That said, because this is NaNoFinMo for me, more or less, because I have decided to be a NaNo Rebel, my word count is actually more than 50K in the document. That is more than halfway through a planned 80K draft. Which is good. Marvelous in fact. I am exactly where I need to be in so many ways — but clearly I need to spend the next 48 hours or so playing a serious game of catch up not only in the novel (I need to hit 26,667 by tonight theoretically) but also around the house. This weekend was filled with marvelous things — friends visiting from out of town! Gatherings and happenings hosted at our house! Meeting the incomparably awesome Stephanie Perkins! — but one thing I didn’t accomplish over the last few days was maintaining pace. I knew I’d fall short and I have, and I need to make up the difference. My brain melts at the thought.

But things aren’t bad, don’t get me wrong. I’m still very optimistic that the goal I set for myself will still be met. Working consistently has been key for me, as has forcing myself to be cautious about the words I use. I am not employing any of the standby NaNo tricks — extending a scene for no purpose; relying on excessive banter or funny dialogue with no purpose; dwelling on moments best glossed over or avoided through well-used scene jumps — and yes I know this is costing me time and effort but even if I “lose” NaNo and come in short of my personal goal of 50K new words, I will know that the words I am using are all good, solid words, and to me that’s the most important part. NaNo’s enthusiasm and community is helping me set and maintain a consistent output but because I am half a full time writer and I have the time and ability to put hours and hours toward this task every day, I am not letting myself squander that time with unworthy words. I am following my outline and I am absolutely in love with my characters, this world, and their story. I couldn’t ask for a better project to be tackling this month and I’m glad I didn’t put this aside and start something crazy or fresh for NaNo; I’d've missed this world too much.

Though this NaNoWriMo is turning out to be very productive and positive, it’s no less exhausting than previous NaNos; in fact I’d say it’s the hardest mentally (I’ve spent hours bashing my head on the keyboard getting a single sentence right) while the easiest physically (the dishes are done, even if the laundry isn’t folded, and I’m well fed). I miss the literary abandon of 2008′s crazy ride — when I had no idea where I was going or what scene I would write next — and I also miss 2009′s cool surety of steady (unbelievable) progress. But 2010′s NaNo, even if it doesn’t end in a completed book, will end with me very close to the end, and hopefully in December I will be able to finish it, tear it apart (gently) and build it up again, and give it over to some folks with fresh eyes. I am nothing if not exhaustingly optimistic!

This year I’m finishing my work in progress which as of 11:30 last night stood at a perfectly even 30,000 words. (So terrifically convenient for updating word count on the website; so whatever word count you see on the widget to the right? Add 30K and that’s the ms’s total.) This is a hardcore rewrite of an old project, which means 100% of the words are new, 50% of the plot and events are new, and about 5% of the characters’ traits and personalities and attributes are new. I know these character so well. I’ve known them longer than I’ve known some people in real life! But in between the day job and other distractions, I’ve been stuck under 30K on it for a while now. In September I vowed if I didn’t have this novel mostly done by November 1st I would spend NaNoWriMo finishing the darned thing. And that’s what I’m going to do. This is NaNoFinMo for me, dang it, and I will write that last page before December 1st or my fingers will be bloody from trying. (I’m overdramatic. Shush.)

I asked the kind people of the NYC meet-up for NaNo I went to last week and they were unanimously agreed that (1) because writing is what I do all year long anyway, why the heck not take advantage of NaNo and use its community and motivators to help me finish this project? And (2) it’s not cheating, to them, if the words are new. I’m not copy-and-pasting, I am writing the words from scratch from a plot that has been pretty tightly outlined and characters I know well enough to know what they’d do in a dozen of strange scenarios my husband has posed for me (hypothetically). (“Would they think this joke is funny?” “A would, but B would think you were being rude, and C would completely ignore your existence for even trying.”) The kind folks at NaNo don’t recommend going in with a book you’ve already started because they don’t feel like it promotes the true kamikaze spirit of NaNo — but that’s exactly why I need to do NaNo. As much as I adore it, I’ve been dragging on this ms. It needs some kamikaze noveling to happen to it and what better time to do that kind of writing than during NaNo?

Anyway. I’ve written five — FIVE — words as of right this moment, but I’m not planning on sleeping until I get my 1,667 minimum for the day which will undoubtedly happen once I get home from the day job.

Onward!

1. Plan as much as you can in advance.

With only FOUR DAYS left, I know it’s hard, but it’s not impossible to sit down and spend three hours or so this weekend plotting and brainstorming and taking notes. Who are your characters? (What are their names? I find I waste lots of time in November if I need to suddenly create a character name.) What do they want? What are their obstacles? Literary agent Nathan Bransford has a great post to this effect, reminding NaNo-ers of the basic tenets of starting any new writing project. Once you know your protagonist, start in on the other major characters and some of the secondary characters. Give yourself as fully-fleshed-out a cast as you can before you start, if you can. If you can’t, then work on plotting an outline or figuring out other elements: settings, places, obstacles, events, Things That Need to Happen, et cetera. We all follow different creative processes and have different ways of tackling the same writing problems so I can’t speak for what may be best for your process. But the bottom line: the more you go in knowing, the less you’ll need to stop and figure out along the way.

