My Mental Marathon: Getting a Novel Published in 1 Lifetime!

Anatomy of a Winning Pitch

2011-02-24T16:12:00.006-05:00

First of all, forgive me the incredibly pompous title of this post. I just thought it was rather eye-catching and would make you want to read it. ;-)- So the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, Round 1 ("the Pitch") results are in ... and I didn't have the courage to look at the list myself. For the past week, I have been rolling the odds of moving on to Round 2 over and over in my head ... 20% seems like a very small number. When I sat for the Bar exam several years ago, there was something like a 77% passage rate. That's a nice, safe number!

Back to the ABNA contest ... one of my best friends knew how much this contest meant to me, so he (sneakily) checked the results and informed me that I had nothing to worry about! Hurray ... onward to Round 2! (Mind you, my only goal was to make it this far - anything else would be icing on the cake.)

I thought it might be beneficial to post my pitch here. Believe it or not, this endeavor is not just some ego trip. When I was writing the pitch, I googled "winning Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award pitches," hoping past winners had posted their work, and was shocked to only find one such post. It became clear to me right off the bat why this guy had advanced, and I found his pitch extremely helpful when crafting my own. So, in the spirit of public service, here goes:

Ambition, lust and madness threaten to tear apart the lives of three young adults bent on conquering New York City at the height of the Jazz Age. Hedonistic Manhattan pits beautiful, self-serving Lila Payton against her best friend - brainy, virtuous Rosemarie Dauber - in pursuit of Marcus Torrington, a handsome high-society attorney. This tenuous triangle is stretched to its limit when they encounter powerful politico Clayton Starwell. Lila, Marcus and Rosemarie are each forced to confront their most closely-guarded secrets: for Lila, it’s her romantic obsession with Clayton; for Marcus, it’s his inner demons stemming from a past tragedy; and for Rosemarie, it’s the moral tug-of-war between her upbringing and her desires.

SANCTUARY OF FOOLS, a 97,000-word historical novel told through the interwoven narratives of three magnetic, true-to-life characters, spotlights one of the most electrifying eras in American history. Written in an urbane-yet-accessible style, SANCTUARY OF FOOLS propels its readers on a dark and enthralling journey that begins with an explosion on Wall Street and ends with a murder-suicide in Midtown Manhattan. Painstakingly researched, SANCTUARY OF FOOLS caters to the historical fiction connoisseur’s craving for romanticized escapism without sacrificing character richness or historical nuance and accuracy.

A lot can happen in a year!

2011-02-06T06:30:00.007-05:00

So, if anyone out there is still reading this blog, here's an update on my life and writings, exactly one year after my last post. Why such a long lapse between updates? Well, the answer can be found below in timeline format (very unliterary, I know!):

January 2010 - Found out I was pregnant on the first "try" ... was expecting a 2 year attempt period like all my friends, so this was quite a shocker! Realized the clock was on for finishing my novel. My husband and I decided to move back down-state to be nearer loved ones and to have better gainful employment potential.
March 2010 - One of my dearest friends died of brain cancer (I had been visiting her every 2 weeks for many months, so I watched her condition decline. I wouldn't wish her illness on my worst enemy. She *is* truly the most courageous person I have ever known.)
April 2010 - Rented out our country cottage to a lovely couple and moved into a rented brownstone apartment in B'lyn. Finished my novel and sent it out to my trusty "editors" ... what did I call them? Oh yeah, my BEs!
May 2010 - Secured a long-term legal temp assignment.
August 2010 - My H2O broke 5 weeks early ... yikes, the co-sleeper wasn't even built yet! And I still had one final read-through to do on my manuscript before it would be agent-worthy. (Oh, and the most gorgeous, lovely, sweet, wonderful "man" came into my life - I suppose that's pretty significant!)
September 2010 - Hastily performed the final read-through and edits while the above-mentioned gorgeous, lovely, etc. man slept for three weeks (guess he wasn't as ready for his big debut as he'd thought!)
October 2010 - Began sending queries out to agents ... began receiving form rejection letters shortly thereafter. :-(
January 2011 - Tweaked my pitch and submitted my manuscript to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.

And that pretty much brings you up to date!

Awards & Why I Blog

2010-02-06T09:18:00.008-05:00

Hi all. Today's post is going to be short and sweet (a real challenge for my verbosity-minded self.) First, I want to thank Ann Elle Altman for giving me a Superior Scribbler Award (I've arrived! ;-] ) Now it's my turn to pass it on. My list consists of 5 terrific blogs that currently have less than 100 followers (but not for long ...)

1) Laugh.Write.Play

2) The Domesticated Writer

3) Booknapped

4) Patti Nielson

5) Less Meat, More Veggies

Now for the second part of this post - a 5-point rundown on why I enjoying blogging about writing.

1) Great community-building tool, especially considering the isolated nature of our passion.

2) Excellent resource - it seems like someone out there has experienced whatever frustration you are currently undergoing as a writer.

