Seat to Seat: Working Small, Partnered, and with Consequences

O.K.

My first post in the group blog.

I thought I'd do something on keeping the words moving. It's one of my biggest issues when it comes to writing and I'm sure others share my pain.


There was a time when I used to be afraid of running out of ideas. I've come to believe that's not going to be a problem. The ideas come. In droves. Usually when I'm least expecting them. Like in the middle of a conference call at work, or when I'm in the shower with no pen or notebook in sight.

I've also noticed that I can write for hours in my head. (I've probably written a dozen mental novels by now.)

But when it comes to getting words on screen (or paper), I find a million and one things to keep me from it.

From physical exhaustion to something good on television [I'm watching House as I type this] to the (momentarily annoying due to my own word frustrations) presence of a lover...

I'm good at bullshitting myself out of writing. (It's a feature that comes with the English degree.)


But I've discovered there are some things that will spur me to get words out. (Even if it's like driving nails into my fingertips with every key I hit.)


Working Small and Working with a Partner


Recently, an artist friend of mine proposed a project. We would both work small in our respective fields. She, influenced by the artist trading card movement, would create 6 art pieces on 3X5 canvases and I would create 6 flash fictions of 500 words or less.

Then we'd swap and create pieces based on each other's work.


I find one of the truisms in writing is that there is freedom in constraint.

When I'm working to fit a story into so many words, I have to have a different approach than I would coming to a full length short story, novella, or novel.

I'm a lover of description and narration. When I read, I like to be transported to a place via the five senses and when I write I can go for hours describing a character's world, her surroundings, and her thoughts and fail to get anything that can be identified as a story out of it. This ultimately results in a lot of editing and rewriting.

Writing small forces me to get straight to the marrow. I can still use description, but it has to be description that centralizes and moves the plot along, none of this side trip business that you can use in longer pieces, just: Beginning. Middle. End.

Introduction. Climax. Resolution.

It works!

I allow myself the freedom of mind to write over my word limit, if need be to get the story on paper, and then tighten up after it's done. Rarely, however, do I write more than 50 words over. Knowing that I must fit my words into a space the size of a 3x5 index card kicks my brain in the appropriate gear and I find I can tell a story.

It may be only a tiny event in one character's life, but it's a story nonetheless.

Secondly, collaborating with a partner is an excellent motivator.

You've got someone who can give you a swift kick in the butt if you get behind, someone to complain to about your finicky muses, and someone to hold you accountable.

The idea of leaving my collaborator to twiddle her fingers (mouse, pencil, whatever) while I continue rewriting the same sentence is enough to send my Inner Critic packing.

I don't like being the dead weight in a group.

And speaking of dead weight...

A few weeks ago (not long after the completion of my first set of short-short fiction) I came across this little gem on one of my Livejournal forays:

Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab: Write or Die.


Accountability, as I mentioned, is one way to keep your words moving.

Consequences are another.

With Write or Die, you get your choice of three modes with different consequences. In Gentle Mode a simple text box pops up, encouraging you to "Keep Writing!" In Normal Mode, the musical stylings of Hanson or squalling infants assault your ears. And in Kamikaze Mode (my favorite), your hard work will unwrite itself word-by-word if you don't keep your fingers to the keys.

Procrastinating perfectionist that I am, even I draw a line at my words unwriting themselves.

(Of course, you have to be willing to pull up a browser and the Web app for these consequences to be of much use. But for an Internet junkie like myself there's something soothing about working inside a browser window... And that does sound quite sick, doesn't it? The cohabiter just mentioned the possibility of creating something similar for me that won't require a Web browser. Maybe I can hold him to it?)

At any rate, I plan to put the kamikaze mode to work in the next few days and see how much progress I can get out of it. I'll give a report later on.

I've got a planned vacation coming up. I'm going to try and use it wisely.




The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
~ Mary Heaton Vorse

This Week on the Web: working with muses and other people

Okay, maybe this is more like This Month on the Web. This is a crazy time of year!

Lilith Saintcrow (who always gets an A+ from me on her Friday writing posts) did a great post about the division of labor between you and your muse.

Galaxy Express has had some great stuff lately. They did an in-depth article on Angela James and Samhain Publishing. Samhain's a huge player in the e-book market - very reputable, very stable. (They've published a lot of my favorite e-book originals.) If you write romance or genre fiction with romantic elements, you should definitely give them a look. Check them out here and here.

G.E. also posted a link to a new for-the-love venue for speculative fiction, Crossed Genres. Their first online issue went up just this month. They're looking to grow into a paying market.

Redlines and Deadlines is the Ellora's Cave editorial blog and they recently posted an article about the co-author relationship. There's some good stuff there! Part 1 & Part 2.

