Still Stuck

So when I work on my novel lately, I've really been struggling with how to start it. I've been developing these characters and this novel since I was in high school. The storyline, the characters, everything has undergone a lot of changes over the years, especially when I was taking Creative Writing classes on campus. The main character that I've always had has lost her part in the story, I don't know where to put her or what to have happen to her. Instead, my second main character has developed an even stronger story and back story. Its throwing me off.

It occurred to me today that I could just make the second main character's story the forefront of the story, instead of the first main character, but that sort of terrifies me. I don't know how on earth I would be able to do that, set the first main character's story as a sideline...

I don't know if this is making any sense, but my novel is sort of going through an identity crisis, and it's hard to deal with. My husband has been trying to talk me through it, but I'm not excited about any of the ideas. I like them, but I'm not excited. Maybe it's because I'm scared to try a completely different route with this. I know it needs to be done, but I'm a complete pansy.

This novel business is tough work.

Getting It Together

So I've been stuck with my story, right? I've felt for a long time like I've been staring at a wall, and over time realised my characters had no direction and I didn't know how this story could possibly progress.

What really started my latest endeavor with it was when I realised that my bad guy had no motives. And the motive that I had previously considered was kind of really lame. My second idea for him was also lame-- closer, but still pretty pathetic and cheesy. Without a direction for the bad guy, my main characters were left living their lives as they normally would, nothing was changing or harming them.

So decided to get my ducks in a row. I've never been good at keeping a storyline together. At some point I had created documents with information on my characters, but nothing super fancy or even coherent. What I did this time was open a brand new word document, format it in the OCD fashion I've had lately (due to typing up recipes for my mother) and start collecting lists. A list of my main characters. A list of the secondary characters. A list of the bad guy and his group. And then I went into information on the countries-- Country A, ruled in this fashion/by these people, significant characters to the storyline from that country, etc. Country B, ruled by these people.... and so on. As I started to organise myself, put my thoughts down, I committed (at least for now) to naming countries and characters that had thus far gone unnamed which made them more tangible to me. I put key points of characters down, things that I had to remember throughout the story.

Little by little, over the course of a couple of days of playing with this, I fleshed out how I wanted the bad guy to interact with his cronies, his supporters, and how he would deal with other people. This spread to considering how other characters interacted with each other, even if they wouldn't see each other until chapters later. I eventually came up with a direction for the bad guy. I ran the suggestion past my husband, and he agreed that it was pretty good and definitely do-able.

My husband mentioned to me once that you really don't have to think about politics or technicalities with characters. They're people. They think like people. Their individual personalities will determine how politics work. How does King A treat his people? His family? What does he think of King B next door? So on and so forth. That's all there is to it. And that same idea I accidentally applied to figuring out my way around the wall. How does this character react to this idea or this other character? That's all there is.

I'm getting excited again about my story. I was so discouraged for so long, and now I feel like I actually have a story I could tell. I don't have everything figured out, but I'm getting there. And it's all because I decided to organise myself and get it together...

(It's also really nice to have all my ideas in one place, so I don't have to go hunting through four different documents just to find what I was trying to remember.)

Stuck

I want to write. I want to write really, really badly. I want to write more of my novel, the story that's been brewing and developing in my head for years. But I'm stuck.

The other day, while I was trying to fall back asleep, my head was trying to solve problems with my story. (Except I'm pregnant right now, and need sleep, so I wouldn't let it.)

My husband keeps telling me I should use my free time to work on my novel, especially since I'll be too tired for a while after baby comes. I actually got really frustrated with him about it, because I just don't know what to do. I want to move forward with it, but I don't know how to get my characters from where they are now to where they need to be. My brain has come up with eight different ways, but I'm not sure about any of them-- am I introducing too many ideas? Too many characters? Will I be able to keep track of everything? Will it make sense to my readers? Is there a better, more efficient way..?

A while ago my brain told me to not worry about going forward with the storyline, but rather to go back and try and finish the uncompleted scene in my prologue. I went back and re-read it... and I feel stuck there, too. What do I really want to convey in that scene? What is most important for my readers to know at this point in time? What about the following scene with the same characters-- is it necessary? What information do I want to convey there?

