First Anniversary!

I’ve been exploring productivity on these pages for a full year now, and I'm still having fun. From the beginning, I knew that I would cover the basics – tips on preparation, drafting, and rewriting. More themes emerged, based primarily on feedback and requests, including dealing with distractions, collaboration, and refilling the well.

Bigger Stories and Writing Tools took on lives of their own – leading to courses, as well as multiple posts.

Gwen Hernandez deserves special mention. Her guest post on Scrivener accounts for about one in seven of my pageviews and continues to bring me new readers.

Thanks also to the many writers who have been featured in Every Other Friday interviews:

Alex Benedict, RC Bonitz, Gerri Brousseau, Dani Collins, Eileen Cook, TL Costa, Barry Crimmins, Jennifer Fusco, Kate George, Kourtney Heintz, Kristan Higgins, Sara Humphreys, Marian Lanouette, Katy Lee, MH Mead, Melanie R Meadors, Carter Phipps, Stephanie Queen, PJ Sharon, Joy Smith, Doug Solter, Tawny Weber, Casey Wyatt, and Bob Zaslow.

And, of course, thanks to all readers, especially those who leave comments.

Believe it or not, I have more to say on the themes that have carried the blog this far. More authors have agreed to be interviewed, and I hope to have more guest posts. And I’m curious about new ways to become more productive: Helpful forms and questionnaires, useful tropes, journaling help, crit groups, mentors, and more. Of course, I welcome suggestions on new topics or deeper explorations of old themes.

For those who geek out on numbers, here are a few statistics:

151 Posts

Over 26,000 pageviews, with 4,600 in the last month

Pageviews for almost 100 countries

Top Ten Posts

1. Guest Post - Write Faster with Scrivener (Gwen Hernandez)

2. Plotting for Pantsers 2: Build your storytelling muscles

3. NaNoWriMo Success 2 - Fast Drafting

4. Bigger 4 - Creating Endings That Buzz

5. Six Ideas on How to Prepare to Write Productively

6. Writing Prep 5 - Distraction Number One, Husband Interruptus

7. Rewrite 8 – Stronger Verbs for Better Stories

8. Every Other Friday - T.L. Costa Interview

9. Do You Listen to Music When You Write?

10. Draft 9 - Let's Get Physical

Thanks again. I’m having a great time, and I hope you are, too.

Every Other Friday - Alex Benedict

Alex Benedict is the young adult author of fantasy fiction with a romantic twist. Her "Broken Fins" series starter, SO DOWN I FALL is a dark re-imagining of THE LITTLE MERMAID.

In another life, Alex writes historical romance under the pen name Alexandra Benedict. Her work has received critical acclaim from Booklist and a rare and coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly. Romantic Times awarded her a "Top Pick" review. All of Alexandra's historical novels are translated into various languages. 

To learn more, visit: www.AlexBenedict.ca

Tell me about SO DOWN I FALL.
SO DOWN I FALL is a contemporary re-imagining of the classic fairytale THE LITTLE MERMAID. In it, sixteen-year-old Grace attempts suicide after the death of her beloved mother, only to be rescued by a mysterious young man: Adam ... a merman now in human form. Adam is also on the run from his abusive father, the Sea King, and together he and Grace must conquer their emotional demons.

What drove you to write SO DOWN I FALL? Who did you write it for?
I was originally in the process of writing a historical romance, when I had a vivid dream about a merman dying in the sea, clutching a boulder, turning into the foam on the ocean because a human girl had not returned his love in time to save his life. When I awoke, I set to work on the first draft of SO DOWN I FALL. That was in spring 2010. This wasn’t my first experience with “dream” writing. Like in the past, the imagery of the merman was so powerful, I felt I was meant to write the story. The tale is intended for teens, but I’ve received a lot of fan mail from adults, so it’s really for all ages.


What were your biggest obstacles?
The biggest obstacle was creating the heroine’s voice. This was my first attempt at first person narrative, contemporary teen fiction. Previously I had written in third person, historicals, and adult main characters. But as I mentioned above, I felt I was meant to write the story even though it was so far away from my comfort zone.

