What summer?

Where has the summer gone? As a teacher, I have always approached August with little less than a panic attack. There’s so much to do. Lesson plans, opening your classroom, in-service days, professional training, slideshows to make, teacher pages and blackboard classes to update, direction sheets and work sheets to be created and copied. The list is never-ending. And teachers operate on a different calendar than others. This is the beginning of our year, and so much rides on it. If I’ve prepped and worked all summer, I can start the year more easily, and it unfolds much less stressfully. If I haven’t had the time or the chance to do all that prep, the year gets off to a rocky start and goes downhill quickly from there. I’m hoping to get it all together during August, so we’ll see.

Is writing for you the same? Tons of prep and then a fairly easy delivery of your writing? Or do you do it the other way? Less prep, more pantsing? I’ve been working on transitioning to some hybrid approach that I’m still not sure is a good thing. How about you?

TGIF!

TGIF! Sorry to be so late, but it’s been a long, difficult week. All told, it’s been a brutal few months, and I’m feeling more than a bit distracted. But I did find this really interesting post over at Plot Whisperer in celebration of pantsers. Click here to check out the role of cause and effect as a really great strategy for writers of all kinds and tell me: Do you write this way?

Road Map

James Scott Bell over at The Kill Zone has a great post here on what you need to do with your manuscript to make it the best it can be before you submit. They’re good, straightforward suggestions from somebody who knows what he’s talking about, and I was pretty pleased to see that most of the suggestions are ones I follow. You’d think I’d be a whole lot happier with my work.

Anyway, check it out and tell me: What do you think of the suggestions? Which ones do you regularly follow? Do you have any other suggestions?

Do you recycle?

Writers write. A lot. And a lot of those words don’t end up getting used in final scenes. They’re locked up in stories and scenes and first drafts that never see the light of day. They’re cut or put away and forgotten. And a while ago Copyblogger had an interesting post on recycling creative content that made me think.

Over the period of about the last ten years, I’ve written a lot of stories set in the same universe about the same characters. Short things, middle length things, long things. And I never noticed that with some connective tissue put in between them and some minor changes in POV and such, a lot of those things could be reworked into a larger piece like maybe a novella/novel.

Have you ever done that? Reworked your own work into something else?

Short v. Long

As I wrestle with the novella/maybe/wannabe novel, I’ve been thinking a lot about writing style. I’ve said before how long and how hard I’ve worked to cut down on my verbiage, to pare down my writing to the essential words and to make those words work in a very spare writing garden. But I also find that I like reading lush description when that’s done right and well and isn’t simply the result of spraying words for filler.

That carries over to first drafts as well. Write It Sideways has an interesting post on the pros and cons of writing short v. long first drafts here. Check it out and tell me: How do you write your first drafts? Short or long? And is that style reflected in your final draft? Or are you a universe away from where you started after rounds of revisions?

Tell me true.

I love dialogue. I love writing it. I love reading it. I love listening to it whether it’s in my classroom, the hallway, on TV, or walking down the streets of NYC. I love the words, the slang, the phrases, the rhythm, the cadence, the whole hidden conversations in our conversations.

I love the variety of purposes dialogue can serve from exploring characterization to describing scenes and characters to giving us information to further the story. And when I write, I always write the dialogue first. If I can’t hear the dialogue in a scene, I can’t write anything else until I can.

Roz over at Nail Your Novel has a great post here on dialogue. Check it out and tell me: How do you feel about dialogue as an element of your story? How do you use it? Do you eavesdrop on people around you? Is it easy for you to hear when you write?

Is it hot in here?

I have to admit that when I looked at this post/title I thought to myself how could you not love this? I mean, writing like sex? How cool is that? And then I read it and realized I really did love it. What a great way of looking at writing and the process and there are how-to tips included. What could be better than that?

So tell me: Is this what writing feels like for you? Have you tried any of the how-to tips? Do they work for you or do you have better suggestions you’d like to share?

TGIF!

Happy Friday. My brain is fried and I don’t think I’ve had a coherent thought in days. That’s a bad thing for anyone, but for a writer it’s catastrophic. Writers are story tellers and story tellers are creative. What happens when the creativity dries up and there’s no inspiration to be found?

Write to Done has a great post on how to have ideas. Check out their seven steps to creativity and tell me: How do you inspire creativity?

