Scared to Miss

Being home for Christmas and January has not, so far, been very productive. Though holiday busyness has wound down, it doesn't look like I can plan for every day to be a writing day. Now, I get to decide whether to bemoan the fact that I don't have time perfect for writing, or I can write anyway.

I've given the first ten chapters of  Void to a few people for feedback. One early responder has informed me that it does not, in fact, suck. This is encouragement enough to face my month-and-half distant deadline with defiance. Fourteen more chapters, ha! You don't scare me, February 15th.

But it does. Not just the still-present possibility that I could fail my deadline, but giving everything else up to it. It is important to take care of the house for my parents because they're at work all day and I am not. It is important to work out with my sister because I don't spend much time with her. Sometimes, it is needful to take a break and catch up on a book or favorite blog to recharge ideas.

Noveling isn't my only project. I want to rescue other parts of my life that have fallen by the wayside. Writing letters used to be important to me; I'm working to make it so again. Blogging is both a creative outlet and a discipline; thus, I've resolved to post every Sunday. Being away from school has resulted in squeezing Bible reading into the cracks because it doesn't "feel routine" anymore, but lack of routine is a terrible excuse when I've been relieved of school responsibilities for a month. If I don't take time to be with God, it's certainly not the universe's fault.

What will happen if I do not submit Void to Tor by February 15th? Nothing. I will still have most of a finished story. I'll still have friends and family who care about me and support me in their own ways. Maybe I'll finish by the 17th, or the 1st of March. Maybe it will be a better story if I wait and revise that long. But my goal is still possible. And I have to remember that the last-minute deadline rush is something I'm very good at.

Am I scared? Yes. Scared to miss my deadline and a bunch of other things. It's not some monstrous fear I must remove from my path. It's a smaller fear, one that's not so much an obstacle as a companion. It might even help me to grow.

Stuck

I don't like the term writer's block. It's not just that it sounds like a nasty thing for us writers, which it is. Mostly it's frustrating because I feel like writer's block is my fault. Am I too uncreative, too moody, too caught up in "the muse" that I can't write whenever I want to? Not usually. Occasionally, however, I simply get stuck because of story reasons.

One thing that can really drag a novel down -- or help it fly -- is the pacing. This causes that, a plot point moves us forward, there's some reaction after this scene to absorb previous action, ebb and flow, purposeful movement. Some writers are masters at this, whether by instinct or training. I like to think it's something I'm tuned to -- I love to pay attention to pacing in novels -- but I definitely don't have the mastery I need to execute it properly.

Is the voice in my head that's telling me there's something wrong with this chapter responding to my sense for pacing? Or is it some other problem with the story entirely? Is it just the voice of self-consciousness and self-criticism that opposes anyone who takes on a creative project? Or am I not being dedicated enough?

Right now, I'm looking at some of the bigger, structural elements of the story. I'm finding that the minor characters I put in have to be there, but need to serve a greater purpose by the end. I have a plot point with tension that needs to emerge in a less contrived way. I need to make the causes leading up to it make better sense, and I have to make an escape seem surprising, yet inevitable.

Oh, chapter five, you needy document.

And chapter five comes pretty early. It's like a foundation for the story -- if I screw up the early parts, the later parts aren't going to have anything sound to stand on.

So I take a break to complain, define my problems for the Internet to see, and move on. What am I doing here? I've got revising to do.

Deadlines are Magic

A month and a half after I finished writing it, I've finally completed a readthrough of my current manuscript for Void. At first, I wanted to take a break and step back from it, which is good for writing. It gives you perspective so you can come back to the story with sharper eyes. Still... I should have finished this a while ago. I have self-imposed deadlines, after all.

Deadlines... about those. The big, scary, far-off one is February 15th, my 20th birthday. That is the day I will send a completed manuscript to a publisher. (I'm hoping Tor, but I need to do some research first.) However, to get to that point, I'll need to set myself some smaller, but still challenging ones. Good thing deadlines are magic.

I think I can give myself until the beginning of December to work over what I have and get my story ready for alpha readers. At the very latest, I could let it slip till Christmas break. This is when I'll beg writing and story-savvy friends to tear apart all my words and tell me what's wrong with them, and pray they won't tear out my heart in the process. I may actually have to limit myself on the number of people I have read it, though, just to make sure the input is focused and I can handle all of it. If you're reading this and are interested, please let me know.

In the meantime, I will be rewriting. Considering the quality of the draft I just read, the time frame I have to work with is mildly terrifying. This is what you get for procrastinating, I suppose. And considering that this is my first time taking a novel to this level in the editing process (my first time finishing a novel-length second draft), there might be better ways to go about it. Like, doing better research before starting. Right now, I have to come up with a semi-plausible-sounding way to modify a dying nuclear generator so as to set off an EMP, as well as consider its ramifications. I have to make the mechanics of character development, dramatic reveals, and the operations of a secret underground society go smoothly and believably. And I have to fix big glaring mistakes (oh, yeah, I forgot that character existed...) and find all the tiny, sneaky ones.

I will be spending the month of January at home, possibly working, but it will also be my time to work on the issues my early readers find and polish all the words. NaNoWriMo has proved to me that I can spend an entire month focused on a story; this January, I'll see if I can finish one instead of start it.

