Weekly Update

This week went pretty well. I had a few days with words in the double digits — for example, I wrote 21 words on Wednesday — but still making progress overall. This part of the story is difficult because I am trying to mix different things together that have already been written in a way that truly fits the new story, but also includes all the stuff I need to include. So, the process is a bit more painstaking than usual. But overall, still good progress, still moving forward.

Optional Monthly Question

How do you define success as a writer? Is it holding your book in your hand? Having a short story published? Making a certain amount of income from your writing?

I love this question. It is really making me think. There are three things I want to discuss here, because I think they are all factors. 1) It depends on my emotional state, to be honest. What is a “success” one day, may be short of success another. 2) Because I am still writing new things, the goal posts are always changing. And perhaps most important 3) It would be better to have a more objective measurement.

In the end, no matter what goes on with any of those, what matters most is having a positive impact on the reader, knowing that they connected with my work and loved it. The problem is: how do we know this?

On fanfiction sites, and Amazon to a lesser extent, we can look at reviews. Having a positive review is clearly evidence of success with that particular reader. Kudos or star ratings without an accompanying review can also say so. But number of reads or buys… That I think is less indicative, even though that’s how we are paid. But all that tells us is that someone bought it or started to read it. We don’t know, from that number, whether they actually liked it. If the ONLY type of advertising was word-of-mouth, maybe because then it would mean that later buyers bought it because of other people who liked it… But in reality, there are so many other reasons someone might decide to take a chance on the book.

So yes, for me, real success is that connection with a reader.

But that’s not actually something I can control, so instead, I prefer to look at success based on what I have actually achieved — and I’m not doing so well there. My current goal is to finish my revision of Cipher, but I keep writing other things instead of revising. I’ve been stuck at this block (what I’m calling the revision block) for a long time now, and I haven’t found a good way to get past it.

The thing is, I do feel success every time I finish something, whether it is a short story, a novel first draft, etc. That is definitely a kind of success. But that’s an example of the goal posts changing. It used to be that finishing a first draft was the main goal. Once I achieved that, it became the revision. And so on. I think it is important for me to keep looking forward to the next goal, to see if I can succeed at that; and if I don’t, try again, as they say.

And despite my insecurity (hey, this is for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!), I don’t actually feel like I have failed at writing. I have almost no sales, but I keep writing, and it keeps making me happy, and when I do share things, there are people who like it. And in the end, that is its own kind of success.

Would I like to make money? Yes, of course. I’d love to make enough that I could go down to 30 hours at my day job (to keep benefits) and have more time to write. But I don’t feel like a failure just because that hasn’t happened yet.

INSECURE WRITER’S SUPPORT GROUP

FOUNDED BY

Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh

Twitter is @TheIWSG Hashtag: #IWSG

Join in here!

IWSG Website

The awesome co-hosts for the September 1 posting of the IWSG are Rebecca Douglass, T. Powell Coltrin @Journaling Woman, Natalie Aguirre, Karen Lynn, and C. Lee McKenzie!

Weekly Update

I am still writing fanfiction, and up until Sunday, was working on a fan fiction piece for Camp NaNoWriMo, which is a month-long writing challenge. You can set your own goal unlike the main NaNoWriMo, which happens in November. I decided on 62,000 words because July has thirty-one days, so that came to 2,000 words per day. I ended the month with 64,414 so that was a success! I never have problems getting much higher word counts in November, but Camps — well, I tend to “lose” them more than win (though, I do hold with the philosophy that the only true loss is not writing at all, so I still consider my other Camps wins). I also usually do editing/revision, but even the times I’ve done new fiction, I tend not to have the same level of motivation in July that I have in November, and I also tend not to set aside as much non-writing stuff as I do in November (such as cooking — I do a lot of food prep/freezing in October, but not June — and work — I often take off several days in November for extra writing time). Anyway, very happy with the success, even though the story is not done. It actually is probably going to end up being split, too, so I guess I finished one and started the next – I am just to Scene 16, and very much near the beginning.

Optional Monthly Question

August 4 question – What is your favorite writing craft book? Think of a book that every time you read it you learn something or you are inspired to write or try the new technique. And why?

I don’t actually have a book like that. I tend not to reread my fiction writing books, and lately, haven’t even finished them. I spend more time on Holly Lisle’s writing classes, and review them a lot, so probably the most useful of those is How To Revise Your Novel, which is a huge class and really, really hard, but so many of my epitomes in writing have come from that class, such as finally understanding, what, exactly, a subplot is. It is so obvious now that I don’t know why other explanations didn’t work, but they didn’t.

