How Waiting to Get to the Good Stuff Can Pay Off

NaNoWriMo update: we’re at the halfway mark, and I am well beyond 25K, with a current total word count of 27,312. While I’m keeping up my novel writing, getting ready for Thanksgiving is beginning to cut into my blogging time. That, and my brain doesn’t seem to have any words for writing beyond those I need to tell M.T.’s story. But I promised myself I’d post today, so here it is.
One piece of advice that I’ve often read is to cut to the chase while writing a draft. Jump straight to the stuff that’s exciting to write, even if there are lots of things that need explaining before the reader gets there. The boring stuff can be added later, and if you’re really lucky, you may not have to add it at all. Writing the exciting stuff is especially helpful if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo because putting your time in where you have the most passion is likely to produce lots of words as well as be the most fun.

I used this advice last year, when I was slogging along with my adventure. I had a prince and a princess searching unsuccessfully for each other, and while I knew they needed to go through a lot before they finally met, I ran out of ideas and patience long before they had suffered enough. So I stopped waiting and jumped ahead, putting them both in the same place at last while ignoring little details like how they got there and what happened in between. All sorts of exciting things came from writing that moment, resulting in energy, new ideas, and enough words to get me to 50K before the month ran out.

When I had the idea of involving M.T.’s weird roommate in an artnapping, I was tempted to jump right to the police searching Poe’s room and finding the painting. Her arrest would be a big dramatic moment, and cause plenty of trouble for M.T.

But I didn’t do that. I was afraid that the arrest might turn out to be my novel’s climax, mainly because I don’t have any other big crisis scenes planned at the moment. (OK, you got me. I don’t have anything planned at all. But I do keep trying.) Since I was afraid to squander the coming drama, I promised myself I would only write scenes that upped the ante. My goal was to maximize the impact of the arrest on M.T. by increasing her anxiety about the rent.

I started with a strange conversation between M.T. and Poe about the theft as foreshadowing that Poe might be involved. Then I forced M.T. to have a lunch with her mother. Their discussion makes M.T. wonder if Poe will be able to pay her share of the rent. Her mother also reminds her what will happen if Poe can’t pay; M.T. will have to move back in with her parents, a situation she wants to avoid at all costs. As a result, M.T. starts spying on Poe to make sure she really does have a job. She is led to believe that Poe lied about where she works and is frantic at the thought her roommate is actually unemployed.

Of course, Poe does have a job, and when she realizes M.T. has been stalking her, there will be a fight. While they may not be on the best of terms afterwards, M.T. will at least know that they can cover the rent. Of course, the police will arrest Poe before she can write her rent check, and M.T. will be digging through the sofa for loose change while Poe’s pet monkey is trashing the apartment.

Making myself work towards my big scene is paying off in spades. Not only is it generating some great scenes and unexpected surprises, but I’m even more excited about writing the arrest scene than I was before. I could have jumped ahead, but I think when I get there (probably in another day or so), Poe’s arrest is going to be much more powerful than I thought. And with luck, it will help me to figure out what happens next.

When In Doubt, Blow Something Up

My temporary reminder of how many words to write each day.

Time for a NaNoWriMo update. My current word count is 21699, which is 1695 words ahead of schedule. I’ve managed to keep up by adding whatever I can think of to the story. In the last few days, the novel has acquired a writing student with a sex obsession, a playwright who lets slip that Action Man helped him with his new play, a writing “superhero” named Point of View who doesn’t actually help with point of view, and a monkey named Tanguy*. Today I put M.T. through another unpleasant writing class, in which her teacher suggests she should think deeper thoughts and otherwise makes her miserable.

But I still feel like not much is happening, and once again, my ideas are thin on the ground. I’ve been getting the feeling it’s time to shake things up. Make some serious trouble for my main character. Either that, or punt kick this boring story out the window and start over. Experienced NaNoWriMo participants will recognize this as the doldrums of Week 2, where the excitement and new-car smell has worn off and suddenly our shiny new story seems dull and lifeless. Pathetic even.

I mentioned my problem to my writing friend Judy. She gave me her screen-writing teacher’s advice: Blow something up.

I resisted at first. My book is not an explosion sort of book, I thought.

Of course, it’s hardly a refined work. How can it be with characters named Action Man and Dialogue Dog, and, of course, a monkey? The one thing I’ve really done so far with this novel is stick like glue to my plan to Keep It Silly.

Still, I thought that my parody of a world where art is so important that medical professionals encourage their daughter to become a painter instead of following in their footsteps isn’t exactly a car-chase, things-blowing-up sort of world. Until I realized that artnappers, who steal famous art works and hold them for ransom, might need to blow up an especially tricky door to get at a well-protected collection.

For the last day I’ve been wondering how to use that single idea of an artnapping, and today I’ve figured it out. I can make M.T.’s strange roommate who just happened to be very interested in the roof of the building next door an artnapper. She can get caught, giving M.T. two huge problems at once. Not only will M.T. be without a roommate and trying to avoid moving in with her pushy parents, but she will also get saddled with the monkey.

