Of Hamsters, Pantsing and Becoming Creative

I still get a total thrill when people send me pics of my books on the shelves. Maybe one day I'll get over it, but not so far. Could be I'm getting tiresome about it because I showed my mom a pic on my phone that someone sent and said, "photos like this make me so happy!" And she said, "I know," in that *tone* people get, like when you've said something too many times.

But, hey. Look! Me and Guy Gavriel Kay!

Hee hee hee.

So, yeah, I might be also stalling a bit. Whenever I see topics like this week's - Spinning Plates and Weaving Subplots: How do you decide how to balance the main story and the connecting tales? - my brain goes a little fuzzy. In fact, as soon as I see anything in the realm of "how do you decide..." the invisible hamsters in my head start frantically scratching at the inside of my skull.

But I really don't want to write another post that's all an elaborate way of saying "I DECIDE NOTHING, PEOPLE. THE HAMSTERS DECIDE EVERYTHING AND I WRITE IT DOWN, OKAY???"

Instead I'll try to explain myself and why I have the process that I do. Besides the fact that I think every writer has her own process and that it's key for all of us to learn what our process is and own it. A lot of writers - both established and aspiring - spend a lot of time trying to alter their process. They want to write faster and better, which is admirable, so they try all kinds of things to make that happen. While I see people able to tweak and refine what they're doing, I rarely see anyone completely convert their process. Most of the time, I see writers completing the cycle with increased understanding and ownership of how they do what they do.

For my part, I've never really tried to change my process. Which means, when I tell people that I try to pre-plot, I'm kind of lying. I mean, I have tried - but I immediately give up, as it gives me that hamsters-scratching-at-the-inside-of-my-skull feeling.

I don't think I need to say it isn't a pleasant one.

Some writers whose methods are more like mine - the pantsers or the misters or the gardeners, or whatever analogy you prefer - say that it's more fun to discover the story as they write. I'm not sure I agree. It makes for angsty, difficult writing days, more often than not. There's a thrill when something falls into place, yes, but "fun" isn't really the right descriptor.

What it is, though, is fulfilling.

There's this whole debate about being happy versus living a rewarding life. I'm a big fan of pursuing happiness, but I'm also a believer in growth.

I often say that, if I wanted to get rich easily, I'd have become a stockbroker. Don't make that face - I'm good with numbers. It could have happened... But the whole reason I became a writer (which is kind of a long story) is because that was the answer when I asked myself what the most rewarding life would be for me. That's why I bailed on being a research scientist. When I committed to being a writer, I studied how other authors do it, particularly the ones I admire most. I wanted to know how they developed their creativity. I'd been so immersed in science that I felt like I didn't know how to be creative. I didn't so much ask the question writers hear so often - "where do you get your ideas?" - as I asked "HOW do you get your ideas?"

At the same time, I was studying Taoism. Really, I have been most of my life. I read the Tao Te Ching in high school and my honors thesis in college (for my other major, religious studies) compared the Tao Te Ching to a sermon by Meister Eckhart. But, when I made this huge choice to alter my career path and become a writer, I was with a kung fu school that emphasized spiritual and mental growth by channeling the subconscious. Taoism is a very individual philosophy, one that encourages this kind of focus on personal growth.

All of this is a long way of saying that I wanted to develop a writing process that channeled the subconscious.

THAT, more than anything else, is why I don't "decide" much about my stories. Instead I try to create a still space in myself, open a door and allow the story to come in. Some days it works better than others. Some days it doesn't work at all, which is agonizing. Other days the rush of being filled with a story from somewhere outside myself is an ecstasy unlike any other.

So, "fun" is really not the right word at all.

But rewarding? Yes, yes, yes.

Be still, little hamsters.

Shadow Side of the Spreadsheet Queen

This week's topic in ye olde Bordello is Keeping Track of all the details: spreadsheets, databases and coffee-stained notes.

Maybe it's autumn, with the whole back-to-school vibe going, but I did a post on my personal blog just last week for a friend's Get It Together blog hop. I revealed a whole bunch of my Secret Spreadsheet Superpowers in "Lessons from the Spreadsheet Queen." 

Guess I should have checked the Word Whores calendar, huh?