I must have re-written the first three chapters a dozen times in an attempt to capture Grace’s authentic voice. My historical roots were showing with tags that sounded dated and very much unlike a teenager. I really had to work hard to push aside my experience as a historical writer and start from scratch. In other words, learning to write all over again. With each submission--and rejection--from editors, I received valuable feedback that helped my re-shape my characters.

I also hired an editor to go over the first three chapters. She was an experienced editor and young adult author herself, so her help was invaluable. It took almost two years (I kid you not) to complete the first three chapters to my satisfaction. Once I had truly captured Grace’s voice, I completed the rest of the book in about six weeks.

Bigger 17 - Shocking revelations

Almost all stories depend upon uncovering information that is hidden in some way. The obvious example is when the killer is revealed in a mystery story. In a single moment, the pieces come together for the reader, the detective demonstrates his or her brilliance, the culprit get the blame, and the innocent suspects are let off the hook. (A few readers may have guessed who the killer is before the reveal, but, we hope, not by too much.)

Of course, if it is not done well, the pieces might not come together or the answer might be so obvious it is disappointing. A revelation that is obvious is not shocking and one that doesn’t fit the evidence or leaves too many loose ends isn’t fair to readers. So we already have two important criteria: fairness and astonishment (or at least an element of the unexpected).  

Another genre that has revelations as essential is romantic comedy. These depend on a secret (usually a lie) by one of the two lovers. It has its own consequences, but it also keeps the lovers from coming together fully.

Notice that the romantic comedy revelation, which usually comes near the end of the story, is different in some ways from the mystery revelation. Readers/audience members not only know it early on in the story, they MUST know it early on. This creates irony and tension. It makes bizarre behaviors credible.

Tootsie provides a great example. The lie Michael (as Dorothy) is living – pretending to be woman makes him unavailable to his heterosexual target of affection for Julie. And, to protect his identity, it puts him into bed with Sandy (a betrayal) and into the arms of Julie’s dad. It’s a lot of fun, and the revelation sets off fireworks, but notice two other important criteria: the point of view (who the revelation shocks) must be interesting and the secret revealed must be consequential, even life changing, to the protagonist. In Tootsie, Julie is shocked and so are Michael’s coworkers. This ties to the consequences, where love and livelihood are both threatened by the revelation.

Notice that revelations, especially shocking ones, are key ingredients of major plot points. Smaller reveals can be part of smaller turns, and, to an extent, each bit of evidence gathered in a mystery is a revelation.

Revelations, of course, are not restricted to mysteries and romantic comedies. Think of how science fiction and fantasy stories disclose facts and relevant details about their worlds to create a sense of wonder. And even a drama like Death of a Salesman, which is grounded in the real world (sometimes this is called straight or mimetic fiction), builds emotion by gradually revealing family secrets and the pain it has engendered in the characters.

It is fair to ask why secrets are kept from readers. A police report or a medical diagnosis or a news story (inverted pyramid) or even a recipe puts the facts out there right away. In reporting, failing to do so is a sin called “burying the lead.” But none of these genres is intended to create emotion (though they may). Fiction always seeks to engage the hearts as well as the minds of the readers. And, while withholding facts may be a disaster in a police report, readers of fiction expect us to withhold or hide facts. There is an agreement between writers and readers. I will tell you lies that deliver truths and you will suspend disbelief willingly.

Truth – it’s the ultimate revelation.

Every Other Friday - Eileen Cook

Eileen Cook is a multi-published author with her novels appearing in eight different languages and optioned for film and TV. She spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer.  Her latest release, THE ALMOST TRUTH, came out in December 2012.

You can read more about Eileen, her books, and the things that strike her as funny at www.eileencook.com.  Eileen lives in Vancouver with her husband and two dogs and no longer wishes to be anyone or anywhere else.