Sometimes I feel like there are too many steps to writing a story. It's discouraging.

At the same time, I know this roadblock won't be forever, and that soon I'll figure it out and gleefully be on my way again. It just takes patience... Darn it all.

Writer's Remorse

I'm not one of those people who writes every day, or even every week. I'm more of a Herculean writer, where I sit down to play with my work and suddenly I've written a couple scenes or reworked some things or figured out the next chapter of my story. This can be good and bad, because at least then my scenes are each entire coherent scenes, but at the same time it could be argued that I'm not really practicing my art very well.

The biggest downside I find with my Herculean efforts is writer's remorse. I write scenes and sections, and then don't see them for weeks. When I open that word document again to continue writing, while I wait for the pages of writing to load, I'm left to stare at the opening paragraph on the document. Often I cringe at it and wish that it wasn't such a bad paragraph, but my brain can't seem to focus on how to make it better. My brain would rather waste its funds on pity parties and bemoaning the fact that someday I'll have to go back and fix it.

This always leads to the big question writers always ask themselves: Why do I do this to myself?

I don't have an answer. I've read lots of answers by other successful authors, but I guess it just comes down to the fact that we're all crazy and will do what we must to enjoy our hobbies.

Until then, I'll have to decide whether I want to rework that opening scene of chapter two, or whether I want to just grit my teeth and just keep moving forward.

The Good and the Bad

When I learn something about writing, or when someone gives me a critique about my writing, I start seeing those problems in my writing everywhere. So on the one hand I'm super happy that I got ideas and learned another way to make my writing better, but on the other hand it makes it tough to want to write!

Yesterday, for example, I had some time between my classes. So I pulled up my novel and reread a paragraph or two where I'd left off... and found myself torn between trying to go back and adjust some of my descriptions, or just ignore them for now and keep writing the scene. It was tough! It makes me really happy for the suggestion my peer gave me at workshop... but it also makes me really frustrated because I just want to finish the novel!

Learning about the publication process is tough, too. We talked about that in my class this semester, and it can almost be really discouraging to think that even if I go back and make those adjustments now, there will still be adjustments to make no matter where I am in the novel, no matter whether it's completed or not.

I guess that's just the life of a writer. I'd better get used to it-- better to know now than to have to have the hard knocks of publishing show up all at once!

On Workshops

So in my college career I've been taking a few Creative Writing courses, because I can and it's awesome. I've had two CW classes, and one on CW and Publishing. All of them have been SO helpful, because of the guidelines that I've been given. One teacher I took had different "do's and don'ts" units on dialogue, creating characters, establishing setting, creating tension-- all different elements of a story. Before I had never really thought about those elements, I guess my unknowing mind thought that if I had a story to tell that people would want to read it. I was completely wrong. It's about how you tell the story that can make the difference!

But I digress. (Maybe I'll do another post about do's and don'ts.) What I really wanted to talk about was workshops.

In each of the classes that I've taken we've had to do peer workshops. Normally I'd be terrified of peer anything-- bad memories of peer-reviewed papers where semicolons get bashed-- but these were pretty good. My teacher for my CW courses really pushed for us to be specific with our critiques, to give examples of how it could be made better, etc, instead of just saying "Your dialogue could use work."

The only problem for me personally was the work that I was required to submit for these workshops. The work had to be a complete short story-- no parts of a novel or sections of a chapter. This isn't to say that those rules weren't broken by the occasional student, but after trying (uselessly) to help one peer with an incomplete work I tried to keep sending in complete short stories. As a fantasy writer, however, this is difficult to do. Keep a whole story within 7 pages, Times New Roman, double spaced? There's not a lot of space for world-building, plot, anything.

What essentially happened was that I got tips for the short story that I could sometimes apply to my novel (which, let's face it, is what I really cared about). A specific critique would sometimes get me thinking, Do I do that with dialogue in my novel? or Oh, bad character development... I did the same thing with that one character in my novel... or something along those lines. But by the end of the second CW class, I sort of began to dread workshops. I began to dread having to spew out some kind of story for credit, a story that I would never look at ever again...