2. Write something every day. Don’t give yourself a day off.

Pace for NaNoWriMo is 1,667 words a day, which can be a brief chapter, part of a scene, an entire scene — but it’s not overwhelming. What is overwhelming is realizing that you are 6,000 words behind pace and you need to catch up by yesterday. By writing a little each day and not taking a day off — which admittedly is hard, but NaNo is about discipline — you’ll stay on pace and far away from tearing-out-your-hair territory. That said, sometimes it’s hard to get in front of a computer, so I’ll suggest some of the things I did when I could not actually drag myself to write my 1,667 words for a day: I plotted and planned and made sure I knew what my next 3,000 or 9,000 words were going to be about. If you can’t write today, make triply sure you know what you’re writing tomorrow, or next week, because every little bit of NaNo planning helps, even when you’re in the thick of it.

3. You don’t have to start a new project for NaNo if you can find another way to get to 50,000 words.

It may seem a blasphemous thought: you can find a way to use NaNoWriMo to your best advantage, especially if you’re a writer normally. Though some would argue it’s “cheating” to do anything but the most traditional write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kamikaze noveling for which NaNoWriMo is famous, I firmly believe — and talking to people at NaNoWriMo meet-up events, I’ve found everyone has agreed with me — that the #1 most important thing about NaNo is production. The actual 50,000 words. Not what document they’re being written for. Need to rewrite that old project you started five years ago but never got around to finishing? Do it! Have the first 20,000 words of a novel already sitting on your computer? Finish it! The nature of the challenge changes when you’re not writing-by-the-seat-of-your-pants but having done a rewrite from the ground-up last year, I can attest that even though I knew my characters and I knew the plot, writing at a NaNoWriMo pace was still breathlessly challenging. I adored every moment of it and I even finished well before Thanksgiving (which is always my personal goal). Did that make it any easier? Maybe. But I still skipped scenes (leaving big [MORE!] brackets) and for the most part had NO idea what the ending was going to be, but I didn’t let that get in the way of getting my 50,000 words done.

4. Have fun.

Don’t kill yourself to win NaNoWriMo. Shirk the chores for a few weeks — have the roommate take over dishes duty for a while! — but don’t sacrifice your first born child over it. Yes, it’s difficult, yes it can be stressful, especially if you fall behind pace — but don’t forget, you’re not alone. One of the best things about NaNo, for me, is the community aspect of the challenge. Go to the forums and talk with other NaNo-ers to get ideas or to find a place to whine to sympathetic ears. Pit yourself against strangers and friends and make it a fun competition. Find your local NaNo chapter’s in-person meet ups and go — they do word sprints and give out free prizes! But always remember: it’s okay to quit. It’s okay to finish with less than the goal, especially if you’ve never tackled the NaNo beast before, especially if you come down with a bout of the flu or the Day Job flares up and consumes your soul. It’s okay if your natural writing style or natural writing pace isn’t a minimum of 1,667 words a day; that’s a challenging pace for even a lot of professional writers. But at the same time, one of the best parts of NaNo is the fact that there are thousands of people attempting the same [seemingly] insurmountable challenge along with you, and you can succeed or fail with others, and giggle about it afterward. (Or go to your local Thank God It’s Over party on December 1st; that’s always a great way to finish the month!)

I’m downright enthusiastic about NaNo time every year because it always energizes me and gets me working. Having that little word count updater on NaNoWriMo.org acting like my ball-and-chain every day motivates me like nothing else in my writing life ever has. Seeing how many hundreds of writers are ahead of me in pace, or behind me, both challenges me and heartens me. Writing is typically a solitary profession but during the month of November when I’m writing I know I’m among friends. And I love every moment.

That summer, I traveled to Munich, Germany to study German and I saw the Alps for the first time. I realized I knew nothing about the type of mountains I was trying to visualize because I’d had no frame of reference. I’d never seen mountains like these before. In Munich, you can see the Alps from within city limits — okay I couldn’t see them until I was standing on top of the Olympiaturm, the sight-seeing tower built in the Olympiapark, the park built for the 1984 Olympic Games — but the Alps are visible. From Munich. Later that month I took the train to Neuschwanstein Castle, in Füssen, Germany, in the Alps — well. I realized I’d had no frame of reference at all for what was a “mountain” and what was a “castle.”

(Though admittedly, Neuschwanstein is no where near the norm of a European castle. King Ludwig II bankrupted Bavaria to build it and only lived in it for 172 days. For reference, this castle was finished in 1884, the year after the Brooklyn Bridge was completed!)

The Alps themselves were even more stunning when I returned to Europe — dragging my then-fiancé (now husband) with me — the following spring, when there was still snow visible on the peaks.