3) Fun diversion from creative writing.

4) Good way to keep yourself on track (because you know people out there are actually aware of your progress, or lack thereof).

5) Helps you develop yet another important writing skill - the art of blogging. ;-)

That's all for today. For all you Award Winners, in case you hadn't figured this out already, just upload the Superior Scribbler jpg into one of your blog posts, then click on the Edit HTML tab at the top to get the code.

WHERE and WHEN Do You Write?

2010-01-28T11:25:00.011-05:00

I'm coming to the end of reworking my WIP rewrite in accordance with the feedback I've been getting from my dear friends and family. As always, they've been tough on me (in a good way!) and I've learned a lot. I'm feeling inspired about pushing forward with Part 2 of the book. It's still a daunting task, but the comments I've received have given me a roadmap as to what my readers would like to see as the story unfolds.

So now I want to talk about a seemingly mundane topic that we all have had to address in our writing endeavors: WHERE and WHEN to write. I'd like to take an informal poll - how many of you are creatures of habit, having to write in exactly the

same spot, at exactly the same time each day? That's generally how I'd describe myself. I'm a morning person (always have been) and so most of my WIP has been composed between 7AM and noon on the downstairs sofa where I'm now sitting.

I'm starting to rethink my rigid writing pattern, however. I need to pump up the output so I can get this thing finished and ready for a final beta-reading. (Remember, the goal is to have this puppy off to agents and small publishing houses by the fall of 2010.) So that means I have to be adaptable. Our house is VERY small and my husband works from home. He has a loud voice, which is great for Skyping tech guys in the Ukraine, but not so great for his aspiring author wife downstairs (did I mention that our bedroom is a loft-thingy with no doors?)

I recently started going to the cafe in town to do some writing. It gets noisy around breakfast and lunch, and at times I'm afraid I might explode from all the herbal tea I have to drink in order to feel legitimate, but it's still better than home. I also suffer from Easy Distraction Syndrome (with a strong disposition toward Eavesdropaholicism), so it is a bit of a challenge to stay on task.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Today I'm turning to YOU for advice. How do you block out the world and find your writing zone?

Have a Good Laugh ... at Your Writing's Expense

2010-01-20T07:37:00.003-05:00

The feedback has been coming in, slowly but steadily, on Part 1 of my WIP. As always, my BEs (old and new) continually impress me with their thoughtful analysis and creative thinking. From their comments, I believe I have made a significant amount of progress since the first draft, but of course, there is still a lot for me to work on.

I've noticed a strange bi-product arise out of the feedback process - humor. Not so much humor in my writing ... wait, let me rephrase that ... not so much intentional humor in my writing, but little quirks in my style that give rise to guffaws. Some of you might be horrified at the thought of a reader laughing out loud at a passage which you, as a writer, take very seriously. But I've got to tell you, I've come to believe it's good for the soul, and the writing, to be able to take a step back and just laugh at your work.

My mother and I were in stitches the other day over my overuse of some words. We had to stop our critique session just to laugh and parody it a bit more. This called to mind an assignment in Junior Year Honors English (many, many years ago) where the teacher asked us to write a short, satirical piece based on one of the books we'd read in class that year. I chose The Scarlett Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. I wrote a page of narrative in which every other line elaborated upon the protagonist's "ignominiously burning bosom." (I still remember that after all these years!) I recall getting an "A" for my cheekiness, and I never once worried whether Mr. Hawthorne was turning over in his grave about it. I imagine he would have found my parody amusing.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: We as writers should let ourselves go a little when we receive feedback on our work. Don't be afraid to embrace the humor in your writing process - have a good laugh at your own expense from time to time. I promise it won't leave you feeling low about yourself or your capabilities ... quite the opposite ... sure you'll need to fix those shortcomings at some point, but a bit of levity may help you realize you're dealing with hills, not mountains.

Book Review: Move over Nobel Laureate, Make Way for a Newcomer!

2010-01-12T08:04:00.015-05:00

I said in an earlier post that I would never openly disparage another writer on my blog, and I plan to stick to that promise. I have no problem with a little anonymous disparaging, though! I recently picked up a highly-regarded book whose author won a Nobel Laureate for writing it.

So I read, and I read, and by page 100, I didn't hate what I was reading, but I didn't love it, either. Ninety-percent of the book was exposition - well-crafted exposition, to be sure, but distancing exposition all the same. (Now we all know that I am not one to talk when it comes to the overuse of exposition, but hey, no one's given me a Nobel prize, and for good reason!) I'm not saying this author didn't deserve the prize, because at the end of the day, literary tastes are subjective. I respect the fact that one reader's treasure is another reader's yawn. But I decided not to fight my opinions, and put the book down in accordance with my "new policy."