The Snowball Method

What I really want to talk about today, though, is a new understanding of my own planning/first draft writing practice, which came to me last week. I realized that I could call my approach the Snowball Method.
I wasn’t deliberately trying to compare it to the Snowflake Method, which is a very well-known plotting method, but once I came up with the term, I realized how well it fits.
The idea is that you start with just a small ball of snow, pack it into a small snowball, and then send it down the mountain where it develops momentum and becomes huge, or, in the case of novel-writing, a whole, complete novel.
So, first, you need the mountain. That, to me, is the setting. I need to build up the setting before I begin. I need to know how the world works. What things people normally do in the world. This can involve research if I am working in the real world, as well as an understanding of how magic and fantasy creatures behave if there is any type of fantastical element.
Next, you need the snow. The snow, in my conception, is the characters. This typically involves the protagonist, the antagonist, and maybe one or two other characters. In mystery novels, I typically don’t like to know who really did it, so “antagonist” ends up being at least five different people. The victim counts as an antagonist because they have the answers that the detective needs, and then I develop at least four different suspects. I give all four (or more) the means, motive, and opportunity for killing the victim. So, for a mystery, I usually have one protagonist (the detective), plus the victim, plus at least four suspects.
Once you have a snowy mountain, then, you need to do some shaping. This can be as minimal as just starting your first scene, or it can be more detailed. I often put up occasional sign posts to pass – major events that I know I want to happen. Sometimes I plan in more detail, so it ends up looking more like a slalom course. For some time now, I have realized that it is pointless for me to outline the second half of the book in much detail because by the time it gets to that point, none of my plans are at all relevant, and I am too lazy to rework my outline, as some writers do.
I do do a fair amount of planning-as-I go. I use the scene template from another Holly Lisle class: How to Write A Novel, which is extremely useful for scene planning. She recommends planning about 3-5 scenes in advance, but I usually end up with more like 1-3. I find that the further out I go (so the third scene in that list) the less I know about what I actually need, so those end up being 3-5 scenes on their own because as I am writing, I realize I cannot quite jump to the end I had planned without a couple of other “ends” before that.
And sometimes, if the writing is just flowing, I don’t even bother doing scene planning.
I also will come up with ideas while writing for parts MUCH later in the book. And so at the bottom of my document (I write in one long document in FocusWriter when drafting), I often have a list of things I want to remember to add in at later points in the story.
So, these are the gate posts that the snowball needs to roll through.
But the key ingredient in this method is momentum. The more I write, the more momentum I have, and this is the reason that I write in one long document, even though I break it up with stars to indicate scene breaks. Rereading is crucial for me, even if it is only the last paragraph of the previous scene. Sometimes, I actually reread quite extensively. Some people can’t do this without being bogged down in editing. Thankfully, I use the [FIX THIS LATER] brackets, so I can just get what I need from the reread. I do occasionally correct easy-to-fix things like grammar or typos, or if I get a new idea that bridges to a scene I wrote later, I might add that. I don’t delete anything, though, because it’s all snow… And who knows, I might need to put it back on the snowball at a later point.
Anyway, so that’s it – the Snowball Method! Hopefully, it will be of use to someone.

Weekly Update

So, to continue from last week’s revelation, I have been working on the Rookery idea. I set up a World Anvil private world for it (so, no link yet — it is very rough), and have been working in Scrivener, going back and forth among the three main areas: plot, character, and setting. I am mostly putting in stuff about the setting that I used to have, but now can’t find (thought it was in another Scrivener project, actually). It’s not a huge deal, though, since it always changes overtime anyway. So, I am not too worried about having lost it.
The plot will probably stay loose, because when I get too detailed ahead of time, I tend to end up going off track and then it’s just a waste. But having a general sense of the main points is often useful, so I know where I am going and what I need to get there. But mainly character and setting. I have five characters established so far: a female main character, the Snape/Sherlock-like character, the main antagonist, a mentor, and the main character’s partner.
For setting, I have played around with religion and government a bit, but mostly explored magic, which is entirely divine magic — that is, there are real Gods who grant aid to their followers. Some of the aid is what in video games would be called buffs/debuffs, and this is what prayer and ritual can help — though in the end it is always the God’s decision, and so prayer/ritual is never a guarantee — but it is more likely than the other type of magic, which is essentially miracles, and where a God would step in in a much more dramatic and direct way. These are rare, and entirely at the Gods’ whims.
I have not yet decided how many Temples there are. Obviously, there’s the Rookery, which worships the Twins of Twilight and Dawn, though I had thought of it being the Goddess of Darkness, but I realized that the Goddess of Darkness is about exploring the Mystery of the Dark, whereas the Rookery is about hiding in the shadows, so they are different. Just because they get conflated in pop culture doesn’t mean I need to conflate them.
Anyway, that has been my work this week, and I am planning to continue it.

Weekly Update

So, I did not get much writing done; I have been watching Sherlock and playing chess against computer bots. When I play real people, I get tense and lightheaded, so I don’t do it often, and it’s true online as well as in person, though in person is definitely much more stressful.
Anyway, that is actually rather relevant because I made a revelation this morning. You may know that I have had a world idea for some time involving what I call the Rookery. It’s a play on the word “rook” which has several meanings: the bird, the chess piece, monks, thieves… Anyway, I thought: what if there was a religious organization with multiple deities/practices that were kind of all connected, and one of them is the Rookery, which, in addition to serving the Goddess of Darkness, also functions as a secret organization of spies, assassins, and thieves? And they leave a rook chess piece when they are recruiting, but other chess pieces when they have committed a “crime” (but because they are sanctioned by the state, it’s not exactly a crime, though also not exactly legal either — in a kind of grey area).
But that is just a setting. I didn’t have a story for it, so it has just been sitting there, waiting for the right moment.
I don’t know if this is the right moment, but I do know that I finally have a character for this setting. I’ve always been drawn to unlikable, intelligent types. For a long time, my two favorite fictional characters have been Madame Defarge from Tale of Two Cities and Severus Snape from Harry Potter. We can now add Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock to that — I haven’t read the real Doyle fiction, nor have I seen any other actual interpretations, so I don’t know whether I would have the same reaction to actual Sherlock Holmes, but that is rather moot. I have a type of character I love, but have never written.
And that, my friends, needs to change. And they would fit perfectly in The Rookery world. I think I know what I am doing for NaNo this year!