Details and Excision: Notes on my WIP, Edition 8

Tags

Plot, Plot Holes, Plotting, Spurn the Moon, WIP, Writing, Writing is Work

Lately my novel has given me plenty of cause for concern, especially ever since I neared the midpoint. It was about that time I realized I was writing a long first draft, especially a long first half, and thus it would either require rearranging or significant cutting.

I don’t like cutting, but I would rather have a novel people want to read than a bunch of things that don’t belong in the story or a flabby middle. But, as I’ve mentioned before, when I write, I tend to write long. I tend to meander through my scene until I get my feet under me and then I can narrow down the focus in later drafts.

Right now I have 114,535 words in this second draft of Spurn the Moon. This creates a bit of a problem, as I’m just now nearing my climactic scene, which should occur around the 90K mark for a 100K word novel. Which means my story is probably going to clock in around the 125K mark.

The frustrating thing is that I stepped back from this project and outlined everything. I have a solidly structured outline. I just suck at adhering to word counts. Or maybe I just want to pack too much stuff into a novel or scene, and so I end up with a long-winded, meandering scene that takes forever to get to the point. We could say I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to themes and subplots and plot ideas. If one is good, two or three is better, right?

Cutting extra words from my novel will be as easy as cuts can be, but cutting extra plot points or subplots is never quite as simple. In that case you have to decide whether or not it truly adds to the story, then untangle it from the story in a way which leaves the remainder of the story intact and stronger for the removal, like excising a cancerous tumor.

But let’s face it, cutting fat from a novel is one of the best ways to strengthen it. Instead of making your reader wade through layers of insulation to get to the heart, you remove that excess and give it to them straight. You make it easier on the reader by removing the things keeping them from the important story.

But how do you know what constitutes “fat” and what is the “meat” of the story? It takes a lot of practice, is the short answer. The long answer is that everyone struggles with this concerning their own work. It’s difficult to see where you can trim, and it’s hard to be objective. That’s why an editor comes in so handy.

Here are a few things to ask yourself.

Does this scene further the plot?

Does this scene create conflict, allow reaction after conflict, and/or push the MC toward the climax of the novel?

If this scene concerns a subplot: does the subplot advance the main plot in any way?

Is this information that is repeated elsewhere?

Is this a scene which strengthens my theme?

Are all of my characters unique and bring something unique to the story? Can any character be removed without a change to the plot? Would the story be stronger if I removed a character?

Can I strengthen this scene in any way? Can it do double-duty for me or create more conflict and drive the plot further?

My Favorite Sentence This Week

Tags

Novels, Spurn the Moon, WIP, WIP Teaser, Writing, Writing Life

Picking out a couple of sentences from this week was rough. All week I felt like I was running uphill, and looking back, I think my writing reflects my exhaustion. But while I’m less happy with this week’s sentences, I’m determined to share anyway!

Paused in the middle of the room, tears streaming cleanly down her cheeks in two trails, mascara perfect and unmarred, but eyes and nose reddened by emotion, Victoria released two handfuls of white fabric into the air. It caught the drafts in the air created by the heat of a low burning fire in the fireplace and floated upward before drifting down to the floor like a feather.

My Favorite Sentence This Week

Tags

Novels, Spurn the Moon, WIP, WIP Teaser, Writing, Writing Life

It’s already Thursday. Can you believe it? Between sleepless nights (thanks to my toddler), and cranky days, I’ve managed to get some writing done in my spare time.

So even though I’m not absolutely satisfied with the quality of my writing this week, I’m continuing with the tradition of sharing a sentence (or two) with you–because I’m getting over my need of perfection before sharing.

The thumping grew louder, pulsing rhythmically at me, as if my footfalls had a delayed echo through the woods and only now caught up to me. It made my heart race to look out upon the water, blue as Damien’s eyes.

Trusting my Main Character: Notes on my WIP, Edition 6

Tags

Characters, Details, Developing Characters, Novels, Trust, Writing, Writing Tips

Truth is a main theme in my WIP, Spurn the Moon. But lately, I feel like I’ve been harping on it in my novel.