The same year I dragged my then-fiancé to Europe, he dragged me to Utah to ski with him, and we’ve been going every spring since. We go to a mountain just outside the city limits of Salt Lake City, UT, less than an hour from SLC International Airport. Salt Lake City stands at an average of 4,300 ft above sea level (so less than mile-high Denver, CO), but on the drive up the canyon road to the mountain, the elevation increases from 4,500 to 8,000 feet at the lodge base. (In the car, driving up the winding road, gravity pulls you back into your seat because of the incline of the road.) The mountain itself has a peak of 11,000 ft. The peak is covered with some kind of snow sometimes as late as June. And the snow! I could write a whole entry about the multitude of different kinds of snow I’ve experienced there over the years. (“Blizzard” is a term we in New York City use for something the folks at this mountain would laugh at.)

(See more photos here.)

What I wrote of mountains before I’d seen them, climbed them, skiied them was not factually incorrect. I’d gotten the basics correct; I had done my research. But when I rewrote the scenes, I found I wrote them with more confidence and authority. I was able to incorporate small details from my own experience, to give my characters the sense of unreality I’d felt being in such majestic surroundings. I think  my writing benefited.

Thoreau said,

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

and every time I read that quote I think of the concept of “writing what you know” — one of the principles taught to writing students early on, one of those things we learn… then learn how to break. I know that as a writer of fantasy I will never have the opportunity to experience all that I’ll write about, either from the standpoint of a practical limitation or that of impossibility. Even more basically, I’ll never know what it is like to have grown up with a single parent. I may never know what it feels like to be a grandmother. I’ll never jump in lava (hopefully my characters won’t ever, either), I’ll never run someone through with my sword (I don’t even own a sword, unless you count my plastic lightsaber), and I’ll never fly through the eye of a hurricane (I wonder if Superman ever has?).

Instead, I’m doing my best to experience life, to live it to its fullest, so that when I sit down to write I can bring a wealth of emotions and memories to the computer with me, from which I can draw to create realistic, evocative fiction.

EDIT: I should probably edit to make clear that I’m not saying one should write only what one knows — or make up an entire novel’s contents without infusing it with one’s real experiences and emotions. There’s a happy medium. I’ve always hated the “write what you know” saying, because as someone who writes fantasy that always annoyed me. But it’s a solid point I shouldn’t entirely disregard. I think I’ve finally come around to understanding that using what I know to make my entirely imagined stuff feel more real is one way I can help my writing shine.

How have you used your life experiences in fiction? How have you compensated for a moment for which you had no personal frame of reference? Tell me what you think about “writing what you know”!

When I first approached this rewrite (which is of a young adult fantasy, naturally), it felt like I was pouring the pieces of a huge, complicated puzzle onto a clean tabletop. I know this story so well I know (or can vaguely see) each and every one of its many little parts, its different plot points and characters with their arcs, the secondary characters who surprise me, the details of setting and scene and world-building I know so well. But how to fit them together again to tell a story better than the way I’ve told it before, in an earlier iteration? That’s the question that constantly drives me when I’m writing. The what in a novel can feel similar — tropic characters or themes, familiar settings or devices — but the how, that’s what always fascinates me about reading a novel as well as writing one. The execution, if you will. I didn’t approach this rewrite daunted by the unknown, not really, because I had all the pieces on the table before me. But I was fitting them together in a fresh way, and that excited me — continues to excite me.

I started with the frame of the puzzle, the opening and the world. In a rewrite, I pay careful attention to the way I lay out the words — and I obsess over this in subsequent edits. Because starting from the front, every word cumulatively builds the world as the reader knows it and is essential in setting up the frame of the world itself as it is with setting up the story, plot, and characters. As Ursula K. LeGuin explains in her (amazing!) essay, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

…In fantasy there is nothing but the writer’s vision of the world. There is no borrowed reality of history, or current events, or just plain folks at home in Peyton Place. There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. There is only a construct in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed. To create what Tolkien calls “a secondary universe” is to make a new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice. And every word counts.

This is an awful responsibility to undertake, when all the poor writer wants to do is play dragons, to entertain himself and others for a while.

(I love her.)

After I pushed through the first chapter or two, in setting up this world (though admittedly in this WiP, my opening still needs work), I continued on assembling the pieces. This is hard, this time around, because I’ve finally understood what I needed to fix to make this story stronger: it’s a dual-protagonist story, not a singular one, and the inclusion of the other main character’s point of view was so essential in making these pieces snap into place at long last. (It’s in third person, and considering the last project I was editing to within an inch of its life was first person, it’s definitely a switch.) Once I rewrote the first third of the novel, I looked back and what I’d put together and saw that some of the pieces didn’t fit as neatly as they ought to. I can’t obsess over those little pieces being wrong right now though; those are matters to address when I get to the end and can see the entire picture, the entire draft. Looking at it as a whole, I’ll be able to more clearly pull apart those pieces that don’t work, fix them, and reinsert them to make the entire story stronger. Maybe what I see now as little pieces that don’t work will actually come back together in the end. I put those pieces back in for a reason, didn’t I? (So I tell myself.)

