Potpourri to Start 2013

So it’s been awhile. Between the holidays, houseguests, and a mystery illness during the majority of December, I haven’t had a whole lot of energy for the blog. But it’s a new year and a new beginning for all things writerly.

A few announcements to get me caught up:

• First, applications are now being accepted for Taos Toolbox 2013. I found it to be a great experience and made a lot of writer friends through it. So if you want to take your craft to the next level, expand your network, and spend two weeks in the mountains of northern New Mexico, get your application in. 

• I’m now reading slush for Masque Books, Prime Books’s new digital imprint. So if you have a great speculative story, check out the submission guidelines and send it in! 


• Duotrope is no more—at least not in a format I can support since they now charge for access to the most useful parts of the site. This is disappointing, as I was a heavy user and proponent of the site, but such is life. If you are looking for a Duotrope alternative, check out THIS POST for your options. Happy subbing! 


• Finally, be sure to check out L. Blankenship’s Kickstarter for the continuation of her hard fantasy romance series. After successfully funding Disciple, Part I, you can pre-order Part II. I was one of L.’s betas on this project, and I highly recommend it! Samples are available through the Kickstarter page. 

I hope 2013 is off to a fabulous start for all of you. Happy writing!

Happy Holidays!

In case the world ends tomorrow, I wanted to reach out to my readers one last time. Thank you for your interest in my ramblings on writing, for your comments and tweets, and for making this whole writing thing less lonely.

If the world doesn’t end tomorrow—and I’m planning on it sticking around a bit longer—then I hope you have a wonderful holiday season with you and yours, however you celebrate.

I’m taking a break for the rest of the month. See you in the New Year (fingers crossed)!

Assumptions, part deux

Last week, I talked about reader assumptions and how the writer can use them to their advantage in their stories. They’re great for worldbuilding shorthand and reveals and revelations, so long as you don’t thoroughly confuse your reader in the process. And I should also say, it can take time to get a bead on what readers think as they progress through a story. Experience will help guide your intuition, along with really awesome trusted readers.

But today, I want to talk about a different kind of assumption. The assumptions we writers make every time we sit down and, well, write.

Think back on when you first started writing. Did you think it would be easy? Did you think if your story had a beginning, middle, and end, it was bound to be good?

As you continued to write, did you assume that if you never stopped, that would somehow translate into success? What about if you wrote a good story/book and assumed it would sell even if there wasn’t a ready market for it? After all, we are told to write the book of our hearts, regardless of what the market demands… Did you ever assume you could get away with breaking the rules because you are you?

Alas, in writing there is no easy button.

Now, some of these assumptions may smack of naiveté now, but I guarantee you those assumptions were helping you to do one of two things: 1) Stay motivated – those dreams of making it big fuel us all at one time or another, and 2) Finish the story – after all, if you don’t make it to the end, it doesn’t matter how well you can write.

In the post Different Stages, Different Questions awhile back, I talked about how writers operate at different stages of writing experience, and the questions that guide their efforts. I also think the assumptions we carry with us at different points in our lives also have a formative effect on our work.

After all, if you don’t know any better, those assumptions are all you have to navigate the writing process. And they can be useful, except when you reach a point where they stop being helpful and start being a hindrance.

I want to point you to a series of posts on The Cockeyed Caravan blog by screenwriter Matt Bird (and if you haven’t visited this blog, you are missing out). In the series, he talks about the more detrimental assumptions we writers make about process, craft, and careers, and discusses the actual reality we face. I know it’s a lot of links to click through, but I think you’ll agree that he’s spot on.

Prologue – General Misconceptions about Writing

Part 1 – Misconceptions about Concept 

Part 2 – Misconceptions about Character

Part 3 – Misconceptions about Structure

Part 4 – Misconceptions about Scenework

Part 5 – Misconceptions about Dialogue

Part 6 – Misconceptions about Theme

Part 7 – Misconceptions about Tone

Part 8 – Misconceptions about Rewriting

Part 9 – Misconceptions about Writing Careers

Happy writing! (And retooling your own assumptions about writing!)

You Know What Happens When You Assume Things…

Assumptions sometimes get a bad rap. A lot of times they make an ass out of you and me, but that’s often only in hindsight. In fact, I’d posit assumptions are essential to living, and, along with that, writing.

After all, an assumption is made based on the information you have on hand or experiences you’ve acquired and can extrapolate from. For example, deciding what to wear based on a glance out the window—I assume I won’t need a rain jacket because the sun is out. Or I assume I can make cream of cauliflower soup because I’ve made cream of broccoli soup in the past.

The assumptions we make are based on our accrued knowledge. So we accrue knowledge to survive, but that doesn’t mean that knowledge is always enough to navigate our world. Mistakes do happen, and that’s actually a good thing for writers.

