suspect it always will.
Writing to Elgar again...no matter what conductor, it just feels good. Among other things, it's helping provide me with continuity of mood when I dive into this story, and that's no small thing considering how long it's been since I've worked on it.
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
"You Know, Kind of Like Serenity..."
In the midst of this long, ongoing season of deep stress and exhaustion, I keep being amazed by the wonderfulness of God. What I love is when he provides those lovely, unexpected moments that make me laugh outright, or tear up with sudden beauty and gratitude, or just plain feel like hugging the world.
So often he sends those moments through my family.
One of the hardest pieces of the past very hard month has been lack of almost any time to write. This after the first couple months of the year when I felt like I'd dived back into some creative work with more zest and vitality than I'd felt in years. The novel I was writing -- yes, I just used the word novel -- was almost compelling me to the computer every late night and early morning, begging to be written even in tiny snatches. I loved every scrap of the time I got, even as I began to realize the writing time tunnel was narrowing to an almost close again. For the past few weeks, any writing time I can squeeze has been of the writing anything quickly for pay variety since I'm busy trying to fight wolfish creditors (where are Taran and the sword Dyrnwyn when you need them?) and to help keep food on the table.
Frankly, I miss my characters. I miss them so much it almost aches. But there's nothing I can do about it at the moment beyond keep missing them, and keep mulling their story in the late night snatches when I can't sleep.
This morning, the sweet girl was talking to me about one of her own stories. Yes, she's a story-teller and writer too, which I love. She was explaining something to me about one of her characters, who is eighteen, but not quite an adult, she explained earnestly, because in this world, you didn't really come of age until you were twenty. My tired brain thought that sounded familiar. And then she said, wonderfully casually, "You know, kind of like Serenity..."
Serenity is one of my characters. She is a princess, set to inherit a throne she is not quite ready for. Her wise mother is the acting regent; her beloved father has been missing for years. She's 19, on the cusp of 20, the age at which she will be considered old enough to become queen. She's trying to become ready for her royal responsibilities in the face of an imminent war. Circumstances have forced her to have to choose a suitor from the very people they most fear.
And she's real. Not just real to me. Real enough for my lovely nine year old, who has heard more of the actual written story than anyone else in the world, to mention her name so casually that it took me a few seconds to realize what she'd done. Real enough for my daughter to use her story as a frame of reference for her own creative story. Real enough that my daughter keeps encouraging me to write again because she wants to find out what happens to Serenity and to Winifred and Garron and to all of the peoples of Radmost and Charis.
I'm not sure there's a better gift someone can give a writer than to care about the story they're trying to tell, and to love their characters. What a great gift that was to me today.
So often he sends those moments through my family.
One of the hardest pieces of the past very hard month has been lack of almost any time to write. This after the first couple months of the year when I felt like I'd dived back into some creative work with more zest and vitality than I'd felt in years. The novel I was writing -- yes, I just used the word novel -- was almost compelling me to the computer every late night and early morning, begging to be written even in tiny snatches. I loved every scrap of the time I got, even as I began to realize the writing time tunnel was narrowing to an almost close again. For the past few weeks, any writing time I can squeeze has been of the writing anything quickly for pay variety since I'm busy trying to fight wolfish creditors (where are Taran and the sword Dyrnwyn when you need them?) and to help keep food on the table.
Frankly, I miss my characters. I miss them so much it almost aches. But there's nothing I can do about it at the moment beyond keep missing them, and keep mulling their story in the late night snatches when I can't sleep.
This morning, the sweet girl was talking to me about one of her own stories. Yes, she's a story-teller and writer too, which I love. She was explaining something to me about one of her characters, who is eighteen, but not quite an adult, she explained earnestly, because in this world, you didn't really come of age until you were twenty. My tired brain thought that sounded familiar. And then she said, wonderfully casually, "You know, kind of like Serenity..."
Serenity is one of my characters. She is a princess, set to inherit a throne she is not quite ready for. Her wise mother is the acting regent; her beloved father has been missing for years. She's 19, on the cusp of 20, the age at which she will be considered old enough to become queen. She's trying to become ready for her royal responsibilities in the face of an imminent war. Circumstances have forced her to have to choose a suitor from the very people they most fear.
And she's real. Not just real to me. Real enough for my lovely nine year old, who has heard more of the actual written story than anyone else in the world, to mention her name so casually that it took me a few seconds to realize what she'd done. Real enough for my daughter to use her story as a frame of reference for her own creative story. Real enough that my daughter keeps encouraging me to write again because she wants to find out what happens to Serenity and to Winifred and Garron and to all of the peoples of Radmost and Charis.
I'm not sure there's a better gift someone can give a writer than to care about the story they're trying to tell, and to love their characters. What a great gift that was to me today.
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