This new policy states that, if I am not fully engrossed in a book after 100 pages, I have no "obligation" to continue reading it. There was a time when I would struggle through a book to the very end, no matter how bored I was by it. That's because I viewed quitting as a failure on my part (if I were smarter, I'd be "getting this" ... must not give in to my own frailties ...) In recent years, I gained the confidence to say, I don't have to impress anyone with what I read. If I can't get into a book, it means it's not the right fit for me - like a blind date with no chemistry. Neither party is superior to the other, it's simply time to go our seperate ways.

I was still in Australia when I set the novel aside, so I went to a small bookstore in the town where we were staying to hunt for something new. I came across a memoir called "Bruce & Me" by a local author named Oren Siedler which looked intriguing. Ms. Siedler is an American whose family immigrated to Australia when she was a child.

The theme of the memoir appealed to me immediately: the author was on a quest to understand her Bohemian parents - specifically her highly-intelligent, vagabond, outlaw father - and the events of her extremely unconventional childhood split between two continents. Two years ago, I wrote a book about a young woman who struggles to understand her family, specifically her highly-intelligent outlaw sister, and what it means to be the child of vagabond, Bohemian parents. Unlike Ms. Siedler, I grew up in a very straight-laced household, and could only imagine what such a life would be like.

My unpublished first novel's greatest failing was not the fact that I hadn't actually lived the adventures I described. It was the fact that I failed to explore my characters' psyches in a meaningful way. The situations I created were interesting, but that did little to enhance the cardboard cut-outs I'd put in place to experience them.

Ms. Siedler proves that a good memoir is about much more than reciting one's life-story. She creates full, rich characters out of herself and her family. Her writing style is clear and clean, and subtly age-appropriate to each phase of her life. Her reactions to the confusing world around her evolve as she grows up. She is always introspective, but never engages in heavy-handed philosophizing. Her writing is witty, warm, and nostalgic at times, but never sentimental. Put simply, Oren Siedler has created a compelling, endearing read out of her quest to resolve unanswered questions about her childhood. In the end, she realizes that some questions may never be answered, and that that's okay. She makes peace with her past and embraces the future with optimism.

I don't think the book has distribution in the US yet, but you can buy it online here. And while we all know that literary tastes are subjective, I can pretty much guarantee you'll agree your money was well spent!

A new year's writing resolution that just might change my WHOLE LIFE ...

2010-01-05T16:18:00.011-05:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about coming up with a writing resolution for 2010, but considering how many goals I currently have in place (rewrite Part 1 of my WIP over the next month or 2, then complete drafts of Parts 2 and 3 by mid-spring, etc.) I wasn't sure I had any room in my life for one. And then, a few days ago, it hit me like a ton of bricks - my New Year's Writing Resolution is to let go of all that pressure.

Let me back-track and tell you a little bit about myself (I have a crazy hunch many of you super-motivated and disciplined writers will be able to relate, at least in part ...) Let's go all the way back to my college days. My first year of school, I got very mediocre grades. My social life was great, but I hadn't found my academic groove yet (although, looking back, I recall spending most of my time in the library and computer lab.) The problem was that I still didn't know myself very well, and I certainly didn't know my optimum study habits ... whatever had worked in high school just wasn't cutting it with higher education.

Fast forward to my senior year of college. I had watched my grades steadily rise from Bs to straight As. I was like a well-oiled machine, and could spend even more time with my friends because I knew how to get the most out of my study time. My secret was simple - I did everything linearly. I absolutely never worked on two papers or projects or test preps at once. I would start one as soon as it was assigned (even if the due date was months away), finish it, and move onto the next. This system was perfectly orderly and efficient, allowing me to maximize the results of my efforts.

But there was a residual problem: the habit stuck and now that's how I live my entire life. Looking back over my 20s, I structured my existence around this principle. I did everything one-step-at-a-time. Grad school, get job ("no time for creative writing - must build serious TV career"), more grad school ("no time for relationships or writing - must build even more serious legal career"), true love found, marriage, great job ("now I can write"), lose job ("now I can write even more"), only work part-time b/c must focus on writing ("can't think about furthering my legal career or starting a family 'til I finish this book.")

That is actually the way my mind works. Many of you are probably thinking, "Whoa, that's scary." Reading it on the screen before me now for the first time, I'm thinking the same thing. I have allowed my goal of becoming a published author to become more of an obsession than a passionate hobby. Somewhere along the way, I got it in my mind that, like a college research paper, I have to neatly tie off my writing dream before I can move on to the next project.

The other day, my mom emailed me saying that her high school crush just published his first novel. He's 74. This got me to thinking about how incredibly lucky we writers are. Of all the "dream careers" (becoming a movie star, professional athlete, rock star, etc.), ours is the only one that doesn't have a shelf life. You could be 300 pounds with a smoker's cough, living in a Florida retirement community, but your pen name may bring to mind visions of gorgeous 20 year-old heroines travelling the world, being pursued by dashing men. Our shelves stay open as long as our minds are working.