So, recapping my progress count spreadsheets and so forth this soon would be a little much. As for story notes... that's where I go all about-face, much as I do with my actual writing. As detailed, precise and relentlessly linear as much spreadsheets are, my writing and note-keeping is equally extreme - in the opposite direction. I satisfy my left-brain self with the numbers, which seems to free my right-brain self to create. I am NOT the keeper of the detailed series bible. It's a bit embarrassing, actually, when people at panels and such ask about my process. Not only do I not have an outline, I pretty much keep a single Word document that I dump all notes and ideas into. When out and about, I put notes in my phone or tablet, then type them into the Word doc later. I use a system of highlighting to note which I've addressed or how I feel about them later. Sometimes, particularly late at night, I leave myself sticky notes, that mostly conspire to make me wonder what my bedtime brain was thinking. Once I found one in the morning that said:

HUMANS??

Yeah - no idea on that one.

Mostly my notes are pretty cryptic. Here's some from the doc I kept for THE TALON OF THE HAWK. I don't think they're too spoilery if you haven't read it yet. If you have read it, the sharp-eyed reader might note what I did and didn't use.

Uorsin needs to pet her too – abuser who both rewards and punishes

Bring in opposing armies to encircle Ordnung, taking advantage of internal weakness – Ursula uses them to liberate.

Which way Danu’s breath blew

Danu stacked the challenge deep

Go back – Ash has worked with Rayfe, they know each other well.

Add in sorcerer to cover their approach.

Andi has letter from Uorsin? In collusion with Terin?

She presses lips together

 I would explain how the highlighting/font color works on this, but I don't recall. I use a different system with each book, just to keep up that delightful non-linear randomness! (And because I can't help myself.)

I also want to talk a bit about this very fun anthology I'm in with these amazing other authors. I've said before, but I don't feel like I can say it enough times - one of the very best perks of becoming an author is getting to hand with other authors. Being in an anthology with some of my writing heroes? TOTAL THRILL!

I put the cover above so you can see. The collection is DARK SECRETS: A PARANORMAL NOIR ANTHOLOGY. My contribution is a retelling of The Goose Girl. The others are an amazing range of cross-genre takes on the gritty and grotesque side of the paranormal, from the inimitable Megan Hart's deal with the devil story to Rachel Caine's crafty ways with ghost stories.

It comes out September 29, but it's available for preorder now! At 99 cents, it's quite the deal. I'm reading it all again this holiday weekend. :-)

Google play

All Romance eBooks

Kobo

Amazon

How an Intuitive Gardener (Okay: Pantser) Creates Conflict & Outer Motivation

I'm lucky to have my crit partner and good friend, Carolyn Crane, visiting me for a few days. This involves much time spent writing, drinking and talking about writing. Perfection!

She's even going to help me plot my next series, which is awesome, because she's WAY better at plotting than I am. As in, she actually *does* it instead of my weirdly organic gardening method of plotting.

By this I'm referring to George R.R. Martin's analogy of how different writers work - either as architects or gardeners, or somewhere in between. I discussed this in detail a while back on Suzanne Johnson's blog. The TL:DR is that some writers like extensive blueprints before they start building the story, while others work more by planting seeds and coaxing along what grows from that.

I am really far down on the gardening end of the scale.

So much so that, when I see a topic like this week's - Development of character outer motivation and outer conflict - a kind of hysterical flutter burrows into my gut. This is akin to asking a gardener what will happen over the summer to keep her flowers from blooming lushly. Sure, I might have ideas - drought, then insect infestations due to drought stress, that sudden hailstorm, maybe a freak early freeze - but I don't know exactly WHAT it will be until I get there.

Yes, this is totally how I write and I know that it's the least helpful craft advice ever. Surely our more architectural Word-Whores will have THINGS to say about plans and scaffolding and so forth.

Meanwhile, here is the gardener's take:

My seeds are my characters. I know pretty much who they are when the story begins and I learn more about them as I write and they reveal themselves to me. Let me spend a moment on that. When I say I "know" who they are, I mean in a visceral way, more of a feeling for the person than anything else. For me, when I think of people I know, they're kind of an amorphous tangle of feeling and impressions for me. I'm not good at remembering faces and I sometimes think this is because I remember how a person *feels* to me on a non-physical level. Does that make sense? This is no doubt a huge part of the Intuitive aspect of myself that feeds into the INTJ.

