It apparently isn’t enough to keep up with all the drama the characters in my new story are creating for themselves. Now I am muddying the waters by interweaving their dramas and making each of them instruments in each other’s dilemma. Insanity. I don’t know why the writing is taking me in that direction, but […]
Last week, I cried so much that I couldn’t see straight. Oh wait – I couldn’t see straight because I didn’t have my glasses. Scratch that. Let’s just say I cried buckets. Not because I had to start over with the narrative for my new story. Though with 10K words already written, having to go back […]
My new work in progress (wip) is on a hit list. In the story, the heroine chases and pins down especially slippery pieces of information. I know who the assassins are – search engines. They have become so ubiquitous that the name of one of them is now the verb for using them all (“Google […]
I started to share another rant about my characters, but Zzzz…. – boring! They’re still misbehaving, but so what? They’re revealing a number of sources of conflict and forcing dramatic irony to materialize. After eighteen months of learning that I needed to rewrite, then learning how to rewrite and finally – actually doing it, I […]
They’re lurking. The miniscule clumps, strands, and bits of primeval origin that were essential in the inception and growth of the story, but now hamper its ability to flourish. The story has outgrown them, but still they cling, abetted by the author who is complicit in their continued existence. I don’t know that this is […]
By the time I recognized that I had been tying myself up in knots, I was already in a pretty tight tangle. Too happy that the narrative structure of my new story was all sorted out, I was unprepared to find that the plot structure wasn’t cooperating. The story was complete, already framed in my mind; and […]
Just as with Sparks, my second novel is in the driver’s seat and I’m just along for the ride. For months, when I’ve had spare brain cycles, I tried to figure out whether or not a portion of it should be shown in flashback. Now that finishing it is one of my main activities, I began […]
Now that I’ve eliminated my intrusive voice, coaxed the plots and subplots to play nicely together, gotten control of pacing, and overcome my hesitance with love scenes, it’s time to complete the set of revision artifacts (outline and scene notes) for moving the plots toward their climaxes. I was very excited about getting to this […]
I’m very excited. I’ve figured out how to make the sometimes revered, sometimes scorned, always discussed writer’s tool work for me. You know the one – the outline. I’d only begun using it because my editor advised that it was the next step for revising the story he’d critiqued. Now I’m outlining because it is […]
I started out this week looking (or listening?) for my voice. Along the way, I was unexpectedly thrilled to discover where my novel, Sunrise on the Pier, belongs. It may sound odd, but I didn’t choose a genre and then set out to write a novel; I wrote a novel and then had to find […]