As people read our stories and novels, they are interpreting our words and trying to make sense of the world we’ve presented them with. To do this, they must make assumptions. For example, if I don’t point out that the sky is green in my story and people get around by walking on their hands, my readers will assume the sky is blue and people walk like normal.

So if on page 30 I suddenly point out that the sky in my world is actually green, that forces the reader to stop and reevaluate what I’ve told them. This can be a bad thing when it throws the reader out of the story. But for some story elements, particularly reveals, this can be a neat trick and make your reader even more invested in figuring out your story as they try to fit the pieces together into a cohesive whole.

"But what does it all mean?"

I like to do this particularly at the opening of a story, where I’m trying to hook a reader’s interest by slowly dealing out world details. Readers will make assumptions based on what is mentioned and/or described, along with what isn’t. And depending on how those details complement one another or how they disrupt one another, my reader will make assumptions about the larger story world that can potentially make the worldbuilding easier on me.

As writers, we should all be relying on a reader’s assumption about genre conventions when crafting our stories except when those conventions interfere with the story we’re writing. In other words, we should be using these assumptions as world building shorthand except when they get in the way. Big deviations, ones that will just cause more confusion than not, however, should probably be addressed as soon as possible so you don’t disorient the reader.

But for me, I like to use reader assumptions and turn them on their head sometimes. As James Killick discusses in Reveals and Revelations,

If you break it down, there are only really two types of revelation that can be made within a story – revelations about the story and revelations about character. The differences should be fairly self-explanatory – a revelation about the story is when something is revealed outside of character – who the murderer is, who is sleeping with the heroine's husband. Character revelation is when something is revealed about character – a hidden trait, an unrealised dream, a hitherto misinterpreted desire.

And both of these (when successful) work because the author has leveraged the reader’s assumptions about the story. The trick is setting them up (which is another post entirely :P).

As readers, we make all kinds of assumptions based on what’s presented to us by the author, as well as unconsciously, based on our own personal and cultural biases. Remember the social media explosion when peoplewere surprised that Rue was black in the movie version of The Hunger Games? That was attributed to a tendency of assumed whiteness where readers assume literary characters are white unless told otherwise. In fact, as The Hunger Games demonstrated, those details stating otherwise can be easily overlooked in a culture of assumed whiteness (and it must be said, poor literacy skills).

So what does that mean for the writer? Well, I think in some ways it’s our duty to engage with these assumptions and draw attention to them by disrupting them in unique ways without sacrificing story. Particularly the more insidious ones related to gender and race and power (and Juliette Wade has a great post on this subject).

But ultimately playing with readers’ assumptions is just another tool in your toolbox. So use it wisely.

Rebuilding Momentum

I’ve been a bit of a slacker lately. At least as far as my blog goes. I haven’t been able to post for the last couple of weeks. In fact this place would be a ghost town if I didn’t have comments from spammers to keep me company. Thanks, guys. Or, umm, bots.

But although the blog may not show it, I’ve been rather busy this last couple of months. Lots of writing going on, and there’s also been an uptick in my critiquing responsibilities. Then I had family in town for Thanksgiving. I basically spent the week before the holiday cooking and cleaning like a madwoman and the week of trying to stay sane. I survived, but just barely.

And now? Now, it’s back to the writing routine and my much-abused blog. I’ll be dusting off the cobwebs so to speak these coming weeks, so please bear with me.

In the meantime, here are some helpful links to help you stay productive:

• Necessary Tasks Doesn’t Mean Productive Ones by the Daring Novelist
• When Bad Things Happen to Productive People from 99u
• 10 Tips for a Productive Writing Day by the Blood Red Pencil
• How to be Productive and Still Get 8 Hours Sleep from Work Awesome
• Adapting your writing routine for the holidays and, in a related way, kids’ summer vacations,  both by Elizabeth Spann Craig

Happy writing, and see you next Wednesday!

Nano Fail

So I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year. I can hear your collective gasps.

I am very aware of all the benefits to participating in National Novel Writing Month: the motivation to get words down, the camaraderie of knowing you and all your best writing buds are typing away, the assurance that it’s ok if your draft sucks since that’s what first drafts are for.

But the guilt of not making daily quotas and the inevitable burnout that always results from going full tilt don’t appeal to me, especially given the timing for me this year.

Word Count Guilt

For the past two years, I’ve participated in Nano. I’ve never “won,” but logged 20k the first year, closer to 30 the second. And I considered those victories. But the 1,700 words a day wasn’t sustainable. At least for me.

On a good day 2k is about my limit. On a really good day, 3.5k is possible. But that usually means I’m way over-caffeinated, my hand aches from writing so much, and my legs have fallen asleep from sitting so long. Not exactly the balance I seek in my writing life.