I plant these seeds into the soil of my story - the general idea of where my characters are going when I enter their lives. I start slowly, watering, fertilizing, waiting for the first shoots of story to push up. Much like with actual gardening, it rarely takes long for trouble to arise. Those early challenges hint of the conflict to come. Which it inevitably does. I never feel like I have to develop the conflict because it rears up as inevitably as aphids, floods and flower-devouring wildlife. The world provides plenty of conflict - it always turns up, whether we want it or not.

Yes - I do go back and tighten my beginnings. Inevitably my major revision time will be spent on the first third of the draft. I move up the inciting event, I amp up the stakes and weave in hints of the conflict I discovered as the story spun out.

If I have any useful advice to offer for this method it's this:

Don't back away from the dark side.

This is really easy to do - in fact, I find myself doing it all the time and having to correct. I think we're programmed, as essentially nice, well-socialized human beings, to back away from the harsher aspects of conflict. We avoid ugly confrontations when possible and turn away from tragedies to poignant to bear. In fiction, we must do exactly the opposite.

Delve into the ugly, the awful, the extreme.

Let your characters suffer. Then intensify and make them suffer more.

Resist the urge to rescue them from the storm. Watch while the hail batters their blossoms into mud-soaked shattered petals, then go out and coax them into life again. The great gift of the gardener, the true miracle, is that ability to bring the destroyed back from the brink and make us all believe in the bloom at the end.

How a Pantser Plans a Series

This week at the Bordello we'll be comparing notes on Making a Series: Plotting and planning a series of books.

It's an interesting topic, especially for the girl who doesn't preplot or plan much at all. Over time, though, I've come to understand that I do have more of a plan than I think I do.

You pretty much have to, to write a trilogy or other series. I've finished writing two trilogies now - A Covenant of Thorns (CoT) and The Twelve Kingdoms (12K) - both with very strong overall arcs that required all three books to tell. In both cases, I did NOT know what the overall story would be when I started the first book. In both cases, I did have a sense that the story I had in mind would take much longer than a single book.

I'm not saying you should try this at home, but this is how I did it, for each.

Core Scene

For each series, I started with the first book - Rogue's Pawn (RP) and The Mark of the Tala (MotT), respectively - and wrote each towards a core scene. In Rogue's Pawn it was the initial dream of The Black Dog and I wrote towards the scene of SPOILER *Gwynn kissing Liam between the tents* END SPOILER. In The Mark of the Tala, I knew the scene of SPOILER *Andi hiding in the castle from the evil lurking outside, her sister swearing to protect her while people died and she knew she had to give herself to the monster to end it* END SPOILER.

And that's seriously all I knew about either story or series when I started laying words down.

Discovering Other Key Characters

Alert readers familiar with the series will note that in neither case did I have a clear idea of the heroes. In fact, Rogue took me entirely by surprise when he walked into the room and threw everything upside-down. (Which is entirely like him, I see now in retrospect.) In 12K, I knew there would be the one sister, but not so much that there would be three and that the overall story would be as much about them and their relationship as anything else.

In both cases, discovering these other characters - who took shape and came to life as I wrote - was what determined the overall series arc.

For CoT, the relationship between Rogue and Gwynn drove the series arc. Though there are other considerations for her - gaining mastery as a sorceress, finding her own agency, and fighting Titania's plans - it's really Gwynn's bargain with Rogue to bear his firstborn child, and their tangled emotions around this, that forms the spine of the series.

For 12K, once Andi's sisters, Amelia and Ursula, took shape, it became clear that the trilogy would be formed of each sister's story, in that order. The way MotT ended pretty much dictates that the main story thread falls to Amelia next, in The Tears of the Rose, and that the final conflict belongs to Ursula in The Talon of the Hawk.

The First Act Dictates the Conclusion

I write using the three-act structure, as such: Act 1 Climax: 25%, Midpoint: 50%, Act 2 Climax: 75%, Act 3 Climax: 90%. What this means is that all the stakes in the story are set up by the end of Act 1. The remaining 3/4 of the story are all resolving the problems set up in the first act.

In a series, this overall structure still applies. If you apply the metric to the entire series, it should become clear that there is an Act 1 Climax that occurs somewhere in book 1 that sets up the stakes for the series as a whole. In CoT, the bargain between Rogue and Gwynn and her subsequent suffering drives the conclusion finally reached in book 3, Rogue's Paradise. In 12K, the political events set off by what happens to Andi - and how they change her sister's lives - are what lead directly to the final conflict in The Talon of the Hawk.