One of the reasons I’m enjoying myself so much with this project is that absolutely I love puzzles, though I think I adore strategy games and logic puzzles more than I do straight up table-top puzzles like in my analogy. I adore solving them. I adore a puzzle that makes me think, that actually makes my brain feel as if it’s using more of its total potential. (I love it when my brain hurts after a complicated bit of thinking. I’m a nerd, shush.) Good puzzles spawn questions I think about in the shower, when cooking, when walking down the street; questions I ponder while staring into vacant space on the subway ride home (and which tend to garner me more than one “She’s crazy,” looks). Answering those questions, fitting the pieces together… that’s why I write. I get a rush from a plot’s pieces falling into place, at that little thing I hit on earlier in the novel coming back into play in a big way.

Writing a first draft is one kind of rush. It’s a new project high of anything goes and literary abandon, as the good people at NaNoWriMo call it. I love that feeling, absolutely. But once the novel is out in front of me, actually on the page in its messy first draft form, then begins the more interesting part. The pulling it apart and putting it back together for the second, or third iteration or more — that’s a rush of an entirely different nature. It doesn’t feel like writing a novel, to me, when I know the story so well. Thus my analogy: it feels like I’m simply putting all of the pieces of the story together to form the coherent image, the story I know waits at the end of all of that work.

Spending a day solving puzzles I’ve created for myself… yes, writing a novel is the best job ever.

Poetry workshop take-aways // or, why this novelist kept taking so many darned poetry workshops.

I think in novels. As a kid, I thought, Oh, I think in stories. No. I learned later: I think in novels. In my first workshop at 15, I told my advisor that I couldn’t write a short story. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. “I write long things. Um. Novels. I think in novels. I can’t make it short. I can do chapters, if that’s okay.” That wasn’t okay. I was coaxed into writing stories that… read like chapters. My advisor finally coaxed me into making my final project a “novella.” But it still read like half a novel. By the time I got to college and realized that short fiction was the name of the workshopping game, I sighed and got to work learning what this short story thing was all about. In the meanwhile, I signed up for poetry classes. Poetry. Verse. Shakespeare. I knew what a sonnet was, thus, I could write poetry. WRONG. But those workshops taught me so much. This advice is hardly a substitute for what I learned, and may seem obvious, but it absolutely changed the way I thought about writing fiction — and about poetry. By learning to write it, I learned to read it, to appreciate a poem written well (like those of a former classmate, whose work I adore). Admittedly, the poetry I wrote for workshop reads like a novelist wrote it. (It’s also terrible.) Which is [yet another reason why] I write novels.

Besides the fact that poetry is (1) beautiful and (2) absolutely worth reading, you novel-reading people you! these were some of my biggest poetry workshop take-aways.

1. Words are beautiful.

So is the way a set of words can be strung together, the sounds they make when they smack and rub and brush against each other. Words are alive, alive on the page and in the mind of the reader. So many writers seem to use words as a means to an end. Yes — words are the vehicle by which you tell your story. But paying attention to diction, to image, to the particular words you use and how you string them together is an often overlooked part of novel writing. (And yes, paying attention to words is also a pursuit better left to revisions, not first drafts.) Most novelists are so focused on plot, on character, that they forget novels are built with words. We have more room to waste words than a poem in our 80,000 novel, technically speaking, but why should we waste a single word? Why? There’s no good reason. None. Words are beautiful and they deserve to be used well.

2. Image, image, image.

String together images as well as actions. Build images as well as dialogue. When we read we build an imaginary landscape in our minds, we populate it with the writer’s words and the images they draw with those words. Too much exposition and not enough grounded image loses my attention. Too much dialogue without rooting me firmly in the scene distracts me.

Showing versus telling, to me, is that difference between rooting me with image and giving me exposition. Telling me, “Anna’s father beat her when she was young” is very, very different from giving me the visceral recollection of a slap. But — images come with intensity, with meaning and depth. Images are immediate, are sensory, tangible things. Sometimes an image is too strong and exposition may be the better choice. But I hate to be told a crucial bit of information in a casual, throwaway bit of exposition when it can be relayed with an effective image or even a strong bit of dialogue (and “voice” is related to image, because I feel voice).

Images don’t need to be paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of scene-setting detail. Too much image, too many adjectives and clunky nouns can overload an image. Too much image without enough meaning, depth underneath it. Images can be brief and still have strength. They can be slices of a life, picked out by a discerning eye, weighted with the promise of story.

Novels, as a medium, are not built around images as directly as a screenplay is built around image. Not even poetry needs image the way film needs it. But to ignore the effectiveness of well-placed images is to deflate the potential power in a scene.

3. Space is a tool.

Physical distance on the page can allow for emphasis. Where you choose to break sentences, add commas or semicolons or emdashes–these breaks influence the way your words are viewed, are digested by your reader. Judicious use of space is a subtle tool in any writer’s arsenal, regardless of how long their work. This goes for chapter breaks and section breaks as well. Those breaks can and should be regarded as tools, not just “breaks.” Space is a tool! Use it.