I recently wrote through my midpoint (see midpoint muddles for more on that struggle), and that was a turning point for my MC, Adrienne. It’s at this point where she goes from a passive character to a reactive character, and she’s on the hunt for truth.

Around the midpoint, Adrienne realized a lot of characters weren’t being exactly…truthful…with her. And that’s a touchy subject for her. She hates being lied to, and so when she realizes that everyone seems to have a secret that concerns her, she gets rather upset.

But how do you write truth and lies in fiction without giving the entire game away? Obviously, it depends on how much you want your reader to know. Many a novel has been written where everyone but the MC knows that someone is lying to her. But there are also a million novels where no one knows someone is lying until a dramatic reveal later on.

I have had to decide which tactic to use, and how many characters are going to be liars.

But this has gotten me thinking about the everyday lies people tell. Even though I believe I’m a truthful person, I tell lies. When I’m having a bad day, a little white lie of “fine,” is still a lie. Granted, whom does it hurt?

Everyone lies once in awhile. No one can be 100% truthful 100% of the time. And everyone probably has one big secret in their life.

So it’s not too much to pull a few strings and have those secrets coincide for Adrienne in this novel. Her mother has a secret, her romantic interest has one, her best friend is keeping a couple, and her bodyguard has one too. But then there’s also her father and her sisters, all of whom should probably have confided in her before now. 

It’s understandable that Adrienne gets a little upset. Yet in order to keep conflict at a maximum, I’ve tweaked the plot so that Adrienne has to stay close to those who are hurting her. She can’t find out the truth except from them, and so that keeps her coming back for more abuse, and getting more and more frustrated by their inability to be honest with her.

But when does it become too much? How many lies does it take to drive someone away? This depends on personality, and so my current challenge is in making Adrienne’s personality believable when it comes to her tolerating being lied to. More importantly, it comes down to how badly she wants the information that only others can give. And so I am working to keep the balance of tolerance, frustration, and truth-seeking alive and believable as I write on. 

So write on. 

What are you working on lately? How does truth and lies come into play?

My Favorite Line This Week

Tags

Spurn the Moon, WIP, WIP Teaser, Writing, Writing Life

It’s that time of week again. I’ve been doing something new on Thursdays, and I’ve been enjoying sharing a line or two from my WIP.

I’ve always held off in sharing bits of my WIPs before, simply because I like things to be “perfect” before I share them. But, you know what? I’m getting over that. I’m realizing that even though this sentence may not stay in my WIP through to publication, I like it now, and I like how it came out this week.

In a way, I’m chronicling my journey as a writer, picking what I think is the best sentence I wrote this week and sharing it as a way to mark my path. In a year, maybe I’ll look back and think that sentence was awesome. Or awful. (Hopefully awesome though.) And maybe, one day, it will remind me of my voice, or where I was at this point in my journey.

So here’s my favorite sentence I wrote this week:

There was so much activity inside here, between Damien, me, my mother, Kat, the party-goers…and yet outside, it was picturesque London: Quiet, still, beautiful. The buildings had been there since who knew when? And they had survived. Survived the changes of the street, the changes of the world around them. Survivors. Stronger for the changes, perhaps…Changed inside, but unchanged outside.

For previous sentences, click here and here.

What’s your favorite sentence this week? Comment below with any favorite sentence–your own or someone else’s you came across this week!

Know Thine Enemy: Notes on my WIP, Edition 5

Tags

Antagonists, Spurn the Moon, WIP, Writing

Photo courtesy Flickr.com user OakleyOriginals.

It’s that time again. The time where I take a break from my WIP to talk about–you guessed it–my WIP.

In keeping with this week’s theme, I want to talk about my WIP’s antagonists. That’s right, there are more than one.

Since every novel needs an antagonist, I’ve spent a lot of time working on mine. They aren’t the most cooperative characters, let me tell you.