Tell me about THE ALMOST TRUTH.
My most recent book is THE ALMOST TRUTH.  It's the story of Sadie, a teenage con-artist. When she suddenly loses all her college money she knows she has to pull the ultimate scam if she's going to be able to escape the small town island life she hates.  When she notices that she looks like the age enhanced photo on a missing child poster, she thinks she's found the perfect con- until she begins to suspect she may actually be the missing girl.

What drove you to write THE ALMOST TRUTH? Who did you write it for?
I rarely can remember where the idea for a book begins, but this book is different.  I was riding on the ferry and saw a missing poster. I was looking at the age enhanced photo and it occurred to me how odd it would be if you looked like that picture. In that instant the idea snapped into my head and I rushed back to my seat to write it down.  I find all my books deal in some way with a character's search for their identity.  One of the hardest things to do in life is decide who you want to be- not who others want you to be- but who you want to become.

What were your biggest obstacles?
I am lucky in that I'm not someone who finds writing hard.  I love the creative process and the chance to "make things up" all day long.  However, no matter how well a book is going there is always a moment that I lose faith in the story.  It most often happens around the 3/4 mark.  It suddenly occurs to me that the story isn't working at all. The characters stink. I have no idea how to make the ending work.  I have a moment of panic where I'm sure the entire book is going to have to be thrown away.  After a few books at least now I recognize that this is going to happen and manage to avoid panicking.  I remind myself that it doesn't have to be perfect, just finished. Once I have it done I can fix almost anything in the revision process.

What are your productivity tips?
I'm a huge fan of setting goals.  I set a weekly word count goal.  I tell myself if I get it all done in two days I could take the rest of the week off, or I can chip away it each day. It's easy to estimate- if a book is going to be 70,000 words and you can do 5,000 words a week you should be able to have a rough (and I do mean rough) draft in about four months.  Then it takes me usually another four months to revise the draft and make it work.

My other productivity hint is to turn off your email and Twitter account while you're writing.  It's so easy to be distracted, give yourself every advantage you can!

Here is the back of the book blurb:

From the author of Unraveling Isobel and The Education of Hailey Kendrick, a smart, romantic novel about a teenage con artist who might be in over her head.

Sadie can’t wait to get away from her backwards small town, her delusional mom, her jailbird dad, and the tiny trailer where she was raised…even though leaving those things behind also means leaving Brendan. Sadie wants a better life, and she has been working steadily toward it, one con at a time.
     But when Sadie’s mother wipes out Sadie’s savings, her escape plan is suddenly gone. She needs to come up with a lot of cash—and fast—or she’ll be stuck in this town forever.
     With Brendan’s help, she devises a plan—the ultimate con—to get the money. But the more lies Sadie spins, the more she starts falling for her own hoax…and perhaps for the wrong boy. Sadie wanted to change her life, but she wasn't prepared to have it flipped upside down by her own deception. With her future at stake and her heart on the line, suddenly it seems like she has a lot more than just money to lose....

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Bigger 16 - Making Your Tale Epic

What do you think of when you think of an epic tale? Characters and the great changes they go through, for sure. But you probably first mention the concept.

·      Jaws – Shark terrorizes coastal town.

·      Liar, Liar – Lawyer forced to tell truth.

·      Home Alone – Kid defends household singlehandedly.

·      Jurassic Park – Dinosaurs brought back to life in our time.

These are all good-sized concepts. They all are accessible. When I mention them, you know what I’m talking about. You “get it.” But a full concept, one you can really run with, requires more.  Being accessible is only one of five dimensions needed for a great premise. Let’s look at each in terms of Jurassic Park.

Accessible: People need to “get it” without a long explanation. Jurassic Park - Dinosaurs brought back to life in our time.

Surprising: A premise needs to reach beyond the mundane. Bringing life back from the past in itself does not create a big concept. Someone recently grew an “extinct” date palm from 3,000 year-old-seeds.  Not epic. In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are big. Literally. And they have captured our imaginations since childhood.