But don’t abuse that space.

With lots of dramatic paragraph breaks.

Because after a few instances, it looks silly and loses the emphasis you’re going for. Like the ellipsis, or the exclamation point, paragraph breaks for the sake of drama should be used sparingly, or at the very least, pay off for the reader.

4. Repetition. Repetition is a tool.

But it’s also one of the easiest tools to use too often, too much, becoming annoying rather than effective. There’s a difference between repetition and redundancy. You can use repetition to be effective. You can never use redundancy for anything.

How many times does your character’s name appear in a given passage? How frequently are the same words in close proximity? When you read aloud, do the same words pop up over and over? There are a plethora of action verbs and adjectives at your beck and call to describe similar actions and behaviors without being redundant. Decide which is effective repetition and which is redundant blah and eliminate.

5. Unnecessary words are clutter. Cut them out. Efficient images are effective images.

This is the simple reason why you see blogs and advice to writers repeating over and over to eliminate adverbs. The truth is this: adverbs are not inherently evil. But when you say she was grinning widely or shouting loudly — you are being redundant.

Redundancy, as we’ve agreed, is not effective writing. When the reader is pulled out of your image by its clunky phrasing, it is not an effective image. And we’re going for effective images, yes? And I know, as we agreed, words are beautiful things. But too many of them leads to clutter. Clean them up and really be honest when you’re doing it; this cleaning up may take multiple readers and a loving editor but you’ll have stronger prose.

6. One of the quickest ways to establish voice is careful diction.

Diction: the choice of words and the way in which they are used. Establishing voice is not simply a matter of throwing in key vernacular or vocabulary (like “y’all” or “dahling,” say). It’s not about short sentences. Or about long, flowing, elegant sentences replete with word upon word, flowery adjective piled upon adverbs of glorified density. No. Diction is all of that. Establishing a voice is about finding consistency, about finding a style and a flow that reads naturally. (I do enjoy well-used vernacular, but please: simply tagging sentences with vocabulary does not count as adding it naturally!)

Poems can establish voice effortlessly in single lines. Some of the shortest poetry can still feel as if it has a character behind it despite its few words. Getting into a character in a short poem was one of the hardest and most effective lessons for me in establishing voice, in getting into a character’s head and speaking their words. When I am having trouble finding a consistent voice, I fall back on my poetry workshop tricks. I look at my word choice, the consistency, the tone my words evoke. I ask for feedback. I read it aloud. It helps.

7. Your reader has five senses. Do you take advantage of them?

Not only within the imagery of the page, but with the very words on the page. When I say I love “evocative” writing, I mean to say I love writing that seems to lift from the page, that has undeniable depth. I measure that depth by the sensory experience I have when I read it. When someone needs to shake me out of a world — that’s a world written well. Every one of those worlds draws me in through smell, through sight and sound, through the occasional stirring of a memory through an image that brings my own sensory experiences to bear on my reading experience. The reason This Is Just To Say hits me so hard every time I read it is because I know what it feels like to bite into that cold, sweet plum, the juice dripping down my chin. I feel that. But some of my favorite books evoke that same visceral experience for an image or a scene I’ve never personally experienced because they use the same tricks of making reading a personal, sensory experience. I’ve never faced down a dragon. I’ve never been in a war, a battle. But the best scenes bring me there and keep me grounded through those little details, and through sense.

——–

Do you read or write poetry? (Or both?) Has any poem or verse influenced you or your writing (be it the “greats” of the past centuries or someone more modern)?

What tricks do you think writers of prose can learn from poetry?

Tips for the Novice Workshopper // i.e. things to get over, and fast, to maintain your sanity and survive a workshop.

[A lot of these tips can help when working with a critique partner for the first time, too.]

No one will read your work the way you read it, or the way you “meant” for it to be read. Be prepared for interpretation.

This is a big one. Especially if no one has read your work before, or the only people who have read it are family members, close friends who are not writers/readers by nature, or teachers in a one-on-one environment. It’s an alarmingly simple concept: the same words can be (and are) read in different ways by different readers, especially critical readers. There’s no guarantee anyone else will read, interpret, and see your world as you do. Reading is an intensely personal experience; not everyone will take your characters’ actions and words to mean the same things you do, or you want them to. Consider: Do you need them to read it a certain way, or are those possible interpretations enriching? Do the different ways people interpret something left somewhat open-ended give the story greater depth, or does it lead to confusion? Confusion should be cleared up, but I love when an author leaves room for interpretation. I’m not talking about cliffhanger or open-ended endings, but rather details left undefined.