Sounds like trouble to me.

*He’s named after the surrealist Yves Tanguy, and his name is pronounced Tawn-gee.

It Came From Left Field: The Enjoyable Challenge of the Unexpected Plot Twist

My all-time favorite writing experience is a collaboration I did with my friend Kelleen a few years ago.  Kelleen suggested we try writing something using the method Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer did to write Sorcery & Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. They started out by playing a game and wound up writing a book together.

In the appendix of their book, they describe the Letter Game: two players take turns writing each other letters “in persona”, as if they were the character they are writing about. The only rule is that the players cannot discuss their plot ideas with each other. Each person responds to the last person’s letter until the story has been told.

Kelleen and I agreed we were not writing a book for publication. We were out to have fun, so we made up our own rules. Instead of writing letters, our characters would be together for the story. We would write alternate chapters of narration using first person from the point of view of our “persona” characters. We agreed that we were not allowed to do anything irrevocable to the other person’s character. We promised not to use the fast-fix cop-out of waking from a dream to cancel out events that we didn’t like from the other person’s chapters. And we would follow Wrede and Stevermer’s rule; we were not allowed to discuss the plot.

We each wrote up a short backstory resume for our characters for reference purposes. Kelleen wrote the first chapter to get us started. My Samantha was visiting Kelleen’s Jennifer in Texas and they were at the Renaissance Festival. We took turns and wrote 14 chapters in all. Before we were done, Sam and Jen were transported to a medieval world where they had magical powers and dragons. Princes helped them and wizards chased them. In the midst of it all, they had to figure out how to get home again.

Our first two chapters were each about eight pages long. By the time we reached the end of our story, our chapters had tripled in length. For one of them I wrote 146 draft pages by hand, considering five different plots and writing material for two of them in the process, all to produce a typed chapter twenty pages long.

What inspired me to put so much effort into a story I was writing for fun?

The unexpected.

While we might not have been talking about the plot, both Kelleen and I had our ideas of what kind of story we were writing, what kind of things might happen. Our general ideas about our story matched well, but the specifics as detailed in the chapters we wrote constantly surprised one another.

For example, in chapter three, Kelleen had our characters meet conveniently unmarried princes. Then Sam and Jen were arrested and locked in a dungeon to await their executions. I didn’t mind the princes, but I had not planned on a dungeon. In accordance with the rules, we didn’t talk about what we thought might happen next. I did my best to get our modern American characters out of the dungeon realistically, even though dragons and magic were involved.

In the next chapter I received, Sam had been kidnapped by a terrifying stranger. There was no explanation of who he was and minimal explanation of what he wanted. I wasn’t planning on a kidnapping, but I had to find a way to get my character out of this horrible situation, right after I figured out how she’d gotten there in the first place.

This pattern became the norm. A new chapter would arrive. I’d read it, be surprised, shocked, stumped. Once I got over the novelty of all the unexpected material that had been handed to me, I thought hard about what came next. Eventually I’d have an idea of how to solve the current problem and I would do my best to come up with a devil of a plot twist to end with so Kelleen could sweat for a bit.

At first all I could think was how hard it was to try to write this way. But with time I came to enjoy it. We were two animals harnessed together and trying to reach different destinations. The story lurched along as a result, first going this way, then going that way, constantly getting dragged back to a sort of middle road that wasn’t what either of us was actually aiming for. We had to work like crazy to squeeze in the moments we had dreamt up for our characters while also dealing with all the things we hadn’t planned on that had been dumped on us by our co-author.

We got really good at this. Our later chapters are amazing. We created dramatic moments, interesting characters, funky magic, and a fairly coherent story without once discussing the actual plot. Our story even had a happy ending, although that was one thing we would definitely have agreed on if we’d been allowed to talk about it ahead of time.

It was a glorious, hair-pulling, that’s-the-ticket, how-can-I-make-things-worse?, I-did-it ride. And absolutely the most fun I have ever ever ever had writing. Thanks, Kelleen.

Using Writing to Uncover Your Plot

NaNoWriMo update: I’m nearly 1000 words ahead of the official schedule, which is to say I am meeting my goal of getting ahead before I leave for my Thanksgiving vacation trip. I know I may not be able to meet my word count goals when I’m visiting family, so getting now ahead makes good sense. I wouldn’t be ahead, however, if I hadn’t finally had some ideas about things to put in my novel.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the best thing for me to do when I don’t know where my story is going and I feel lost is to write about it. My project journal is full of complaints about being stuck and clueless, which helps relieve some of my angst (and with any luck spares my friends at least some of my griping that “I don’t know what to write!”).

But what really helps is thinking on paper: making lists of things that might happen, exploring the motivations of each character, trying to explain how something I want to have a certain way got that way. Even diving into a scene that I don’t really know much about tends to lead to ideas, although I have my share of dead end, bore-you-to-death scenes that were written this way.