So where does that leave me for 2010? Well, I'm going to make a conscious effort to just chill with all my writing goals. That's not to say that I'm going to become slack, but I plan to focus less on "getting it done" and more on enjoying the ride. And most importantly, I'm going to embrace the fact that this "ride" may well last a lifetime, and it would be an awful shame to speed past all the wonderful stops along the way.

2010 ... A Writer's Odyssey?

2009-12-28T17:50:00.006-05:00

Can you believe it's almost that time ... a new year? And not just any new year, but one that, like 1984 and 2000, has been historically celebrated by society's collective zeitgeist. Isn't it weird to think that things we take for granted now, like Skype and sending Russian billionaires into space, used to be the stuff of sci-fi movies?

And look at all the tools currently available to us as writers ... super-fast computers and manuscript formatting software (not to mention my personal favorite - that million "room" research library known as the internet.) But shave away the fancy trimmings and writing is still writing, just as it was for Jane Austin, Herman Melville and all the rest. It's the same impassioned, draining, exhilarating, daunting experience as it ever was, and no new technology is ever going to change that.

I originally wanted to do a post about new year's writing resolutions, and I may still do one, but I have to admit that, at the moment, I'm not really in a good space for such a topic. I was afraid this might happen (more on that in a moment.) We're still "on holiday," as my husband calls it, and I've allowed myself a little time away from my writing. My beta readers are hard at work back home, and hopefully they'll have some initial feedback on Part 1 of my WIP when I return in January.

Theoretically, everything is on track, but psychologically, something is amiss. I find that when I take a step back from my intense daily writing schedule, my Inner Demons start to rear their ugly heads. At this moment, I am feeling very down in the dumps about my potential career as a writer. I can't put my finger on exactly why I'm feeling this way, but that lingering "lump" is definitely in my chest. Do you ever feel that way? And do you find that re-immersing yourself in your writing generally cures these ills, or does it require something more?

I don't have a FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO for today ... I welcome YOUR tips on how to overcome these writer's humps that seem to constantly creep up in our paths ...

Are you using ALL your senses?

2009-12-18T15:25:00.008-05:00

I remember a passage in Elizabeth Lyon's Manuscript Makeover which said that writers often only focus on the sense of sight in their first drafts, and that all the other senses have to be worked into subsequent drafts. Isn't that odd? I mean, that sure describes the first draft of my novel. Only now am I thinking about how a place smells and sounds. Why is that? And why is it that the problem is so common that Ms. Lyon could make such a generalized statement with confidence?

I don't have the answers to these questions, but I find it comforting to know that I'm not alone in my sensory short-sightedness. So now I'd like to do a little exercise with you - one that you can do at home, or wherever you might be spending the holidays. At the moment, I happen to be in a fantastic place for sensory overload - Australia. I've never been to a subtropical continent before, so this is all very new to me. We touched down in Sydney yesterday morning (which is technically tomorrow for all of you in the States ... I think ... ? :-]-). I took a long walk through the area where we're staying (Bronte) and here was my sensory response (an abridged version, that is, because I could go on and on ...)

SIGHT - I was thrilled by the sight of rainbow-colored "lorrikeets" flying out of stubby, waxy-leaved trees so they could perch on low, red-tiled rooftops.

SOUND - I found myself startled every time I heard what sounded like a toddler babbling, followed by a monkey shrieking, only to realize I was listening to bird calls.

SMELL - I couldn't get away from the fragrant odor of eucalyptus oil mixed with a hint of sea brine, and I didn't want to!

TOUCH - It started to drizzle on my way home, and I felt as if I was being followed by a personal assistant continually spraying me with a fine lukewarm mist.

TASTE - When I got home, I opened a bottle of Australian Cab-Merlot and swished the fruity, woody liquid around in my mouth before swallowing.

I'm going to try and do a new five senses exercise every day I'm here (but I promise not to bore you with any more of them!)

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Do you have trouble bringing all 5 senses to the forefront of your writing? Maybe this is because you, like me, don't always make the time to be aware of all that you're sensing in your own life. Try this little exercise wherever you are and see if it sharpens your writing ... I'd love to read YOUR sensory experiences!

Feedback: Friend or Foe?

2009-12-13T07:08:00.010-05:00

I've been getting so much fantastic feedback on my last two posts (which can be found here and here.) I now know I have a ton of rewriting ahead of me on Chapter 1, but this is not a bad thing. I actually find it quite inspiring when people tell me I need to rework my writing (am I crazy?! Maybe ... ) I generally take it to mean that my beta readers are engaged in what I've shown them, and that they think I have it in me to do better. However, I don't respond positively to all feedback, which leads us to the subject of today's post ...

If you're like me, you're careful to show your writing only to people whom you trust, i.e., people who you believe will give you strong, constructive feedback. But sometimes one can get blindsided. I want to tell you a little story about something that happened to me when I sent my first unpublished novel around for informal review.