Sometimes it’s difficult to write them for the mere fact that you don’t want your reader to immediately know she’s looking at the antagonist. But other times, you struggle more to give the antagonist motive and a tiny bit of sympathy.

The best antagonists are ones that are slightly sympathetic, or at least have a reason for doing what they do. (And, let’s face it, what they do is make our MC’s life pretty miserable.)

My current WIP has two antagonists, but one doesn’t appear on the page until near the climax of the book. The first is there almost from the beginning, intent on making Adrienne’s life a living hell–but not just because. But character motives are important, and she can’t be making Adrienne miserable just for kicks. An antagonist has to have a reason.

What is that reason? Well, because I want to publish this book and hope that you may one day read it, this won’t be a reveal-all here. But antagonist-1 (a1) has some real reasons for throwing Adrienne under the bus. 1. selfishness; 2. self-preservation; 3. jealousy; 4. Adrienne reminds her of her past mistakes and vulnerabilities.

Okay, I faked you out there–number 4 is the biggie. I don’t know one person who likes being reminded of past failures or how vulnerable they are. Who likes to wallow in failure and vulnerability? But this reason actually works two-fold for my antagonist, as readers connect with a character who has both those traits–vulnerability and failures–and makes a1 more than just a cardboard cut-out villain. In fact, she’s not really a villain at all. She’s a woman, a complex woman who has fought her way up her career and wants to hang on to the top. She’s afraid of falling–just like anyone else might be. But how she reacts to that fear is what makes her an antagonist.

That’s really the thing that has proven to help me the most as a writer: antagonists are people too. Their reactions run the gamut of what a typical person might react as–in fact, an antagonist doesn’t see themselves as an antagonist at all. They are just another character in your story–and they have their own point of view.

One of the things I’ve done this past week is to explore a1’s motivations and her POV. How did I do this? By getting in close with her, by buddying up to her. She’s not particularly likable, and I wouldn’t want to be her friend if I knew her. She’s fake, self-centered, and utterly determined to get ahead of everyone else. But she serves an important purpose in my novel, and because of that, I have to know her as well as I know my MC. So I’ve been writing from her POV lately, stuff that won’t appear in my published novel, but which helps me get in her head.

My antagonist is one of the most important characters in my novel, and I need to treat her with the respect that deserves. So I’ve been hard at work fleshing her out, knowing that doing so will give me more believable conflict.

An Exercise:

Write a major scene of your novel from your antagonist’s POV. Explore her reactions to both what she’s doing and what the MC is doing. Explore both character’s reactions.

My Favorite Sentence This Week

Tags

Spurn the Moon, WIP, WIP Teaser, Writing

So this Thursday I’m continuing to share with my readers something from my WIP. As I said last week, I’ve held off doing so in the past, simply because I don’t like publicly sharing something that isn’t completed to my “standards of perfection.”

But I’m fighting to let go of my perfectionist nature, and so continuing this idea into its second week. This week I’m offering up two sentences.

My mother’s honeyed voice slowed my anger in her presence, as it always did. It was as if her wry amusement at everything I said prevented my anger from fully forming, or shoved it back in the cave where it had woken from.

-Spurn the Moon, Kelsie Engen

Midpoint Muddles: Notes on my WIP, Edition 4

Tags

Editing, Midpoint, Novels, Plotting, Revising, Revision, Spurn the Moon, WIP, Writing, Writing is Work

I’ve been writing around my midpoint for a couple of weeks now. When I say “around,” what I mean is that I keep writing toward it, keep approaching it, but keep pushing it further and further away as well.

Maybe that didn’t clarify anything after all.

Okay, so I have a tendency to write long in my first drafts. I think I’ve mentioned that at some point before. But I write a lot of words in order to have a few which I keep.

I’ve aimed to have a 100k novel at the end of this rewrite (which is probably rewrite 2.5, since I rewrote the first half of the novel before realizing I had issues with the plot and then stepped back to outline, after which I started rewriting again).