Decisions, decisions, decisions

We all know the pain, frustration, and fear of failure from our own particular writing sins. I can freely admit that I think my biggest writing weakness is plot and story structure. I’ve struggled and worked on these and still am not happy with myself. And in my current WIP, I’m beyond worried that the choices I’ve made doom the novel and like a beached whale, the cumulative effect of those choices and my weaknesses as a writer will crush the story under its own weight.

Write It Sideways has an interesting post on six fiction writing weaknesses and their quick fixes.

Does anyone else feel like this? What do you consider to be your own writing weaknesses? What do you do/have you done to help fix them?

What were you thinking?

Rejection is a part of life, possibly more for writers than some others. It's part and parcel of the process. But for everyone currently being overwhelmed by revisions and queries and critiques and anything else that carries the sting/possible sting of rejection, Jill Corcoran has an interesting post on famous authors and their famous/rude rejections.

How do you handle rejection/the fear of rejection?

Transitions

If I haven’t been commenting much or eloquently lately, my apologies. I haven’t been around much. And while I don’t normally talk much about personal things, I’m going to take this post to do just that.

You might remember my taking off for a weekend wedding in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. That trip was also a journey home to see my father-in-law. Not very long ago, he was diagnosed with cancer. He underwent chemo and radiation and when all was said and done, the doctors said he was cancer free.

That didn’t last long. When he got sick again, he was told that the cancer had spread and he was Stage 4. His timeline was 6-9 months. As it turns out, that was optimistic. About a month ago, my husband went with his mother and father to Mexico, where they had retired ten years ago, to sell their home and set their affairs in order.

My father-in-law got so sick down there my husband had to stay three extra days just to get him well enough to fly home. They took him to the hospital and were told his kidneys were failing. The weekend I went back for the wedding, I took my kids back to say good-bye to their grandfather.

I went from sitting in the oppressive grief of a house waiting for death to a wedding in Holy Name Cathedral, a majestic building, to an elegant restaurant overlooking the lake and sailboats back to sitting in a room listening to my father-in-law laboring to breathe.

We came back late on Sunday. Early on Tuesday, he died, and last weekend we went back for the funeral.

In the 27 years since my in-laws embraced me as part of their family, they’ve treated me as one of their own. They love my children and have been generous, warm, and kind. I couldn’t have asked for better in-laws.

At the reception I met a friend’s brand new, month old baby. I remember the experience as surreal, the juxtaposition of life and death and the full circle of it all. And I thought about writing and how the experience of the last couple of weeks would shape me and my words.

We take what we know and through the alchemy of writing we create stories. Experience shapes us as people and writers. I am not the same in either capacity as I was last week. And while I grieve with my mother-in-law, I miss my father-in-law.

Rest in peace, David.

In the end

All around the blogosphere the talk has been about balance and burnout, slowing down, pushing through, stepping up, stepping back, going dark and unplugging, and all the various points of passage on our journey through real life as well as writers. Not spoken of as much as these points of place, is that almost mythological point in the journey known affectionately as the end. So in the spirit of Lilah’s Last Lines Blogfest coming up, I thought I’d share a post by Joe Moore over at The Kill Zone about endings. Check it out and let me know how you feel about endings.

What are your favorite kind? What do you hate? As a reader? As a writer? How do you feel when you get to the end of the piece you’re writing? Elated? Sad? Scared? Thinking of revision or the next project?

The long and winding road

We’ve been talking about burnout; blogging, writing, and otherwise lately. And sometimes about how non-writers don’t quite get what could possibly be so hard or draining about sitting down and writing. Plot Whisperer has a great post here about the stamina a writer needs for their journey. Check it out and tell me: What part of the process is most draining for you? What is the most difficult part, mentally or physically, of your writer’s journey? Is there a point where you know that if you’ve gotten that far, you’re going to make it to the end?

Layer up!

Behler Blog has a great post on layers in story telling and where/what/when plot begins. While I’m a fan of a spare story telling style, I really believe that whether a writer tells their story with an economy of words or creates a lush verbal landscape, I’ve always been a big fan of layers in what I read and write and in storytelling in general.

So as I struggle with outlining my plot I wondered about some things. Are your layers like your characters? I mean, characters sometimes jump up and demand that you do something totally different than what you had planned. Do you have all the layers in your story in hand or in your mind when you start writing, or do your layers develop as you go deeper into your character’s heads and your plot-lines?

You Want Me to Do What?