I sent a copy to an individual (let's call the person Sam) who runs an independent publishing company. Sam is a very nice, helpful person in general, and a friend of one of my good friends/BEs. I had met Sam before and found them to be warm and intelligent. (All the markings of an excellent beta reader, right?)

That's why it shocked the socks off me when Sam ripped my manuscript apart (not literally, although they might as well have.) Now here's where I want to pause and deconstruct exactly why this person's critiques were so jarring, and in my opinion, detrimental. My novel was a faintly auto-biographical coming-of-age tale with a criminal trial in the background (that part was pure fiction!) The nuts and bolts of the trial were not so important as how it affected the family. Sam's comments were along the lines of, "I wasn't at all interested in the family's dramas; why didn't you make the trial the center of the book?; I think you should have gone into detail about the politics behind the case," etc.

My first reaction: "Sounds like a fascinating book, but it's not the one I'm writing." I think I actually told Sam that, along with thanking them for taking the time to read my manuscript and to give me feedback. But in all honesty, I wished I'd never given my writing to this person. I felt numb, and in shock. And most of all, my instincts told me that something wasn't right about what I'd just been told.

I shared the experience with my friend who knows Sam, and she was immediately sympathetic. She pointed out that Sam publishes mostly politically-oriented non-fiction, and it did not surprise her, in restrospect, that they would be so focused on the criminal trial aspect. But my friend, who used to work in publishing, also acknowledged that Sam's critiques were just plain out of line. She validated my hunch that a good beta reader/editor should respect the genre and goals of the author, and not try to impose their own literary vision of the world on the writer. (I later met a professional copy editor who said the same thing.)

So what can we take away from all this? See below ...

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Does the feedback you're getting pass the "smell test," i.e., are your instincts telling you there's something foul about it? I'm not talking about getting all touchy when someone tells you something you don't want to hear about your writing (fyi, one of the best critiques I ever received was from a BE who said, "Your protagonist is completely mechanical, you can do better than this, Cammie!") It's key to remember that your reader/editors' role is simply to bring out the best in YOUR writing, not to try and turn you into a ghost writer for their own ideas.

Cyber Beta Readers Rule!

2009-12-10T09:38:00.004-05:00

Without further ado, here's the second part of Chapter 1 of my untitled WIP. (May I suggest that you read, if you haven't already, the first half, so as to get some context.) I've decided to save my analyses of the art of critiquing for the next post, so stay tuned ...

(Brief formatting note re Chapter 1 - the section you read the other day is separated from the one below by "***").

Marcus awoke with a start. He tried to open his eyes, but there was something covering the left one, and the right one was having difficulty focusing. Light flooded into the room, exacerbating his throbbing headache. He closed his eyes and reached for the top of his head, which was covered with a bandage.

“No, no, don’t touch that, Darling.” That doting, chirping voice, bathed in a faint vapor of gin and vermouth, could belong to none other than Marcus’s mother, Minnie. He wrenched open his right eye and could almost make out her diminutive frame, haloed by the deluge of light all around her.

“Where am …”

Birdlike fingers were now stroking and tugging at the bandaged cap on Marcus’s head. “Your beautiful hair, all mashed down like that. You’ll look a fright when they take this thing off, but don’t you worry. As soon as they let you go, we’ll run you right over to Alfred’s to get it washed and cut and …”

“Mother, where am I? What …”

“Hush now, my angel. Don’t get yourself worked up. Everything’s going to be fine. The doctors say you’ll make a full recovery.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, there was some kind of trouble down on Wall Street today, a bomb or something.”

Minnie’s nonchalance in reporting a bomb explosion, especially in light of her sincere anxiety over her son’s mussed hair, might have seemed odd, disturbing even, to a passerby, if there had been any. But not to Marcus.

The world was rapidly coming into focus through his right eye now, although his mind still felt somewhat mired in a fog. As suspected, he was in a hospital bed, in a hospital room. It appeared to be a private room, for which he was grateful. The only other person in the room was his mother, who perched on a metal chair at his foot. She must not have been there long because she was still bundled in her fox-tail coat, the one she wore from September to May because of her tendency to get chills.

Marcus attempted a smile at his mother to show her that he was glad she had come, but the tension in his face muscles triggered a painful jolt to the back of his head, and he yelped. Minnie was out of her chair and hovering once more.

“Darling!”

“I’m alright, just a little pain in the back of my …”

“Well I should say. You suffered a nasty blow to the top of your head. But don’t worry, it didn’t do any permanent harm. There was a nice doctor in here just before you woke – I can’t remember his name, unfortunately – anyway, he said at the very worst, you might have the teensiest little red scar underneath your hair, but that’s it. You’ll be back at Yale in no time.”

Yes, of course, I have to get back to school, Marcus thought. Life has to return to normal. No time to stop and take stock of what had just happened. That’s the way Minnie had raised him: you put on a smile and act as if everything is just fine no matter what blows life deals you. As a boy, Marcus had admired his mother’s ability to maintain a stiff upper lip after his father had left them, and again after Edgar, Minnie’s second husband, ran off right after the twins’ birth. It was only in recent years that Marcus realized his mother’s stoicism was made up of about twenty percent personal resolve, with the rest being attributed to some combination of gin, vodka, and whisky.

