Writing In the Cracks

There are days I dream of a quiet room with a wraparound desk, multiple monitors, a giant whiteboard full of index cards and a pleasant, but unobtrusive, sound system.  Then there is the reality of trying to write at the kitchen table while supper is bubbling on the stove, my kids are threatening to launch a full on nuclear attack and my boss is texting me to do “just one more thing” for the night.

I am a full time mom and I have a full-time job.  Which means that my writing must grow in the cracks of my life, like lichen on a cliff.  I’ve had to learn to stop waiting for the “perfect” time, to say no to dealing with chores or last minute requests and teach myself how to write in small fits and spurts.

When I was in college and my first full-time job, I used to bemoan my lack of time for writing.  I would come home and fling myself on the couch and curse that there were only two hours after supper.  I whined that I didn’t feel creative in the evening.  I protested that I needed long stretches of six to eight hours to commune with my muse.  Looking back, I want to slap my former self and her delusions of being a special snowflake with her creative process.

Sometime later, I emerged from the miasma of sleep deprivation after my second child was born and I realized that I did not particularly enjoy my job and that my opportunities to make my creative mark on the world were quickly going to run out.  So I decided to get a plan and make it happen:

1)      Set Goals.  I set myself the rather modest goal of 1000 words per week (terrified that putting a quota on it would quash my delicate creativity).  I reasoned that I could surely find the time once per week to write a thousand words.  Instead, what I found was that life has an ironic sense of humor and pinpoint accuracy when it comes to mucking up plans.  I would set aside a two hour window and watch it erode with phone calls and other interruptions.  Which led me to my next step.

2)      Take Every Opportunity.  Rather than waiting for my two hour window, I decided to break down my thousand words into smaller bites.  I looked at my schedule and found my downtime: the 45 minute music lesson, which was useless for running errands or going home and the half hour to an hour when my kids were watching something cute and fuzzy learn valuable educational lessons on TV.  Lessons, doctor’s appointments, anytime when I was stuck waiting.  I started bringing my laptop with me and making myself write.  Slowly my words started accumulating and I began to meet my quota.  Of course, I found my grand first novel was slowly becoming incomprehensible, which sparked the next change.

3)      Plan Ahead.  I am a pantser by nature.  Novels and short stories bloom inside my head and then as they emerge onto the page, they grow and change and become more than I could have imagined.  Unfortunately, the gap between writing times meant that sometimes I couldn’t remember the brilliant inspiration which had struck last time or I would forget the work I’d done foreshadowing a particular event and end up cutting it.  Or I would spend half my writing time staring at the screen and trying to guess where things should go.

I had to learn to become a plotter.  On days when the creative juices are flowing and I feel more like I’m downloading the novel from some cosmic databank than like I’m actually composing it, I do masses of plotting and preparation.  Then on days when I am less cosmically connected, I still have my notes to fall back on.  Often they’re quite detailed, laying out exactly what needs to happen in each scene.  Now if I only had fifteen minutes, I could get another 300 to 400 words further in the story without worrying about making mistakes or twisting the plot into an inescapable cavern.  This was my big breakthrough in changing my writing from a hobby to a serious pursuit.  But I still needed to improve.

4)      Go For Portable.  Having done all these wonderful notes, I had a different problem.  Namely that hauling an entire whiteboard full of plot stickies wasn’t really a practical option for my lifestyle.  Which meant that I was often trying to write without the resources I’d created for myself.  I tried making them digital and just storing them in the computer but I quickly learned that I was a visual person who needed the notes in front of me.  So I came up with what I believe is a fairly ingenious option: a photo album.  Now my writing bag has my laptop and a photo album full of index cards.  I have notes on my characters in one section, notes on the overall plot in another and individual scene notes in a third.  If I decide to make a change, I can add a note to the relevant area right away.  And I have all my research and notes with me, so I don’t get derailed by wondering what I did in a particular scene four chapters ago (which may have been written weeks or months earlier).  I was finally starting to make some serious progress, but I still had one more step to go.

5)      Get In the Mood.  I’m human, I find it hard to go from worrying about whether or not I remembered to pack my son’s gym shoes to dark and sexy alternate realities.  So I needed to find a technique which would help me to get my creative juices flowing on demand.  I spoke with other writers and heard suggestions about using inspirational pictures, theme music or even creating a stretching ritual before sitting down the computer.  I went with music, since that has always worked the fastest to transport me into imagination.  I put together playlists of instrumental music on different themes: sad, joyful, powerful and sexy.  But I found they weren’t quite what I needed.  Instead, I found myself picking particular songs for different characters at different points in the story.  Suddenly I could shift mental states quickly and easily.  Following up my mood song with an upbeat playlist kept my energy up and my fingers typing faster.