Having 100k words means that my midpoint should hit right at the 50k mark.

Ohh. Problems. Because at the time of writing this post, I am at 53,864 words and I have several scenes, probably long ones, to go before I hit the midpoint.

Every time I look at that number, I wonder if I’m losing focus. Am I jumping off on rabbit trails with my characters (mostly the subplots)? Am I repeating myself? Or am I creating meaningless conversations just to meet my daily word count?

It’s a daily dilemma, really. Every time I open Scrivener to start writing, I focus on that little word target.

Yep. This one. I want to be at 65k by the end of this month, and I’ll be there. But in terms of being where I should be by 65k, I don’t think I will. If you are familiar with plot points at all, you’ll know that you ought to structure your novel around them. The first plot point (pivot point #1) happens at 20-25%, the midpoint at 50%, and the second plot point (pivot point #2) at 75%. This is the main structure, the three act structure. My novel should fall into that, and I’ve plotted it to be so.

In the grand scheme of things–and what I am trying to tell myself–is that at the end of this draft, a few extra words won’t matter that much. If my midpoint is off by a few pages, a few thousand words, it won’t matter too much–that’s what draft 3 is for after all. But I don’t want to clock in at 120k or more. That’s too much, it’s probably going to mean my novel is padded with too much unnecessary story.

The middles are always a difficult point for me to write through, and the more I write, the more I realize this. I start to lose my way around the middle. Either I start to lose interest, or I start to think that my novel isn’t good enough, or I begin to think I’ve written too much or not enough. Case in point is draft 1.5, where I abandoned my revision halfway through the novel because I realized that I had a lot of problems with my manuscript as it was; it required extensive revision, more than I could give it in a regular edit–it had to be rewritten completely.

So what’s a girl to do when you have to plow through the middle in order to get to the end? Well, it depends.

On my hard drive right now, I’ve got six unpublished novels standing witness to my inability to complete a novel to my satisfaction. Yep. True story. (And these NaNo novels aren’t just the 50k required to “win” a NaNo event, but completed first drafts, tens of thousands of words longer than that.)

1. NaNo Novel 2013
2. Camp NaNo Novel 2013
3. NaNo Novel 2012 aka Spurn the Moon
4. NaNo Novel 2011
5. Pillars of Sand
6. Phoenix Reborn (edited too many times to count)

Technically, 5 & 6 were one of my first novels, which topped out at about 200K when I finished the first draft, so I was able to split that into two parts. As a result, I edited Phoenix Reborn so many times that I got sick of it, and realized over and over again that I didn’t like how the story ended, only when I got about 75% of a way through an edit.

So do I have a problem? Perhaps.

My problem is this: I am a slow, deliberate editor.

I don’t want to edit forever–I love writing new pieces, I love participating in NaNoWriMo, and I love new stories.

But I also don’t want to publish a work before it’s edited to be as good as I can make it. And right now, not one of these projects are as good as I can make it.

As I add more words to my current WIP and write through my midpoint, I have to consciously fight the desire to return to the beginning and give a new read-through, to see if there is somewhere I went wrong and where I have given my characters too much freedom.

Why do I fight that urge? Because sometimes getting to the end is worth an extra 10K that I’ll have to cut later, or even an entire subplot. I can’t ever publish this work until I get to the end, and I can’t get to the end unless I shove through this midpoint muddle I’m in.

It’s taking persistence and determination, and sometimes, time and energy I simply don’t have.

But I persist. Because I know that I am a writer, through and through. I’m not only a writer, but a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend…  All those things take time and effort away from my writing, but I make time for writing too, because I don’t want to let this story get away from me.

My Favorite Sentence this Week

Tags

Spurn the Moon, WIP, WIP Teaser, Writing

So on Thursdays I’m going to start a new thing, and share with my readers something from my WIP. I’ve held off doing so in the past, simply because I don’t like publicly sharing something that isn’t completed to my “standards of perfection.”