Emotional: All good stories need a heart. The Odyssey has a man trying to get home despite great challenges, but the heart of it for me (and what leads to a great ending) is his getting home to his wife. Without Penelope, it is not as epic. The park part of Jurassic Park ties it to Disneyland and other places families gather. And sure enough, people (including children) are in the park, and they are in jeopardy.

Question raising: Along the way from concept to full premise, the ideas should make people curious enough to ask questions. People will have a series of these that must be answered in the story or their expectations will not be met. When Blake Snyder talks about “The Promise of the Premise” in Save the Cat, this is what he is talking about. As a writer, the premise stage is a good time to explore this. In addition, there is an important question worth raising – the story question. What question will people a reader or an audience member look to see answered by the end? 

For Jurassic Park, there are a number of questions that come to mind (and, indeed are developed in the story). How will you feed these animals? How will you maintain control? How will you pay for such an enterprise? What are the legal concerns? Will the animals escape control?

Of course, the story question in Jurassic Park is will the characters we love survive?

Credible: You have to give people a chance to willingly suspend disbelief. Some people cannot abide fantasy and science fiction in any form. (Most men in the U.S. never read novels. They require nonfiction.) Some people require elegant world-building, like Lord of the Rings. For comic book fans, a spider bite might be sufficient. As for Jurassic Park…

Crichton provides an elaborate explanation involving blood-sucking insects, amber, DNA, and frogs. The movie actually includes a short documentary (with, appropriately, a Disney-esque style). Crichton wanted a large audience to swallow his premise. He also used that concern as a jumping off point for research.

Digging in to learn more will create a strong foundation for a big story. It will provide details that suggest plot points. (Using frog DNA enables sex switching for the dinosaurs so they can reproduce.) Crichton actually added another element to Jurassic Park, chaos theory. I don’t think he needed that theory to make the story more believable (though it does). But it became vital to his theme, which is “we cannot fully control nature.”

So, the premise for a big story needs to be accessible, surprising, and emotional. It needs to raise a question. It needs to be credible.

I’ll put these aspects to work on something new. I had a vision of WaterMan, a guy who could seep through cracks, travel through drains, and basically reduce himself to molecular scale, go through small spaces and reassemble himself. As I consider this, I have a precedent, T-1000, the metal guy from the future in Terminator 2. (Most ideas have precedents. If they are not specific enough to raise a lawsuit, see if they develop into something that’s truly yours.)

Accessible: Hmm. Hard to get this correct right off. Water-Man doesn’t quite do it for me. SmokeMan? ParticleMan? I like the idea of leaks. If fresh air can get to you, so can he. (Is it a draft? Or ParticleMan’s chilly fingers?) Okay this still needs some work. For now, my sentence is “A man can turn himself into a mist of particles, fit through tight spaces, and reassemble himself at the other end.”

By the way, this is going from crazy to mundane, but accessibility can be worked from mundane to crazy. Mundane: A teenage boy falls in love with a girl.  Less mundane. A poor teenage boy falls in love with a rich teenage girl. Even less mundane. A poor teenage boy falls in love with a rich teenage girl who has Down’s syndrome. 

Surprising: I think the idea of ParticleMan itself is unexpected. Not a bad superpower for the comic book crowd, though I would like a larger audience.

Emotional: A brilliant government scientist comes home to find his family has succumbed to radiation sickness. (See the sad story of Alexander Litvinenko.) His home has been dusted with particles of polonium-210, and he knows he is doomed, too.  He transfers his mind into his experimental project n animating self-assembling nanoparticles. Then he seeks revenge. (I need to sort out an easy explanation of the science, but the revenge part is what’s important here.)

Question raising: What if you could go through locked doors? Turn water and natural gas lines into your private subway systems? And what about your emotional life? Would you be lonely? Would you miss the touch of others? Finally, how would your new powers make you both vulnerable and able to take revenge? The story question would be, Will ParticleMan find and get revenge on the people who killed his family?