There was a light rap at the door, which stood ajar. A pale-faced, be-speckled man of indeterminate age entered the room. Marcus noticed his mother sit up straight, pushing a wayward auburn curl back behind here ear and straightening her feathered cap. She then stood up, flashing the doctor her brightest smile.

“No need to get up, Mrs. Beaulieu. Good afternoon, Mr. Torrington. How are we feeling?”

“Alright. My head hurts a little, but that’s about it.”

“That’s what we like to here. That little lug nut came at you at an alarming speed. It could have killed you had it hit a few inches lower. Thankfully, all it did was knock you unconscious. And here we are now, wide awake.”

The doctor smiled, not in anyone’s particular direction, and Minnie smiled at him. According to them, that was about all that needed to be said.

“What exactly happened?”

The doctor shook his head, half-smiling, half-frowning in a way that made him look like a circus clown. “There was an explosion downtown, a bomb they think. Probably the work of the Bolsheviks, the Anarchists, maybe. I’m sure the IWW had a hand in it somehow.”

Minnie clucked in distaste at the mention of the radical socialist trade union. Marcus’s mind was slower to process the doctor’s words. Anarchic unionists bombing the stock exchange. His grandfather would have been the first to say, “Let’s not jump to any conclusions. Just because someone’s working class and a unionist, it doesn’t make them a terrorist.”

Suddenly, the misty fog in Marcus’s mind dissipated and he bolted upright in a panic. “Where’s Grandfather?”

Marcus felt his mother and the doctor’s hands pressing him back against the bed. Minnie was cooing “there, there”s and the doctor was mumbling, “Take it easy, champ.”

“Where is he?”

“Don’t worry, champ, he’s in good hands.”

“Good hands?” Marcus sat up again, but this time, he was not going to be pushed back down. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Marcus, please.”

Marcus didn’t give a damn at that moment about his mother’s embarrassment in front of the doctor. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” The last word got lost deep in Marcus’s throat. He fell back against the bed and shut his eyes, squeezing them tight to stem off tears. His head was pounding so hard that he did not recognize the pulsating beats as coming from his own body.

“No, your grandfather is not dead, son.”

Marcus opened his eyes. “He’s not?”

“No.” The doctor hesitated, and then smiled like a fool. “Mr. Torrington, your grandfather is in good hands down at Broad Street Hospital. They’re keeping him in the intensive care unit there.”

Marcus sat up slowly. “Intensive care? In a different hospital?”

Minnie chimed in: “That’s where they took everyone after the blast. It was a ghastly sight. I absolutely insisted they transfer you up here, so you could be near home. Unfortunately, your grandfather’s condition didn’t allow for him to be moved.”

“Yes,” the doctor said, “your grandfather apparently sustained some rather substantial injuries from the blast. I had my nurse telephone over to Broad Street, and she reported that Mr. Torrington is in stable condition at the moment, although it’s difficult to say how soon, or how completely, he’ll recover.”

“What are you saying? Can he talk? Can he see? Can he walk? What?”

“There, there, no need to shout, Darling.”

“Answer me!”

“Mr. Torrington, I’m sure the good doctors at …”

“Answer me!” Every muscle in Marcus’s body seemed to be twitching, so much so that he couldn’t move. He could not do what he wanted, which was to climb out of the hospital bed and shake this grinning idiot until the facts fell from his gaping mouth.

A secret button must have been pushed, because a slim young nurse in pristine white appeared, her arms draped beside her shapeless hips. In her right hand was a syringe. Marcus decided not to fight. He glanced calmly from his mother’s pitying expression to the doctor’s condescendingly serene gaze, and then looked up at the serious young woman, who whispered, “This won’t hurt, Mr. Torrington.”

“Sure, whatever,” Marcus said, offering up his left arm. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift into downy nothingness. For years to come, when the anxiety gripped his throat at night and threatened to choke the life out of him, he would try to remember this deep sleep over all else that had happened that day.

Holding my breath and jumping off the high-dive ...

2009-12-08T19:28:00.021-05:00

That's how I feel about what I'm about to do. I just sent out the first third (possibly fourth) of my untitled WIP to my trusted Brilliant Editors (or Beta Editors ... whatever their official title, they're the "BE"s I'm always referring to). But I don't plan to stop with them. I want YOU ALL to read it too. Okay, not 15 chapters (36,000 words)-worth, but the first chapter, at least. I'd love your initial reaction, or if you're more of a minutia-oriented reader, feel free to pick it apart line-by-line. It's your call.