But I’ve decided that sharing a sentence can’t hurt. And sharing my favorite sentence this week may very well give me something to look back at when I’m old and can’t hold a pen anymore, assuming blogs stick around until then.

And though I say “sentence,” it might be a sentence, might be a couple words, might be a paragraph. I reserve the right to interpret “sentence” loosely.

So here goes:

My future apartment seemed like the ugly stepsister to the neighborhood, as though it would only be days before neighbors peititioned to have it knocked down.

-Spurn the Moon, Kelsie Engen

Luck Calling London: Notes on my WIP, Edition 3

Tags

Flickr, London, Research, Spurn the Moon, WIP, Work-in-Progress, Writing

Photo via Flickr.com user Les Haines. Parliament is an iconic bit of London. Nearly everyone who has visited London has visited Big Ben, and my MC is no different.

Ready to embrace another round of WIP Wednesday? I’m continuing to work on my novel, working title Spurn the Moon, and I just have to resort to photo hunting for inspiration throughout the week.

Okay, you called my bluff. I don’t have to, I want to. I love photography, and I love scenic photography. Forget people, give me places, buildings, pastoral scenes!

But this love comes in rather useful when writing. Why? Well, I can see a photo of a scene or building and my mind immediately starts putting people there. People I can imagine. But buildings I sometimes need a bit of help on. And entire settings sometimes need a bit of guidance to truly pop off the page, let alone keep all the elements straight.

How to find the right photos:

There’s a bit of luck involved in finding the right photos at the right time. Pinterest is great to create a board (private or public) of inspiring photos for my WIP. And I occasionally jump on there to see what’s out and about, and quickly get lost in the maze of photos.

But I keep coming back to Flickr and its plethora of fantastic, professional quality photos, like the one below of the Tower of London, a place I’ve been, but can’t get a photo of like this unless I took a helicopter ride over London. A photo like the one below can give my MC a path to walk or run, one that I would otherwise have to map out via Google or Bing maps and not get quite the clear idea of what it would be like to run down the Queen’s walk along the Thames.

Photo via Flickr.com user Rick Ligthelm. The Tower of London has to be one of the most visited sites in London. it’s not only gorgeous and chocked full of history, but it is right on the Thames, with a fantastic view of the Tower Bridge.

I’ve been to a lot of the touristy places in London. After all, I’ve visited at least half a dozen times in the last 15 years. (Wow that makes me sound old. But I started world traveling as a freshman in high school.) and while I love seeing the castles and “touristy” things of London, I don’t plan on my MC, who is moving there, visiting the tourist sites of London.

Where to search:

Herein lies one of the beauties of the Internet. (I know, I just gushed about it two weeks ago too.) but nowadays finding pictures of the average Londoner’s day is a whole lot easier thanks to Instagram.

Photo via Flickr.com user DncnH. There is something about this photo that makes me think of my MC rushing down London’s classiest streets to find a wedding present for her mother.

And Flickr.com. Don’t forget Flickr. You can honestly follow people who post to it like they post to Instagram. And then you have those gorgeous works by professional photographers. The best thing about Flickr is the ease of downloading photos to use elsewhere–if the photographer allows it. But the interface of Flickr is prettier than Instagram, too. 😉

Why bother:

So this past week, I’ve been hard at work on a few scenes for my novel, all of which include places I’ve never been in London. Now some of them I am using a literary license on, and reality be darned, I’m not worried about it. But there are some details I do want to get right, like the pathway in Kensington Park. Gravel, pavement, rock? Turning to photos for these kind of tidbits could be valuable. Granted, it’s best to go there yourself or ask someone you know, but photos can be a great starting point.

Kensington Park, photo taken by me on my recent trip to London.

Sometimes, all you need is a starting point, and that will allow you just enough information to either make up the rest or ask the right questions of someone who’s been there. Then you can have the right details and be exact.

Remember our quote of the week:

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Then when your luck (publisher, agent, reader, etc.) comes along, you’ll be ready.

Tell me:

How do you do your research?