Filling in the Detail

Thus, as far as plotting and planning, I do have a general sense of what the major beats and climactic events will be. More or less. I probably have a better sense of the impact on the characters than the details of the events themselves. Those things I discover as I go along.

It's definitely true for me, however, that setting up that first 25%, both within a book and for the series overall, is what gives me a solid trajectory to see the story through.

Plus a bit of black magic.

Scenes and How They Do and Don't Work in Novels

That picture is a bit blurry, but that's Nora Roberts rocking it out on the dance floor at the Harlequin party a the RWA National Conference. She is so wonderful in so many ways.

So this week's topic is Scene Goal: Why YOU Should Have One (Pantsers Beware!). No doubt it was KAK, calendar Nazi and avowed pre-plotter who added that snide addendum for Pantsers to beware. No doubt directed at me.

Ha ha.

But it's interesting, having just come back from the convention, and hearing so many amazing workshops on craft and business. So many writers talked about various approaches to writing that involve blending of plotting and pantsing that it makes me think there are very few of us - if anyone - who does all of one thing or the other.

The whole idea behind making sure that you, as the author, have a goal for every scene is to keep the writing tight, focused and moving forward. The primary definition of a scene comes from theater, as so many of our writing craft concepts do.

Thank you ancient Greeks, yet again!

So a scene is, first and foremost:

1: one of the subdivisions of a play: as

a : a division of an act presenting continuous action in one place

b : a single situation or unit of dialogue in a play <the love scene>

c : a motion-picture or television episode or sequence 

In theater they are usually delimited by the entrance and exit of characters, because that dynamic movement is such a driving force for a stage play. Many movies have adopted the sense of a scene break - moving fast from one visual to another - to drive action forward. In network TV, scenes are broken up by commercials. 

 

This can be less clear in a novel, because characters don't necessarily physically come and go, conversations and actions may flow more seamlessly from one point to another, and there are no commercial breaks. (We hope!)

People who use screenwriting models to structure their novels tend to move scene by scene. However, though I use the Three-Act structure and find it very useful, I rarely think in terms of scenes, or scene goals. This is not because I write for discovery, pants, mist or whatever you want to call it.

It's because I'm a character-driven writer. 

See, the common wisdom - and it's generally good information - is to follow the Goal-Motivation-Conflict model. This largely comes from Debra Dixon's book on the topic, which many writers, especially new ones, seem to like very much.

It does nothing at all for me. 

To me, characters are real people. They're complex, which means they're muddled. It makes a clean story for a character to have a single goal for every scene, to be driven by their motivation to overcome the conflict. We used this in theater all the time. But that's only the most fundamental level. Do any of us have only one goal or motivation at a time? 

Think about yourself, right at this moment. You're reading this post. What's your goal? Your motivation? Is there a conflict? Maybe not and you reading this wouldn't make a very good scene or story. But, placed in the larger context, reading this might be part of the goal to be a better writer, motivated by your deep-seated dream and the desire to overcome that last rejection. 

But, if I'm writing your story, I want to show how you're feeling, whether you think this makes sense or not, and then throw in a symbol of whatever is truly holding you back - that maybe you don't even realize. You start thinking about maybe playing Solitaire instead or your crying child comes in saying you don't pay enough attention to her, or your spouse grumbles about wanting you to cook something. 

What's my goal for your scene?

Not a neat tick on the outline. Not an easily encapsulated 1, 2, 3. Instead I'm painting one piece of a puzzle. Hopefully by the end, it will make for a complete image. 

I suspect this is the heart of pantsing. Not that we don't pre-plot, but that we don't always have a trajectory that can be mapped like a vector equation. Maybe we're the impressionists of the writing world. The rules matter less to us than the FEEL. 

In fact, one of the best workshops I went to at the conference was about intensifying emotion. Tanya Michaels gave us many great examples of how some great books do this. Most valuable to me, she said "if you can make your reader feel one emotion, you can make them feel all the emotions." Loved that. 

I suppose what I'm getting at is, not every emotion has a goal. Sometimes a scene is there just to create a mood. Perhaps one could argue with me that creating a mood IS my goal, but I don't always know that.

And I don't think I have to know. 

But then, I'm happy in the misty worlds.