This Week on the Web

Hey, groupies! Don't forget about the meeting this Saturday at the usual bat time and bat channel.


I really enjoy Lilith Saintcrow's Friday writing posts. They're of the "get off of your butt and quit whining" variety, which, really, is what budding commercial writers need to hear. Even if we don't want to hear it. The woman is full of common sense, motivation, and great insight. Her post from the 31st (I know, it's technically not from this week. But I didn't see it 'till Monday, so it still counts!) is about truth as it relates to fiction.


And what would be a week without a link to Paperback Writer? Earlier this week, she wrote about first lines. What makes an effective first sentence for your book or short story. Some of her "don't" examples had me howling! Or as much as I could howl at the front desk of a library.


""I know this guy who knows this girl who's married to this dude who works for this other guy who dates this woman who has a cousin with a son who knows this lawyer whose client is looking for someone who can date his daughter's adopted son's best friend -- which would be me -- and I thought that might interest you.""


Title Magic hosted Giselle Green, author of Pandora's Box who wrote a brilliant post for us on using astrology for charactarization that I found very helpful!

Write On!

It's that time of year again. The season where perfectly respectable people turn into zombies, wild-haired hags, rabid monsters, and shades of their former selves. You guessed it! It's NaNoWriMo!

Exposition time!

I wrote a little bit about NaNo in an earlier post, but for those of you not in the know, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo is a month-long writing marathon in which participants strive to finish a 50,000 word (minimum) novel in November. The goal is sheer output. You turn that inner editor off and just write no matter how bad you think it is and by the end of the month, you should have a workable rough draft ready for editing.

/exposition

I find it interesting that a bit of controversy has risen up over NaNo over the years. Any Google search will give you arguments for and against. Personally, I believe NaNo is a valuable experience for any creative person. Especially those of us who are writing to eventually publish. And MOST especially if you write genre fiction. Here's why:

• Deadlines are a reality in the publishing world. When you sell a book, there's a manuscript deadline, a revisions deadline, a copy edit deadline. If you sell in a multi-book deal, there are even more deadlines. Learning to write to a deadline as a pre-published writer will put you ahead of the curve.


• You learn a lot about your creative process. During my first NaNo, I developed good habits that I still use. Keeping to a daily word count, for example. Making time to work each day, no matter how busy I was. I also developed bad habits including a caffeine addiction that plagues me to this day! :-D But it all jumbles together to make me a more productive writer.


• It's easy to write a few pages, or a couple of chapters and endlessly pick at them, thereby guaranteeing you will never write the last chapter. What's hard is to just finish the darn thing already. I challenge any writer, published or not, to produce a perfect piece of fiction right out of the gate. NaNo teaches writers to just get the words down, however imperfect they are. Editing can come later. Editing SHOULD come later. When you actually have something on paper to edit.


• Finishing is scary. It's also exhilarating, exciting, and invigorating. Along with the satisfaction of a job done, you get an icon and certificate when you finish NaNo. It's something you can look at to remind yourself that yes, you absolutely can do this. Writing takes a lot of faith in yourself. And sometimes having tangible proof helps you reinforce it

I highly recommend all beginning authors try NaNo at least once. It'll either affirm your desire to write, or cure you of the affliction forever. Are you ready for the challenge?

J.T. Ellison says it better than I at Murderati. And she's offering at 25 page critique to a lucky winner. The catch? You have to get your NaNo 50,000 words in to enter the drawing. If that's not incentive what is?

There's lots of helpful advice around to get you started, and get through, the NaNoWriMo writing marathon. Some of the best of this year's advice so far comes from one of the most helpful writers on the web, Lynn Viehl in her posts Pro-to-NaNo: Twenty Bits of Advice From a Pro to a New NaNo'er and Speed the Outline. Don't skip the comments either! Her readers add some good stuff, too!

This Week on the Web

I discovered a new small press fantasy publisher via Fantasy Debut this week! Bell Bridge Books is an imprint of Belle Books, based in Georgia. A lot of us Smyrna Writers write fantasy, urban fantasy, noir mystery, horror, etc. From the looks of it, it seems like BBB would be a good potential market for us. The parent company has been publishing since 1999, so they're stable. Like Samhain, they publish e-books with POD paperback versions. And from the reviews and snippets I've found, it looks like their books are high quality fiction.

I've been considering entering Voice of the Bard in the Golden Hearts, RWA's unpublished fiction contest. The ladies at Wet Noodle Posse almost have me convinced. All the "Noodlers" are Golden Heart finalists and have spent the past couple of weeks talking about the contest, answering questions, and providing tips and strategies to prospective entrants. Check out their blog!