For instance, in the first writing I ever had workshopped (I was fifteen), my characters’ appearances were vitally important. I needed everyone to see them the way I saw them. The reason? Because I’d seen them that way, darn it. (Which is not a reason.) Strangely enough, half of my classmates read an ethnicity into one of my characters that the others hadn’t, which started a debate on perceptions and realities, which was… enlightening. Something I hadn’t intended ended up being one of the most interesting things my peers discussed about my story. I learned early, then, that one must prioritize, in a sense. If certain information is vitally important to get across to the reader exactly the way you envision it—and you do have to ask yourself why that information is so important before you push for it—then that’s something to ask for very specific feedback on, to ensure that your readers “got it” or “saw it” the way you needed them to, for the sake of the story. But everything else you don’t need to prioritize, it’s okay to leave it open. It’s okay, really. Is it important, for instance, what color your character’s hair is? Do we need to know everyone’s eye color or height or weight or age or build or what they ate for dinner last night or what clothes they’re wearing? Etc. Priority of relevant information distribution is something I’d never considered before a workshop taught me to see it like that. Readers can only digest so much detail at once. Clogging the first pages of a story—especially in short fiction, when page space is scarce—with needless detail and description lessens the impact of the story and its characters. Before workshop, I’d never really considered how a reader digests information, how the way I reveal it can impact their interest and their imagination. Now it’s something I never lose sight of.

Criticism is important for growth; so is knowing how to take it AND how to give it.

Writing workshops are a very good way to learn how to take criticism. They are, or should be, a safe space. I’d been told, jokingly, that enduring a writing workshop is like having your soul ripped out. But possible soul-ripping-out is very perspective-based. The first time you ever receive critical feedback, regardless of how mentally prepared you are… it’s soul-wrenching, no doubt. But moving past that is essential, because the reason it hurts is either due to (1) an inexperience with criticism or (2) related to the above point, about how your reader didn’t necessarily see it the way you do. But criticism, given in a constructive way, is essential for growth.

What do I mean by “constructive”? That’s one thing I kept asking my teachers, because no one wanted to explain it to me in concrete terms. One professor explained that negative comments in workshop should be framed by positive comments. That’s helpful, sure. But what constructive criticism means to me now is feedback to help a writer make their story the best it can be—pointing out things that don’t work and why. Pointing out places that could be stronger, and how. Simply saying “This character felt flat” is not as helpful as saying, “Her dialogue felt wooden. I believed her actions but when she spoke, she didn’t feel real to me.” That I can take home and work on. Specificity and suggestions are essential. I want to come away from a workshop with “homework” to do—not a list of complaints and issues with no suggestions on how to make my story better. Even suggestions I won’t follow are good, because they show me what got my readers thinking and where my writing took their thoughts. I love knowing what possibilities are out there in readers’ minds.

Personally I never spoke in workshop when I didn’t have something to offer in the way of a suggestion. I couldn’t bring myself to point out flaws without offering solutions. What this meant, sometimes, was that I started challenging the writer with questions, ones I had, ones their story brought up for me. I always love to know the writer knows more about their story than I do, so I tend to ask a lot of questions–not necessarily for me, but for the writer to think about.

In workshops, it becomes obvious after a while what kind of criticism everyone is best at giving. (Natalie Whipple spoke a little about this on her blog last month, as regards crit partners. There are definite similarities in a workshop environment.) There’s bound to be the one person who’s a stickler for grammar, the one who pays attention to character above all, the one who’s always looking at language and page space, the one who’s focused entirely on plot and “what happens,” always pushing you to think about plot. In the workshop environment, isolating who gives which criticism consistently may help you interpret their comments on your story in a different light.

The writer’s brain gives you a different perspective when reading. Learn how to turn that perspective on and off.

If you have a writer’s brain, a writer’s passion, you are not like everyone else. (You are really a superhero! No. Sorry. Just a writer.) The workshop environment was the first time I experienced writers who were willing to look at what could be on the page rather than what was, those whose brains were programmed to look at a story in a first draft and give advice on how to make that second draft even better. That kind of reading calls for a different way of thinking about a work than a normal reader will think about it. It’s different again from say, an English major reading a text and analyzing it through a specific critical lens, or a casual reader tearing through a novel and experiencing it for pleasure’s sake.

That said, realizing that you need to turn on and off the writer’s brain when reading can be helpful. In life. Nathan Bransford discussed this idea in a recent blog post and the point he was getting at is this. Know what you’re reading and how you ought to be thinking about what you’re reading before you go into it. Turn off the hyper-analytical writer’s brain before reading a bestseller. When a friend offers you a story to critique but wants you to first give them a basic read, to “get a feel for it” or to see how it all flows… turn off the writer’s brain. Become a reader. Absorb it, don’t let the criticism start intruding until you need it to. Maybe your friend has the grammar of an orc, but is the story solid, are the characters real, is the setting evocative? It’s hard to turn off the critical brain once you’ve gotten used to it, but it’s essential to learn how to turn it on and off, otherwise you’ll be micro-criticising everything in the back of your mind, all of the time. That’s no good for sanity, people.

The writing you do isn’t the ONLY kind of writing that is (1) worthwhile for you to read and (2) worthy of your respect.