My CW&P class started off the same way. I resubmitted the stories I used in the CW courses, altered them a little, thought about revising them to use in my novel (and rejected that idea every time)... And then I noticed a trend among my peers in that class: about half of them would bring chapter chunks to workshop, and when they did they really appreciated the critique we had. In fact, they got really excited about it. So I decided to step out of the boundary and submit a section of my prologue that I love but knew needed work.

That workshop is my favorite workshop to date. Although, the one that I submitted the opening part of the first chapter was really good, too... People read what I gave them, understanding that it wasn't a complete work, and would focus on how to help me make it better. It's an opening chapter- do we like the character? Is there desire? Is there tension? Is there a problem? Does the character react in a believable way to his/her surroundings? Is the opening description confusing? Do you need more tags in that dialogue section? These kinds of things were addressed in the workshop, and they really got my mind rolling. I knew, for example, that the opening chapter was weak, but I couldn't figure out why or how to fix it. One of my workshop peers nailed the problem dead on the head. Once he said it needed tension and to move faster, I instantly felt like he was right, and that it was the missing puzzle piece that I had been looking for.

So I still have mixed feelings on workshops. I definitely think they can go wrong (I'll never forget the incredible urge I had to punch a girl whose only critique was that every single dash I had used was apparently the wrong kind of dash), but I can also definitely see their benefit. Sometimes an outside perspective is really what you need-- and is way better than bashing your work with the hammer, hoping it'll still turn out ok in the end.

Four Months Later...

I felt guilty about not posting here even though I knew I wouldn't be a regular blogger. Being in college, I haven't really made the time to write every day. Some of my creative writing teachers have said that they have to write every day or they go crazy and then their wives banish them to their room to write so that they can rejoin society. One teacher talked about times during the day that they write best, how some people write in the morning before anything can get to them and worries start popping up; others say that they can only write at night, when it's their time and they can do whatever they want. I've just sort of written when I feel like it, and let's face it- that's not often.

It's not that I don't like to write, and I really really really really really really really want to more than I do. I love writing, and ever since I decided that it wasn't just going to be a night job, a hidden hobby, I've tried to practice and work and take what I learn in my classes and apply it to my writing. It's gotten better, not even just since I first started (I've come leaps and bounds since then) but within the last year. I'm getting to be proud of my writing (or more of it, at least) and willing to try new things and work harder at it. It's such a process, one that I and probably 99% of all writers wonder whether it's worth it for such little gain. But I love telling stories, I love my characters...

And of course I want to be the next J. K. Rowling. But that's years and years away, if my story is even good enough to be liked by the masses.

And if it's not, that's all right too. I'll have done something with my talents, with what I've worked on for so long. And hopefully I'll get a lot written between graduation and when my first baby comes in July...

Because I take forever to post on here, I can't remember what I last said about my prologue, but in a nutshell I decided the majority of it was horrible, and that I should rewrite it. Completely. I've finally come up with an idea that will work better at portraying the information that I need to present in the prologue, and I'm really excited about it. It took forever, lots of skirting around it and pretending to think about it, before the idea came. Sometimes it just takes a while of sporadic thinking to figure out what to do about something, I suppose.

My husband has also picked up his novel lately as well. He finished one of his favorite sci-fi books ever, and then decided he was going to write. He told me that it was hard because his writing is horrible, especially compared to the book he loves. I tried to remind him that you can't compare the first draft of a novel, the rough and bare ideas pouring from your head, to a published and successful work. I don't know if it worked, or helped him at all, but he wrote for quite a few hours yesterday. That's another thing my teacher said-- some people can't work every single day, some of us are just sporadic writers who sit down and crank out pages and pages and sometimes even chapters at a time. I guess my husband and I are that type of writer. I do want to try writing every day, though, just to see if that doesn't work as well or better than sporadic writing.

I'll probably maybe do a post about publishing next, since that's a class I'm in and we've been told so many great things that make complete sense now but I never would have thought of on my own.