Then I'll have two weeks in February to make sure I'm happy with everything before this challenge I gave myself over half a year ago is over. (Yeah, over half a year. Again, procrastination.)

Am I scared? Yes. Can I do it? I'm certain. Tight deadlines can be awful, but they're also the reason I've managed to write first drafts for three different 50,000-word novels in the first place while having rehearsal every night (November tends to be a heavy month for theater), as well as a 60,000-word second draft. These next four months might be terrible (especially if I decide to be insane and do NaNoWriMo again), but I can do it.

Why? Because I love this story. It's the reason I wrote it in the first place.

Heaven help me. Bye for now -- I've got work to do.

Outlining... sort of

After resolving to outline my story, I decided it was time to do some research and reviewing.

I turned to one of my favorite writing resources -- Writing Excuses. It's a fifteen-minute (or eighteen-minute... or twenty-minute) podcast by writers Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler, the guy behind my favorite webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. Each 'cast focuses on some aspect of story writing. I picked out some helpful episodes and got to listening. I also perused Dan Well's blog, because I remembered there had once been something on there about plot structure.

That led me to a really cool series of videos from a presentation he did on the structuring system he uses. So far, this has been my most helpful tool. Now I have beginnings and endings and midpoints and plot turns for the major character's arcs and the biggest plotline of the story. So, basically, an outline.

The reason I dislike outlines is from some unsubstantiated-but-still-strong belief that as a creative person, I don't need an outline. Obviously my thoughts and ideas are much too free and can't be constrained by such a rigid system.

This is stupid because I've never really used an outline before.

And I still don't think I can do a precise outline like other writers do -- chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene organization. Once I get to the point where I can picture it like that, I don't think I'll need an outline anymore. But right now I have a framework on which I hope I can start building my story.

But that's not the same thing as starting.

Creative Projects/Scrivener Review

Home for the holidays means lots of relaxing time for me. I've been in a comfortable sleepy haze which has mostly been spent playing Mario Kart with my brother and visiting friends. Still, I've made room for ocarina practice and finished an ongoing art project. Before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an artist. Interestingly, both these prospective professions were sparked by excellent teachers.

Now I have professors, and though I admire many of them, I'm largely on my own to decide what to do with my career. I'm supposed to be an adult now, after all. I love practicing music. I love drawing. And I love writing. Though I don't doubt that I want to be a writer, I'm starting to worry that my other creative projects might be taking my attention away from writing. It's something I need to practice more than music. It's something for which I need to make long-term goals.

Over my extended family Christmas, I talked to my NaNoWriMo-loving cousin about my novel. It made me realize just how much I love the ideas in my story. Since then, I've been thinking "Hm. I really need to start working on revision." But thinking isn't doing.

Last month, I downloaded the free trial of Scrivener, writing software aimed at breaking down big projects into small pieces. Since the tutorial takes about two hours, I didn't manage to get through it until we started the long drive back to Iowa. Scrivener is a major sponsor of NaNoWriMo, and one of the "winner goodies," at least in past years, is a discount on the software, which is already cheaper for students. My conclusion after going through it was that I'm not ready for Scrivener yet. I'm not at the point in revising where I can start writing scene-by-scene. But once I am ready, I'm getting it.

Scrivener has a ton of features useful for different styles of writing. One writer probably won't use all of them, but there's something for everybody. You can tag different sections by topic or character and then pull out only those sections. You can outline. You can attach different documents to notecards that contain summaries or to-do lists and see what work you have left to do at a glance. You can have documents inside folders which themselves contain text. If you're creative, you can use any number of the tools to work for you. For me, I'd probably have separate documents for all the major scenes in the outline view and then have to-do lists for each of the scenes in the notecard view. I'm particularly intrigued by the ability to track different sections by topics, keywords, or characters -- beasically, whatever you want to tag.

Or you can keep it simple. Outline, write scene-by-scene. Breaking it down is really what it's all about. It appears flexible enough to work not just for novels, but research papers, nonfiction, and other lengthy writing projects.

The only thing I was disappointed in was that the feature for taking notes on different documents just wasn't big or flexible enough for me, which is why I take written notes anyway when typing a story. I need the freedom to write all over the page, draw arrows to things and underline things without having to think about dragging boxes around or formatting. Having to do this by hand is okay by me, though.

If you're interested, I recommend getting the free trial and running the tutorial; after going through it, you'll know what features are good for you and whether or not you want to give it a try for real.

But like I said, I'm not there yet. Today is the day I start revising. I'm reading my novel through for the first time and taking notes on what needs to be done. I'll see what I need to do from there.

Ocarina Christmas Carol 1

As promised, here's my first Christmas song on my ocarina.

Even though it's pretty easy, I could still tell I was improving as I practiced. When I walked back from the music building where I recorded it, the ocarina came off its neck strap and fell on the sidewalk. I was momentarily terrified, but the glaze only chipped a bit. Thank goodness it's sturdy!

I haven't really done a post about writing in a while. I'm trying to get started on revising this year's NaNovel, which is something I've never done before. Last summer I gave a halfhearted attempt at revising last year's NaNovel, and I didn't get very far. Right now, I'm testing out Scrivener, some pretty interesting writing software I think might work for me. Expect posts on that soon. In the meantime, I wish you a merry Christmas!