I will gleefully admit that for most of my writing life I have been a pantser. I’ve only recently given serious thought and any effort to exploring the joys of outlining. I blame all the pretty pictures of grids floating around my little corner of the universe.

And it’s not a pretty, easy fit for me. I think that’s because I’m a character driven writer and storyteller and plot is not my first and foremost love. So I’m finding it a little difficult to quantify my major plot threads at the beginning of the process. Plot Whisperer has a great post on plot-lines, plot writing, plot planners, and one writer’s pre-work and success story.

Has anyone converted recently to outlining from pantsing? Is that working for you? Thinking of going back? If you outline, do you know the entire plot and all the plot-lines before going into your actual writing?

The space between

With all the talk here this week about cutting words and laser focused editing and concise writing, it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of writing and its process, and to lose sight of the bigger picture.

And it’s easy to lose your balance and your way in the process.

Elizabeth Spann Craig has a great post over at Mystery Writing is Murder about the big picture. Check it out. Then tell me: How do you maintain your balance as you negotiate the space between the overall big picture and the myriad small ones that create the big one?

Wait just a minute.

We all do it. We all feel bad about it. And then we do it some more. It’s a vicious cycle. And with the arrival of Spring and Sun in our lives, some of us use that energy to kick our writing into high gear. But there are some of us who feel the pull of warm weather and the rebirth of green taking us outside and dragging us further into our procrastinating writerly ways. Procrastinating Writers has an interesting post here about how to overcome procrastination.

So my question to you is this. Have you tried any of these fixes? Will you? What do you do to kick your procrastinating self into gear?

Stop and Stare

As many of us are working out the kinks in or starting our current WIPS and struggling with various stages of organization, writers block, and actual writing, Plot Whisper gives us a really good look at why writers get stuck. Check it out and then tell me:

What’s the biggest thing that hangs you up as a writer? Is it plot or your lack thereof? Characters that refuse to behave or won’t speak to you? Your own self-criticism? Any or all of the above?

Words of Wisdom

It seems a lot of us lately are feeling the revision blues. It’s totally understandable. Most of us feel all of that red/purple/pink/orange/green ink spilled all over our hard-crafted words like a kick to the head or the gut.

There’s been some talk about who makes the best CPs, friends or non-friends, and how critique should be presented so that it is helpful and not hurtful. But no matter who gives it or how it’s coated, no matter how much we know it’s coming and that our words will be better for it, the expected blow does not hurt less.

But for all that we know it’s a part of our journey, our success at revision lies in how we handle that outside assessment of our work. How we process the suggestions given us. C.J. Redwine over at The Last Word had an awesome post about The Art of Revision. Check it out and tell me what you think.

How do you handle revisions?

Thinky thoughts

Given the discussion that's been going around, I thought Rachelle Gardner had a lovely guest post about being kinder to yourself as a writer. Go check it out.

Another discussion going around is the one over at the Literary Lab about what makes a good story and the need for a good idea to do so.

Writing is a long haul exercise. A long term investment of yourself in words and craft even if you write short stories or flash fiction. And over the long haul, a story will take on a life of its own. Plot affects characters; how characters react drives plot.

What I think is imperative here, what needs to be present for the story to work, is honesty. And respect. For your craft, your words, your characters, your story, your readers.

For your good idea. Wherever that idea takes you.

And after all that pontificating by me, here's two hundred words of flash fiction.
--------------------
She shivers hard, wraps her arms around her middle.

It doesn’t help.

She kicks out her legs; stares at the tiny, bare feet in front of her.

The door cracks open. She drops her feet.

The gap widens; she’s not alone in the room anymore.

He drops onto the stool, rolls to the desk.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

If there’s anything she’s sure of in this life, it’s that she doesn’t want this.

“I’m nobody’s mother.”

“A simple yes or no will do.”

There’s no room in her life for this.

“Yes.”

A long forefinger taps the file; he doesn’t bother looking at her. “The father isn’t…”

“Relevant.” Her eyes are as flat as her voice.

“Here?”

“Should he be?”

“Does he know?”

A glass-edged smile slashes her lips. “Does he care?”

No, he doesn’t. And she doesn’t need what he hasn’t got; doesn’t need the weight of his disinterest or pity.

She doesn’t need anything small and needy weighing her down.

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone, my…friend is waiting.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“Can we just get this over with?”

He pushes back, leverages himself to his feet. “I’ll get my assistant.”