Credible: The idea of memory metals has been around at least since the 70s, and probably inspired T-1000. My glasses frames can be twisted into knots and pop back. And self-assembling systems (where pieces come together to create something bigger and different) are the subject of intense research. Nanotechnology, of course, is a headline item, very similar to what genetic engineering was when Jurassic Park was written.

Self-assembling nanoparticles? Not too much of a stretch. In fact, I just googled that phrase, and I got over 58,000 hits. A lot of opportunity for research and finding the sort of details that could make ParticleMan a winner. (That’s good because this story is just beginning to catch my imagination. Much more to do.)

Overally, the idea here is to explore your concepts across dimensions that will make it more enticing to an audience and that will suggest avenues for research. And more fun.

 

Every Other Friday - Kourtney Heintz

Kourtney Heintz, the author of THE SIX TRAIN TO WISCONSIN, resides in Connecticut with her warrior lapdog, Emerson, her supportive parents, and three quirky golden retrievers. Years of working on Wall Street provided the perfect backdrop for her imagination to run amuck at night, imagining a world where out-of-control telepathy and buried secrets collide. Her YA novel, RECKONINGS, is currently represented by ICM Partners. 

You can connect with Kourtney and learn more about her via Twitter, her Facebook page, her blog and her Website, as well as Goodreads, Amazon Author Central, and Pinterest.

Tell me about THE SIX TRAIN TO WISCONSIN.
This is the book I always wanted to write. It’s emotionally evocative speculative fiction that captures the deepest truths of being human. For my characters, love is a journey never a destination.

If I have to distill it down to one sentence: When Kai’s telepathy spirals out of control, her husband Oliver brings her to the quiet Wisconsin hometown he abandoned a decade ago, where he must confront the secrets of his past to save their future.

It was a 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Semifinalist and is currently available in e-book and paperback.

What drove you to write THE SIX TRAIN TO WISCONSIN? Who did you write it for?
After I recovered from disc-replacement surgery, I was cleaning my bathroom—a simple task that had been impossible to do before my surgery. Back then, I had been in chronic, unrelenting pain caused by a disc compressing a nerve root in my spine. It had been a dark place for me.

A year later, I was pain-free and could look back on that time with more perspective.  I realized how hard it was on the people around me. I thought about what it had to be like for them, dealing with someone who was constantly exhausted and on edge from pain.

I decided to write the caregiver’s side of the story. What it was like to love and nurture someone who was in an incredibly dark place. In my novel, the caregiver is the husband, Oliver. But as I wrote, I realized the person in pain had a side that needed to be told. I ended up alternating point-of-view so that both characters could live and breathe side-by-side.

I wrote this book for women who don’t like traditional romances. They want a love story that fits their lifestyle. They don’t believe in happily ever after. They do believe in the peaks and valleys that come with any relationship. And they like reading about the journey of love and don’t think of it as a destination.

What are your productivity tips?
1)    Know yourself—it’s the only way to set attainable goals. If you’ve never written 5,000 words in a day or a week, do a test run. See how it feels. Keep track of how much time it took. Then ask yourself if you are comfortable committing to that kind of schedule. Be honest—it’s the only way to set measureable goals that you can achieve.

2)    Ask yourself what can I do in two minutes? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes? Don’t get bogged down in only dedicating large slices of time to writing. Seize two minutes and edit a couple paragraphs or think about that scene that isn’t working. You’d be surprised what a few minutes can do for your writing.

3)    Be creative about where you write. Sure there are times you need to be in front of your computer at your desk. But paper editing can happen anywhere. Waiting at the doctor’s office or for a friend are perfect times to squeeze in some work. And you can always think about plot holes while watching a boring movie or grocery shopping. Just make sure you have a pen and paper or the notes app on your phone to write down any solutions that come to mind.  

 

Buy Links

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Quick Q&A on How To Write Fast

Today, I'm guest posting on the Waterworld Mermaids Blog. How to get started. How to keep going. What I'm most proud of as a writer.
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