I don’t understand why just thinking about these things isn’t enough, but it isn’t. I can spend hours turning things over in my head, trying to get somewhere, and have nothing to show for it. Maybe it’s because most of my thoughts are about the problem and not the solution. When I decide to use paper and pen, I tell myself “Make a list” or ask myself “What could happen next?”, and I write down anything that comes to mind. I don’t find the answer right away. Most of what I come up with is junk. But hidden in my lists are usually one or two things that make me go “Hey. What if…?” and that give me new ideas. Those are the things I usually go after, because they are actions with consequences, which result in more action.  I look for the ideas that open doors instead of closing them and then I play with them, asking more questions, making more lists.

Once I’ve actually got my teeth into an idea, then thinking can be productive. But finding that idea to begin with comes with the writing.

Here’s one example of how writing solves my problems and reveals my hidden plot to me. I eked out this weekend’s word count for my novel by writing: a tearful good-bye; a humiliating search for a roommate; a description of the eccentric new roommate; and a day at work with my main character. While some of it was funny (to me at least), and some of it was a pleasant surprise (the new roommate is really odd), nothing was moving the story along significantly.

Last night, I got out my notebook and asked myself what could happen next. I thought of outside forces that could come in and disrupt things for my rather insular character. How might her parents make her life more difficult? What about that new bizarro roommate? And what about the whole premise of my book — that she is inadvertently creating superheroes who help writers?

I started writing about all of this, first as fragmented sentences, then as rambling paragraphs, in my project notebook. Some of the things I wrote down seemed both obvious and boring to me. Others got me asking more questions. The big one turned out to be: now that Action Man and Dialogue Dog exist, who else are they helping? Does M.T. hear about it? How?

And that opened the door to the struggling playwright, whose play is about to open, and who is nearly sick with dread because it is not the Thing of Beauty he envisioned. Enter Action Man and Dialogue Dog, who will help him to spruce up that script in time for the final rehearsals and opening night. Once he has a hit on his hands, he can let slip that he had superhero help in a TV interview. M.T. will hear about it. She thought she made up these writing heroes, but if other people are seeing them, too, then what exactly is going on? So far, I’ve only written the first bit about the playwright, his despair and the arrival of our heroes. I can look forward to writing the TV interview sometime in the next few days.

I also started writing about M.T.’s creative writing class today and am I glad I did. Beyond a vague idea that M.T. would be unhappy there, embarrassed by the teacher and feeling inferior to the other students, I had no specific plans for the scene. But things started bubbling up as soon as I sat M.T. down in her chair. Apparently, I have a head full of crazy student writers, plus a vivid prissy writing teacher that I swear isn’t based on anyone I’ve ever known, yet she seems very real to me. They took up most of today’s session. I stopped writing mid-scene, so I can pick up where I left off.

It’s a relief to know that I have specific ideas, like the playwright’s story, to work with tomorrow. It’s so much easier to sit down to write when there is something in my head to write about. It’s harder to have faith in that treasure chest of material I accidentally opened regarding the writing class, but I’m pretty sure there’s plenty more where that came from, even if I don’t know exactly what it looks like just yet.

As often as I go through this not-knowing/drowning-in-ideas creative cycle, it never gets any easier. The not-knowing is always scary and frustrating. The drowning-in-ideas phase is energizing and laugh-out-loud fun. I’m glad that the fun  outweighs the frustration, because I really want to write.

Missing: A Plot of Any Kind Whatsoever

Dear Plot,

Where are you?!?

I know it’s only Day 3 of NaNoWriMo. I know you’re shy. But I won’t hurt you. Please, take off the Cloak of Invisibility and come out of hiding, because I really need your help. I can’t just keep sending my main character through her day without anything interesting happening

Sure, having superheroes show up to help when she was struggling with a hard writing assignment was cute. Having the solution to her problems be making the scene center on a kosher dill was even cuter. But dinner with the parents? It did introduce some frustration and humor, but it’s hardly a major plot point.  It would be nice if something dramatic happened, oh, sometime in the next 45,000 words. Feel free to throw a wrench in the works and mess everything up. Just please throw something.

While I’m being needy, I’d also like to ask you to please, if at all possible, keep the pug-eyed art teacher from becoming a main character. Except for his funky eyes and the way he doesn’t look at you, there is nothing interesting about him. Considering this story is proving so devoid of interest already, the last thing I need is a boring teacher taking over the show.

I also need you to protect me from the negative talk the super villain is using to demoralize M.T., my struggling writer. I didn’t expect Conversation Cat’s comments about the stupidity of what was being written to cut to the bone like that. So I could use a little distance, maybe some extreme humor, to keep her harsh words from undermining this entire project. If necessary, send Action Man and Dialogue Dog to my house to give me a hand.

I hope you can hear the desperation in my voice, because I am feeling really desperate! If you will just come out, I promise to do everything in my power to love and cherish you. I don’t care what you look like. I don’t care how silly things get, as long as something happens so I don’t die of boredom. You can even include the pug-eyed teacher if you want. Only please, please show up and help me out.

27 days is a long time to write without you.

Hoping you have a kind heart and will take pity on me,
Your frightened author