Stay tuned for my next post, which is going to be about good v. bad feedback. Like everyone, I've had my share of both. (Actually, that's not true - I have only ever had one experience where I felt the critique was so off the mark that it truly jarred me. I later learned from industry professionals that this person - an editor - went completely against Literary Editor Etiquette 101. But that's a story for next week ...) Can you tell I'm stalling? Alright ... *sucking in breath* ... here goes ... *BIG SPLASH!!!*

Chapter 1

That September morning had been so eerily bright and blue that Marcus would later wonder if some cosmic force had been trying to warn him, and everyone else ambling along Wall Street that day, to be on high alert. He would chastise himself for running early, for once, that morning. His grandfather had made a luncheon reservation at Fraunces Tavern, just around the corner from his William Street office, but that was for twelve-thirty. Had Marcus arrived closer to the appointed hour, they would have gone directly to the restaurant by way of South William, instead of strolling up William and down Wall Street to kill time. However, these thoughts did not yet occupy Marcus’s mind that day when he met the tall, commanding figure whose dark eyes and thick, wavy hair - no longer chestnut but ash-colored - looked so much like his own, add forty-seven years.

Even though he had been to his grandfather’s office at least a dozen times over the years, Marcus still found himself awed and humbled by the grandiosity of it all. His eyes darted from intricately molded ceiling to gilt and mirrored wall as the two men walked from the office of Torrington Wilke Baker to the elevator bay. They stepped into the elevator and Marcus’s grandfather nodded to the short attendant wearing a crisp red suit. The operator punched and pulled the cage’s brass buttons in a deliberate way that made him appear very proud of his role in controlling access to and from this megalithic granite tower.

“I feel honored you decided to spend your day off down here with me, Marcus.”

“I couldn’t think of a better way to spend the day.”

Oliver Marcus Torrington the First laughed in that low, rumbling way that had always made Marcus feel safe and secure as a child. “The last thing I would have wanted to do on a day off from my first week at Yale would have been to spend time with my family. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my father. But he never seemed to want to stray more than half a mile from the Edenbrook campus.” The creases around Oliver’s deep-set eyes multiplied as his lips tightened. “Seven years at that damn place was enough for me.”

Marcus and his grandfather rode the rest of the way to the lobby in silence. Marcus knew better than to make some glib comment when his grandfather brooded about the past. Oliver’s peers at Edenbrook had made it clear to him at an early age that the son of an Academy history teacher was not, and never would be, one of them. Marcus suspected that graduating top of his high school class, going on to Yale with many of them, and then building a financial empire, had not, at least in his grandfather’s eyes, completely erased this hierarchy.

The elevator arrived in the lobby and the man in red opened the cage door and bid a good day to his two passengers. Marcus admired the swirling Japonica designs on the mirrors which paneled the lobby. This was the third office building Oliver had been based out of in his almost forty years as founder and chief financial officer of the ever-growing Torrington Wilke Baker. The brokerage firm had moved into this turn-of-the-century tower just days after the last stone had been laid. It was the only one of his grandfather’s offices that Marcus had ever been to. The building itself had long been branded in his mind as an appendage to his grandfather’s hearty physique.

As if reading his grandson’s thoughts, Oliver said, “I hope you’re prepared to say good-bye to this old girl.”

“What?”

“This building – she’s been good to us over the past two decades, but I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be able to hold us. Torrington Wilke Baker is expanding.”

“Moving?”

“Yes sir. We hired six new accountants over the past few months, and right now they’re sitting two to a cubicle.”

Marcus and Oliver passed through the brass and glass revolving doors and out onto the damp, narrow street. Marcus inhaled the pungent odor of seawater, freshly-washed stone, burnt coal and just a hint of horse manure, any combination of which would forever trigger thoughts of this day in his mind for years to come.

“So when might you make this move, Grandfather?”

“That I’m not sure of. Winston has been looking into office spaces in the area, but has yet to find one that meets all our needs. Hopefully sometime next spring.”

Marcus wanted to ask his grandfather whether he himself would follow his firm to the new location, or might he see this as a good time to retire. Oliver was, after all, about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday in a few weeks. But Marcus thought better of this question. Mortality – even slowing down – was not a topic of conversation ever entertained by Oliver Marcus Torrington the First. So as the two men turned left onto Wall Street, Marcus decided to steer the conversation to something light and inoffensive.

“I’m getting hungry. What do …” The reverberant gonging of Trinity Church’s noon bell absorbed the last part of Marcus’s question.

“Yes, me too. Fraunces Tavern has the best …” The church bells swallowed the dish which Oliver proposed to Marcus.

As they continued ambling down the cobblestone street, Marcus was struck by the larger-than-life quality of the view before him. Straight ahead was the pink spire of Trinity Church, one-time spiritual home of Alexander Hamilton. And coming up on the right was Federal Hall, where the country’s first president was inaugurated, and where the Bill of Rights was passed – the spiritual home of democracy, one could say.