Of course you, oh wise blog reader, know this. But in my first workshop? There were kids who believed it was Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or bust. They looked down at anything called “genre” and termed it “irrelevant” for them to (1) read and (2) ever consider writing. What could they learn from reading genre? One teacher actually told the class, straight out, “Happy endings are unrealistic, fictitious, and boring.” (I was sixteen, that was at Yale. So I cried a little.) But, contextually, this was back when Harry Potter was considered “Something my twelve year old sister is reading,” not yet a multi-billion dollar book-and-movie-and-video-game-etc franchise. Genre was something to be looked down upon, something without artistry or commercial value. Stunned, I thought of all of the fantasy books that had won awards and influenced culture—can anyone say Lord of the Rings?—and couldn’t believe that my fellow workshoppers wouldn’t give genre a chance. I was determined to prove them wrong.

(The genre-in-workshop story for me has a happy ending, but I’ll save that for another Wednesday.)

Perhaps in retaliation for this vehemence I experienced in my first two workshops, I grew to have the opinion that the only writing I should be reading was young adult fantasy. High school assigned reading wasn’t worth my time, so I skimmed most of what I was assigned, except for Shakespeare (who was and is too seminal to mess with). Those I did read influenced my teenage brain more than I should have let them. (The Fountainhead had me on a snotty individualism kick for months; The Stranger gave me an existential crisis.) So at some point I said, Screw anything not in MY genre. This Jane Austen person? Not reading her. Pride and Prejudice? BAH. …Then, my mother made me sit through the BBC’s miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. Having fallen for that Mr. Darcy quite thoroughly (I blame Mr. Firth), I tore through that book in a few days—a staggering pace for me, for a non-fantasy novel. Suddenly books written before 1960 were, well, relevant. (And that Jane Austen person? I never doubted her again.) Ever since I’ve never dismissed a book out of hand and really, it was a lesson I should have learned long before high school. (Something about books and covers and judging, I think it was…)

Bottom line? Dismissing any writing out of hand is silly. (Says me, who refuses to read Eat, Pray, Love because it’s a bestseller. Um. *runs away guiltily*)

Learn to love reading aloud. Or at least learn how to do it decently. (Which means practice.)

It’s a fact of life that most of us become writers [partly] because we’re terrible at other things like, say, acting. Or speaking. Or singing. Or… the list goes on. There are some few of us writer-types who do multiple things well and I applaud them. But I—and just about 98% of all of the writers I know—do writing best. That means speaking, public speaking, public reading… that’s pretty far down on the list of things I do natively and do well. There are some writers I know who are amazing readers. They will take the story they’ve written and captivate an audience with it. I envy them. I want to be them. But I’m not, so I practice. I do try. I am still attempting to become comfortable with simply talking about my books, talking about my characters and plots without getting lost in the details. It’s something I could not do in my first workshops. I shook and could not get the words out of my mouth in a slow, coherent manner until some years later. Reading poetry aloud helped. Going to readings, hearing other writers read, helped. Listening to audiobooks helped, too, hearing actors perform books I know and love—that helped. I’m still learning and trying because a long time ago I learned that a writer can’t simply hide behind her desk for the entirety of her career. She’s got to get out, talk about her books, and even read. So. Practice.

Some people are born gifted. Plain and simple. But that doesn’t mean you are talentless.

Any artist in any field knows who I am talking about. There’s always that one boy in your high school, one girl in your college class. They are not only gifted but magical. No, honestly; you find yourself wondering whether or not they made some kind of Faustian bargain as toddlers or maybe their parents consumed an experimental drug when they were in the womb, because they are unnaturally gifted for their age, for their experience. It’s not luck—there’s definitely a difference between a lucky person who is talented and this kind of thing—this is pure, phenomenal talent. It’s always easier to spot in those dance prodigies, those chess players, in athletes, in singers. You’ve seen those kids on those singing competition shows. But with writers, it hits you in that workshop and it feels the same. God or whomever has seriously given them a talent and, well, then there’s you. Try as you might, you need several drafts to get it right. You need to hack and edit and edit and edit anything you write to bring it into the territory of reasonably good. But there’s that poet whose words sparkle on the page and she spent forty minutes last night writing that little thing of brilliance, then went and watched TV. Or the first novel that’s won a kajillion awards.

That these people exist is a fact of life. But simply because they are amazing doesn’t make your talent less. Their success doesn’t hinder yours, doesn’t affect you at all. Everyone is different, everyone works and thinks differently, and if there’s any big thing I learned by being in class after class of writers, there’s no right way to be a writer, or to succeed as one. It’s about perseverance, cheeky optimism, and yes, some talent. But talent can be grown and honed, too. (Meryl Streep went to acting school, you know.) Those magnificently gifted writers you meet along the way shouldn’t serve to discourage you, but encourage you. They’re good. But so are you, you negative, overly-critical, self-effacing ninny. I’m talking to you. You’re good too. Remember that.

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Anything to add on the topic? Any advice of your own to give based on your own first workshop or crit partner experiences? Please share!