I still use my mood playlists sometimes, but more when I’m plotting than when I’m writing.  They create strong emotional reactions in me, sometimes stronger than I need.  I’ve also learned to short cut by listening to my chosen mood song in the car while I’m driving to lessons, priming me to be in the right headspace.

My process is still evolving, but I’ve gone from failing to achieve a thousand words a week to often managing a thousand words a day.  I don’t manage to write every day, which will probably be my next goal to work on.  And I’ve discovered it’s not easy for me to edit one story while working on another, which gives me another goal.  But I’m moving in the right direction and I’ve discovered that waiting for the perfect moment killed my creativity far more thoroughly than exercising it in less than ideal circumstances.

I may have glossed this over into a five point list, but I spent almost three years pushing myself before I realized I needed to start plotting.  Writing a worthy novel isn’t easy.  It takes a huge amount of work and dedication.  But it is possible, no matter what else you’re dealing with in life.  If creating something, anything, is your dream, then find a way to make it happen.  My life may be infinitely more hectic than it was before, but I’m enjoying it a lot more than I was.

5 Right Lessons From the Wrong Places

When I was in college, one of my professors told me something which changed my mind about the best way to learn.  He told me that I would learn more from people I disagree with and experiences I didn’t like than I ever would from those I enjoyed and agreed with.  And he was right.

Everyone tells you to read good books in order to learn how to write good books.  But I’ve learned just as much, if not more, from books I didn’t enjoy.  I won’t share specific names here, since I’m a big believer in not being sued.  But if you want to be a writer, I would strongly encourage you not to put a book aside because you’re not enjoying it.  Instead, break it down and figure out why you didn’t like it, especially if it seemed promising at first.

1)      Flat characters

Dickens is renowned for his vivid characters.  With only a few phrases or words of descriptions, he made them seem real to his readers.  But description is only the first part of making a character seem real.

I was put off with a recent library pickup, a paranormal romance, because the heroine seemed completely removed from the story.  Werewolves attacking?  Meh.  Family’s safety threatened?  All in a day’s work.  I suspect the author was trying to demonstrate this young woman’s shock by minimizing her emotional reaction.  But instead, it came off as if the character didn’t care at all.  Characters are our windows into a book’s world.  We react to stories about people, which is why we care more about one little boy or girl suffering than statistics about millions dying.

Characters may feel real to the author but sometimes they don’t transfer onto the page.  To feel real to a reader, they need information sprinkled throughout.  Favorite foods, a nervous habit, souvenirs from childhood, all of these sorts of details make a character feel real.  And most of all, they need to react to what’s going on.  I was told to make sure my point-of-view character reacted either emotionally, intellectually or physically to every action in a scene.  And it makes a difference.

Another common character challenge is a stereotyped character.  Another recent book I picked up felt like the main characters had been picked up out of a discount bin.  There was the Peppy Cheerleader, the Brooding Poet and the Dumb Jock.  Not once did any of them break with their stereotypes: the cheerleader was enthusiastic and ditzy about everything, the poet wore black clothes and brooded in corners and the jock failed to recognize such exotic places as “Mexico”.  The concept of the story was interesting but the flat characters sucked all the fun out of it. 

Every person is unique and every character should be, too.  Even secondary characters should have something unique about them to distinguish them from the thousand other gum-snapping waitresses or awkward tech specialists out there.  Main characters should break out of stereotypes in a dozen different ways, at a minimum.

2)      Failing To Deliver

Nothing ruins a story faster than anticipating something which never happens.  In one small-town romance I read, the heroine arrives on the run from an abusive stalker ex-boyfriend.  Throughout the book, I kept waiting for the ex to find her.  She worried about it constantly, running away from a local TV broadcast, not giving her real name to anyone, lying about her background.  Halfway through the book, she sees a news broadcast telling her that the ex-boyfriend has died in a car accident.  That was the closest he came to playing a role in the story.

 
I felt incredibly cheated by that novel.  I’d been looking forward to some kind of confrontation, maybe between the ex and the hero.  Or maybe the heroine would have to decide between staying with the man she’d come to love or escaping the one who hurt her.  I even held out hope that he’d faked his death to lure her out of hiding (since he was described as obsessive and manipulative).  Instead, the problem was solved without her having to lift a finger or make a decision.
 
Readers will expect narrative promises to be fulfilled.  If an author brings something up, then readers expect it to play a role in the story.  Crises and plot points should never be solved “off camera” away from the reader.

3)      Too Much Backstory

 
Personally, I’m obsessive about backstory.  If I like a character, I want to know everything about them.  What songs did their mother sing to them at night?  Where did they hang out in high school?  I like knowing details.

On the other hand, there can be too many details.  One rather hefty novel I picked up had a 30 page prologue detailing the hero’s ancestry and his ancestor’s achievements.  None of which ended up playing any role in the story.  Granted, it helped to establish the world but that could have been done much more concisely.  Details should establish character, establish the world in the story or create the mood/scene.  Otherwise, the pace is bogged down and readers can’t pick out the significant information from the multitudes. 