This Week on the Web

I'd intended to make a non-link salad post this week as well, but I've been preoccupied with my rough draft marathon and let the whole darn week slip away from me. But I'm getting words! Lots of them! If I don't have a complete draft by Halloween, it won't be too much longer after that. Which means I'll have a lot of editing to do come Christmas.

Victoria Strauss posted this great guide to literary agency directories just today. She includes tips on how to interpret the directories as well as some of the hidden dangers and things to look out for. If you're searching for an agent, or about to start that process, make sure to give it a look.

Earlier this week, agent Jessica Faust blogged about pinning down a genre for your book. This is also great info for those of us starting the querying process!

Via Urban Fantasy Land, Concept Draw's Mindmap is available for a free trial for a limited time.

I'm saving this post from Love is An Exploding Cigar. I have a feeling I'm going to need it when I start the aforementioned editing. Samantha Hunter wrote a lovely blog about accepting the potential for undiscovered mistakes or flaws as part of the creative process. My favorite part? "I've come to think of flaws like a little sign that someone real made this thing." Combine that with Agent Faust's The Futzing Stops Here, and you have some real psychological limits to help avoid the cycle of endless polishing and never submitting.

This Week Around the Web

The Southern Festival of Books is on this weekend in Nashville! If you're downtown Friday afternoon, make sure to stop by Room 29 for the panel Keep it Short: Writing and Publishing Mystery Short Stories. Our Sir Otter'll be sitting on that panel from 2-3:30.

The heavy-hitting agent, Donald Maas, has made his book The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success available as a free download on his agency's website! (From Writer Unboxed).

Ever wanted to know more about working with a publicist? Romance Bandits hosted Sourcebooks publicist Danielle Jackson over at their blog.

Reaching the End

Those of you with a drawer (or box or computer file) filled with abandoned three-chapter novels, raise your hands. Yeah, I thought so. Me too. It seems like we all go through this stage at the beginning. We see a bright, shiny idea, we eagerly start to write, and then something happens. We get stuck. We have doubts. Maybe we fiddle with the opening a bit, rework the plot in our heads, scrap the whole thing and start over only to hit a brick wall. Until the next bright, shiny idea comes along.

Getting to "The End" is hard. Some of us never make it. The rest of us keep at it until we find something to get us to that finish line. For me, that something was the writing marathon.

I joined in my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November of 2002, and had a complete blast. If you're unfamiliar with NaNo, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel, or at least the first 50,000 words of a longer novel in 30 days. For a newbie writer, this was a daunting task! I finished, though. And along the way I learned more about my own process than I ever had during the Shiny Idea phase.

I found that I do better with lots of tiny goals instead of one big one. For example, "Write 1600 words tonight" instead of "Write a book." I also work better with deadlines and tend to be more successful if I'm accountable to someone else. You have to prove to the organizers that you wrote those words. And there's a whole community of folks in the NaNo forums that you can go to for support and motivation.

I brought all of these things into my writing routine for the rest of the year, and for the most part it's worked pretty well. Now I know when something really isn't working as opposed to me falling prey to plot bunnies or the new Shiny Idea. I stick to a words-per-day schedule, I work toward a deadline, and I tell my writers' group to expect me to complete those goals.

There's one more thing, perhaps more important than all of the above, that I learned how to do during NaNoWriMo: I learned how to beat that infernal internal editor into submission during my drafting process and to accept that my first drafts aren't going to be perfect. In fact, they're going to be crap. There will be plotholes. There will be continuity errors, spelling and grammar problems, and I tend to have compound word issues. But I can't fix any of this stuff if it doesn't exist in the first place. The writing marathon forces me to create.

This year I'm going to try something new. Instead of NaNoWriMo, I'll be taking a class over at RWA Online - Fast Draft in 14 Days and their Kia Writing Marathon. This is a new challenge. I can do a first draft in a month. Can I chop that in half? Wish me luck!

x-posted at Title Magic

Launch Day

Welcome to Smyrna Writes! Our contributors all belong to Smyrna Writers, a writers' group based in Middle Tennessee.

We started this blog to talk with you and each other about writing, publishing, reading, and living the creative life. We also intend to share and keep track of our writing resources, to write about our work, and celebrate our successes right here.

We're mostly fiction writers with enough essayists, poets, and children's lit writers to keep the rest of us honest. We critique each others' work, we network, we brainstorm, research, nitpick, and encourage. The latter is, perhaps, the most important thing we do.

We invite you to join us as we grow. Visit us often, and don't forget to say hi once in a while!

Howdy There!

Check back September 15th for our launch day post. Thanks for visiting!