This one is YA fantasy (shocker), with a lot of the elements of a swords-and-horses-and-princesses kind of fantasy, but with a couple of flip-the-genre-on-its-head unconventional twists of plot and character. (Yay for being vague!) At its heart, this is a story about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons; about questioning one’s role in one’s family and the larger world; of others’ expectations versus personal desires; of truth, deceptions, and consequences. (EVEN MORE VAGUE!) Is it better to break out of the shadow of your elders and try to be your own person, strike the consequences, or is it better to surpass your elders’ expectations of you in following the path they’ve set for you? I always find I write stories about finding one’s identity, about reconciling expectations: those of your parents, of others, and of yourself. Granted, it’s fantasy, so I’ve taken some, ahem, magical liberties shall I say, in the extrapolation of these circumstances. But like any interesting fantasy, this story resonates with me (as a writer especially) because it’s ultimately about the journeys of the characters as they try to come into their own, to prove they’re just about grown up — to everyone as well as to themselves.

Also, this story has nothing to do with “destiny” because I happen to think the “destiny” trope has been done [well and poorly] by others and I’ve no interest in exploring it. Besides, I happen to think “expectations” are a lot more annoying, harder to handle, and more interesting as a relatable concept to a reader in a non-fantastical context because we all have them, or others have them for us. Really: which is harder to live with, being destined to do great things, or being expected to do great things? The externality of the pressure of “destiny” is interesting, but it’s remote. Destiny implies a deity or other such remote being/concept with a “plan” (for one or for all), and that can get sticky — and epic. I heart epic, but this story is not epic. (And that’s another thing this all comes down to: what is right for this story.) Here I’d much rather stick to human beings and their relationships.

Like everything I write, it has no title, so I may refer to it here as a lot of things including “this story” and/or “the WiP.” I hate titling things until I must, then even afterward I squirm uncomfortably. (Even titling these blog posts feels odd, which is why so many of them seem like partial sentences or involve language reminiscent of I Can Has Cheezburger.)

Now, back to Scrivener and its loveliness!

Every project I’ve written I’ve prepared for differently. I haven’t found one right method to follow for every project, but neither do I think that I ought to have that “one” method for every project, because every project is so different. The one constant has always been that at some point — maybe before the first page is written, maybe after the first draft’s first chapter has been written — I always sit down and hack out the general ideas and the ending (in varying degrees of detail, initially). I never write without knowing the post-book resolution, as it were, though the ending, detail-by-detail, is amorphous until I get there. It’s one thing to say Prince Philip and Princess Aurora will dance together at the end, but it’s quite another to figure out all the little details (Prince Philip’s flight to the castle, the fairies’ intervention, the battle with Maleficent, climbing the tower, the kiss) that eventually get them to that dance floor to complete that image.

The weird fact is, though, that I’m tired of brainstorming and outlining and I’ve only just begun the process. It’s because I really, really want to write this project. So why don’t you just write it already? I… well. I had a long explanation prepared for that question. But I think the better answer is I’m going to go work on it right now, start getting into the first draft (oh, first drafts…!) then go back and hack into the outline. Once I see the shape of the start of the story more clearly (and the best way to do that is to write, to begin the process of getting the images in my head to take shape in the form of scenes) I’ll be able to really outline it.

So I’m going to go write now. *Grins* Get it? Write now… right now… okay, I’ll stop with the lame puns and go work.

The other fun and really exciting thing about this story is my narrator herself. She’s much edgier than the last main character I spent a significant amount of time with and the contrast is really thrilling. She’s so vastly different from me it’s both an excitement and a challenge to dig into her brain and look out from her eyes. (It may sound pretty gross, but I definitely do imagine myself as something of a leech in these characters’ heads when I’m writing first person. I’m weird but we knew that.)

In other news, it’s also my first wedding anniversary, the week of my sixth anniversary of being together, and it’s Oscar night. The anniversary(ies?) we celebrated with a lot of sushi on Friday and an obnoxiously huge steak to share last night. That steak made my life complete. (Who needs gluten when there’s steak? Carnivorous GF folks of the world, rejoice!) I should have photographed it, but considering the husband and I were starving, there wasn’t really any time to waste. (Also, my iPhone has no flash and you know restaurants with mood lighting that equates to shadowy darkness…) Both anniversaries sort of shocked us. I’m surprised it’s been a year since the wedding, and even more surprised that it’s been six years of us together. In a good way. But because we celebrated both Friday and Saturday, I’ve spent a lot of today writing and working. I’m also very excited about the Oscars (but less excited than I could be because I haven’t managed to see all of the nominated movies — though 10 is a lot to try to tackle before Oscar night!) and the whole shebang. The husband is less thrilled with my taking over the remote for a whole evening (as well as my decision to sit there and write between awards with the netbook on my lap) but then, Oscar night comes but once a year! As does our anniversary… but I think the steak counts as time well spent to celebrate each other. Right? Steak makes up for tonight being about Oscar… yes.