After a big writing day, I usually take a break. But during Nano, the pressure to “catch up” takes over. And while it might be good to understand just how far you can push yourself, to motivate you in the future, you eventually have to worry about…

Burnout

We’ve all heard the horror stories, related to Nano and other publishing deadlines. Burnout’s no fun. It can leave your brain a pile of goo and have you questioning your resolve. And as far as I’m concerned, anything that makes you doubt your decision to write is not a good thing.

Plus, with the projects I’m working on, the goals I want to reach with them, I really can’t afford the time off to manage burnout symptoms.  Besides, I believe you should be focused on writing everyday, not just once a year, as outlined in the NaNoWriMo No post from Writer Unboxed. Slow and steady, wins the race… (at least I hope!)

Timing

Despite my (lack of) progress in Nano’s past, I have used November as a good time to jumpstart a new project or restructure an old one. But this fall, I started another project, wrote a skeletal draft, and am now fine-tuning things. The WIP is not in typical Nano shape, and I’m in too deep to consider starting one that is. So the timing just didn’t work out this year. For me.

That doesn’t mean NaNoWriMo isn’t a worthy goal for those of you forging on. But I’m sitting this one out, and hopefully I’ll be able to join in next year!

Happy writing!

How Do You Critique?

The last couple of weeks (and maybe into the next) I’ve been buried in critiques. Hence this slightly delayed post. I’m not complaining, mind you, but the volume recently—the result a confluence of chance—has forced me to evaluate my process in between all my edits, insertions, and comments.

Some observations:

I read everything. For me, critiquing is less about the genre or subject matter and more about supporting the writer behind the project.

I firmly believe there is a level of trust required for exchanging work. And that mutual respect means doing my best to evaluate the work I agree to critique, regardless of what it is, as I would hope others would do for me. It’s too early for me to be trapped in a particular genre, and I’m always eternally grateful that my CPs and trusted readers are usually game to crit whatever I send their way.

Part of this is because I’ve spent a lot of time in non-genre specific writing groups. In fact, one of the more successful groups I’ve been a part of has members writing in completely different genres—poetry, alt lit, women’s fiction, and then there’s me. All of us have good bs detectors and strong writing chops, which definitely helps. Plus having this exposure also keeps me from getting tunnel vision from the particular genre/style I’m writing in.

If a fellow writer thinks they’ll benefit from an honest reader reaction from me, I’m happy to support them. Karma is important, and I know I've benefited from the writer connections I've made. That’s not to say if they hand me a mystery I’ll be thrilled. But I’ll do my best to critique it, with the caveat that I’m not as well-versed in this genre as I am others.

I usually have to read a piece twice before I’m ready to critique.

This is time consuming, yes. That has become abundantly clear these last couple of weeks. BUT, it’s something I’ve made peace with. Mostly because my own standards of quality demand it.

Reading the piece the first time, I’m trying to get a general feel for the story, understand how all the different elements work as a whole. I might make some copy edits in the first round, but really I’m just reading for story.

This is a tremendous help when it comes time to offer my comments on the second pass. That’s when I decide what are real issues that need to be dealt with to support an author’s story intentions. I believe I have to understand the macro story elements into order to comment on the micro-level ones (outside of grammar).

My critique style has evolved as I’ve taken strides with my craft.

What this essentially means is that early on, I was overly focused with style and micro level issues. If someone wrote a line in a way I wouldn’t, I’d offer my suggestions for changing it. I was also overly concerned with "the rules" and more than happy to say "You're doing it wrong!" because the craft books said so. I won't say I was a Craft Nazi, one of the Writerly Types to Avoid, but it took time for me to digest all that advice so I could apply it in more constructive ways.

But after a number of critiques, after reading a variety of work, I’ve been exposed to a lot of different ways of doing things. And I've realized with all the do's and don'ts out there, all that matters is whether a particular technique is effective in a particular story context. That's it.

So I’ve adopted a more flexible live and let live policy. I’ll still point out awkward phrasings or unsuccessful techniques, but I’ve come to realize that just because someone doesn’t write something exactly the way I would doesn’t make it wrong. It just makes it different, and that’s ok. And that frees up more of my mental space for addressing more substantive story issues.

I rarely say no to requests to exchange work, but the time may be nigh to change that.

For so long, I was too scared to share my work. Then, when I got less scared, I had trouble finding people to share it with. I talked about this progression in my post The Critique Mindset a while back.

Over time, I’ve collected a formidable group of trusted writer friends: local writers, online writers, and my writer colleagues from Taos. For every person I can rely on for critiques, they must be able to rely on me. And as the last weeks have shown me, I’m near my limit, if I still want to be producing my own work at a pace that doesn’t make me cranky. (Hint, I'm cranky this week.)

So while I’m a huge proponent for exchanging work for critique, all things in moderation. And maybe it’s time to take my own advice.

***

Happy Nanoing for those participating! Happy writing for the rest of us! And only good thoughts for our friends on the east coast!