4)      Overdeveloped World

 
Technically, I suppose this flaw is really an extension of the “too much backstory” and “flat character” flaws.  Sometimes authors have a real gift for world creation.  They can create an alternate reality or a fantasy world which feels incredibly innovative and real.  Setting is supposed to feel like another character.  It isn’t supposed to usurp the actual walking-talking characters.

I’ve read any number of historical, fantasy and paranormal novels where the world was fascinating but the flat characters ended up feeling like a distraction against the backdrop.  In one Victorian romance I read, the author devoted a lot of time to making 1860s London feel real and substantial.  She explained customs deftly and had done her research on dress and manners.  But her hero and heroine remained stilted and awkward. 
 
One of my friends wants to write novels, but he fully admits he’s much better at coming up with unique worlds and grand sweeping arches of fictional history than he is at creating characters that other people want to read about.  I’ve offered him the following litmus test: if I pulled these characters out of this world and stuck them anywhere else, would anyone be interested in what’s happening to them?

5)      Too Many Surprises

 
I like being surprised, but only in a good way.  I want to look back at the story and say to myself “My God, how did I miss that!  It’s so obvious!” as I eagerly flip the pages.  I do not want to be sitting there going “Hunh?” as events play out.

A series I was enjoying ended up completely flipping the expectations from the first book in the last one.  There was a secondary character who I fully expected to be revealed as a villain (perhaps a reformed villain trying to mend her ways but a villain nonetheless).  There were all sorts of hints that she was not what she appeared to be.  But in the last book it was revealed that she was, in fact, exactly what she appeared to be.  Meanwhile, the good guys had become the bad guys and everyone had changed their minds about what they were fighting for in this particular post-apocalyptic landscape.
 
I read interviews with this particular author who admitted that she went through a major reconceiving of the overall story about two-thirds of the way through the series.  Unfortunately, the preparations she had done no longer applied.  And so the ending scenario came off as incomprehensibly surprising.
 
This is where a good beta-reader is invaluable.  Someone who has not talked to the author about the story and who only knows what is on the page.  Authors may think they’ve explained something or set it up perfectly, but the reader is still in the dark.  A good beta-reader will tell you if your plot and character actions make sense based on what you have already established.

Final thoughts:

No author can ever indulge in the belief that she or he has learned all there is to know.  To quote Jurassic Park: “Creation is an act of sheer will”.  The spark of inspiration is only the kernel.  After that, comes the layers of sheer will and determination which turn the tiny kernel into a pearl.

So take the time to indulge in some “bad” stories.  You’ll learn more than you think.

Finding My Revelations

This novel started with two inspirations which quickly became intertwined.  The first were stories about the Babylonian temple harlots.  The second was the idea of using superheroes as my main characters.

Religions have always fascinated me.  There is a huge variety in beliefs and cultural attitudes out there, all with people equally devoted to them.  I believe humans may be drawn to different religions but begin their search for the same reason, to explain their personal experiences and sense of something beyond themselves.

I first learned about the Babylonian temple harlots in high school.  They were initially presented as prostitutes, a way for corrupt priests to make money.  However, as I started doing my own research and learned more, it became clear that this was a perfectly socially acceptable form of worship.  The French refer to the moment of orgasm as le petit mors, the little death.  It is implied that it is a moment of spiritual and emotional transfiguration and awareness.  The temple harlots were trained to help worshippers achieve that moment.

The idea of sex as something sacred which could be pursued openly intrigued me.  It is such a radical difference from our “don’t ask, don’t tell” social policy.  More research led me to the myth of the succubus, a demon which comes to virtuous men and has sex with them in their sleep, causing them to sin and lose their souls to the devil.  The two ideas became paired in my mind.  Many pagan beliefs and deities became demonized by the Roman Catholic Church (such as the Celtic god of the woodlands, Cernunnos, who was remodeled as the devil).  I wondered, could the temple harlots have been demonized as succubi?  There’s absolutely no evidence for it, but the idea stuck with me.

The second part of my inspiration was to use a superhero as my heroine.  I grew up in during the revitalization of comics, when stories moved out of childhood and into maturity.  I devoured stories plumbing the depth of the human/superhuman experience, such as Chris Claremont’s Phoenix and Dark Phoenix sagas and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns series.  Heroes weren’t infallible, they made mistakes and questionable moral decisions.  I wanted to create a heroine who felt the weight of her supernatural gifts, who didn’t want the life of sacrifice which was required of a hero. 

Dani was born out of a mixture of defiance and desperation, ready to go down fighting to her last breath but still denying there was anything good or worthwhile about her.  She would be descended from the temple harlots, able to open her lover’s mind to the infinite majesty of the divine cosmos.  But what would that kind of awareness do to someone’s mind?  People are quite happy in their delusions most of the time.  Those without self-sustaining delusions are the clinically depressed.

Dani needed an appropriate hero to match her, which let me explore another idea of mine.  A hero who was not more badass than his heroine but who inspired her instead.  It’s a bit of a flip on the traditional match of the romance hero and heroine, where the goodness of the heroine inspires the aggressive hero to become more than he has been.  While Dani emerged as a full-fledged (and opinionated!) character in moments, Michael took a little more time to come fully to light.  I had to coax him to share his secrets with me.

He began his fictional existence as a youth counsellor, but that didn’t quite sit right, no matter how I tried to make it work.  Then one day I met a little boy with an attendant in tow.  His parents explained that the boy had severe autism and the attendant was his therapist, who worked with him every day.  Lightning struck and I suddenly understood Michael’s true role.  He was a developmental therapist who worked with children and he had psychometric gifts which allowed him to peer into otherwise silent children and find out what they were feeling.  Like discovering that the previous half-hour’s tantrum was because of an itchy clothing tag.  His big-hearted kindness and optimism came into focus and I finally understood how he fit into the story.

After I had my hero and heroine, then I needed an appropriate villain.  Someone who was the antithesis of them both, combining their worst qualities and fears.  André deigned to explain it to me.  Some people are given supernatural gifts, and those people have the god-given right to rule over the non-gifted.  Ruthless, driven and sociopathically practical, he is simply doing what anyone else would do, given the opportunity: making sure he is not out-gunned in the drive to acquire people with special gifts.

The three of them quickly took over the story and pulled me into a new world filled with strange powers and secret societies.  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface in Revelations and I’m looking forward to telling many more stories of the lalassu, the hidden people.

A Different Kind of Hero

I have been reading romance novels since I was a teenager.  I quickly learned to find the hidden troves at my friends’ houses and over and over I fell in love with the dark, brooding romantic heroes.  I imagined countless scenarios of being swept away by some lovely lethal man.  A guy who knew what to do if being attacked by terrorists and could single-handedly scale castle walls, that was my kind of guy.  If he could also have a tortured soul where he constantly strove to overcome his perceived sins, even better.

Between comic books, action movies and romance novels, I had my fill of dark heroes to pick from.  But then there began to be a shift.  More and more kick-ass women began appearing as the heroes, not needing any man to show them how to handle a roundhouse kick or firearm.  I shifted from wanting to date the heroes to wanting to be the heroes.  Buffy, Xena, Karen McCoy from The Real McCoy, Huntress from the Batman universe (and I realize I am revealing more than I want about how old I am), all of them were strong, capable women with quick wits and faster feet.

But there was something a little unsatisfying in my newfound revelry.  I have always been a romantic at heart and the romantic entanglements of my favorite heroines bothered me.  Either they stayed solo (any guy who loved them died before the closing credits) or they were paired with alpha males who regulated them to the sidelines in an effort to keep them safe.  If they did find a supportive male, the relationship was often doomed to fail.  Sometimes it was even explicitly stated that their boyfriends couldn’t handle being less than them in a relationship.

It got me thinking.  Could there be a romantic hero who was strong and capable but able to accept a woman who might be stronger and more competent than him?  Otherwise, weren’t these stories still reinforcing the old worn-out advice that women have to be less in order to get a man?

I got at least part of my wish with the television series, Castle.  The hero, Richard Castle, is a writer who brings his ability to make wild leaps of faith and unseen connections to help Kate Beckett, an NYPD detective.  Beckett is stronger than Castle in almost every way.  She’s better with a gun and she doesn’t get tripped up dealing with dangerous suspects.  Part of Beckett’s appeal to Castle is that she strong.  I loved it.

But I still wasn’t completely satisfied.  Finally, I created my own hero, Michael, a child therapist with martial arts training, an enthusiasm for comic books and the ability to pick up emotions and information through touching the people and objects around him.  He’s no weakling or comedy sidekick, but his strength is in his heart and faith.  He sees all the darkness in the world, all the terrible secrets we hide from each other, but still manages to be idealistic and optimistic.  He’s the perfect counterpart (if I dare say so myself) for my dark, brooding heroine, Dani, who tortures herself for her past mistakes.

One of the things I love about romance novels is how they are continually evolving.  Forty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have a heroine who wasn’t a virgin, let alone one in her forties and fifties.  The heroes used to be criminally violent and now they range from sweet boys next door to the powerful alpha males.  The stories they tell plumb every aspect of human existence.  They’ve branched into fantasy and science fiction sub-genres (and many others, but those were the ones I got particularly excited about).  They offer every level of sensuality, from sweet to scorching.  I’m proud to have added my own variation to the classic tale of boy-meets-girl.