Marcus mused that, were someone to drop down out of the sky in front of this impressive structure, they might think they were in Ancient Greece, but for the austere bronze face of George Washington peering down on them from his pedestal on the steps. And finally, Broad Street came into sight on Marcus’s left, and with it, the Corinthian topped columns and highly-ornamented pediment of America’s temple of finance – the New York Stock Exchange. Across the street stood the temple’s high priestess - the office of J.P. Morgan & Company.

The twelfth and final gong sounded, and the low hum of busy bankers chattering on the street could be heard once more. Marcus glanced at his grandfather, whose brown eyes danced as he took in the neighborhood that had nurtured his ambition all these years. Marcus was about to comment on their good fortune at having such lovely weather when a deafening noise, unlike anything he had ever heard, roared through his head. And with it came a strange new odor, one that was acrid, thick, and just a little sweet.

In years to come, Marcus would not be able to remember with any clarity the order of events which ensued. They became like items for sale in a retail catalogue – detached from one another, adorned with romanticized illustrations. Because Marcus’s eyes were soon filled with scratchy bits of dust, he would have to rely on his imagination to create these pictures.

First there was the sound of metal shrieking and crunching. He saw this as a steel-jawed giant waking from a long slumber, bearing its teeth as it half-yawned, half-screamed itself into consciousness. Then there were the shards of glass which cut into his back as he doubled over in the street, trying to stay small. The catalogue illustration for these would depict tiny prisms hailing from heaven, drowning in an ocean of dust and debris. And then there were the chunks of hot metal which beat all around Marcus’s feet. These were pictured as sunbursts shooting from the sky.

And then, when an object (which Marcus would later learn was nothing more than a two inch lug nut) made contact with his scalp, he added the final picture to his catalogue. A wash of bright white, followed by black.

***

There ends the first half of Chapter 1 ... I'll include the 2nd half in my next post ... ;-)

Blog-to-Blog: What we all can learn from Amy March ...

2009-12-05T08:50:00.015-05:00

Take a look at this wonderfully provocative post from Megan Rebekah Blogs. So what's your initial reaction? When I read that "Tweet" about metaphorically burning one's manuscript, I instinctively cringed, as I think any writer who has slaved for months (or years) over a WIP would. And then I had this delayed reaction: "More brilliant words have never been written!" I realized that I myself had basically "burned" the first draft of my current WIP. Here's the back story ...

After I finished the first (personally revised but without beta input) draft of my 160,000 word (roughly 400-page) novel, I sent it around to my BEs for feedback. I got some great critiques - overall, everyone thought it was an enjoyable read. However, a number of people pointed out lags and sags in certain subplots, a couple of dead-weight characters that got too much page time, and some personality inconsistencies. Oh, and let's not forget that little exposition problem I keep mentioning ... ;-)-

After sifting though all this feedback, I felt confused. It was as if I was standing at a multi-pronged fork in the road. One road (a dead-end, really) led to abandoning the novel completely and moving on to something else. This was the road I took with my first novel. However, I had no desire to go there again with this one. So that left two other paths not-yet-travelled ... one leading to the revision of what I'd already written, and the other to a rewrite from scratch.

Of course, the latter sounded like such a monumental undertaking that I didn't even consider it, at first. The sensible choice would be to simply revise my current manuscript, right? And then I thought, what if I spend the next 3-6 months patching up holes and cobbling together new passages with old ones, only to end up with a disjointed Frankenstein monster of a novel?

So what does all this have to do with Amy March, some of you may be asking. (Others of you may be saying, "Who is Amy March?") As a child, Amy March was, in my opinion, the most dastardly villain in all of young adult fiction. Yes, I am referring to Jo's youngest sister in Little Women. She got on my nerves from the get-go with her princessy ways, but the moment she threw Jo's novel into the fire, she became my arch-nemesis. Even as a child of 9, or however old I was when I read Louisa May Alcott's classic, I identified with Jo's trials and tribulations as an aspiring writer. And even when Jo forgave her bratty little sister, I didn't. I mean, how dare Amy burn the manuscript that Jo had toiled over for months?

If I recall correctly, Jo came to realize that rewriting her book was not the end of the world. In fact, it might even be a blessing in disguise. So, nobly, she set to recreating the entire story (and staying on her sister's good side!) Of course, Jo's literary struggles didn't end there. When she finally got a professional editor (her eventual true love ...) to read her book, he dismissed it outright and told her to go back to the drawing board!

So how does this tale fit into our lives as writers? Perhaps it reminds us that we can always improve, and that no time spent writing is ever wasted. Does this mean we should never be satisfied with the work we produce? Of course not! (Goodness knows many of us - myself included - revise our work into the ground to the point that someone just needs to pry the computer out of our hands and put an end to the cycle!)

But I think we all know, deep down inside, when a piece truly does still need work. Start by listening to your beta readers - what are their first impressions? I'll save my detailed analyses of "constructive verses detrimental feedback" for another post, but for now, let's just assume that you have received enough helpful feedback to know that your WIP misses the mark in some way(s). Now it's time to ask yourself, are these critiques minor enough that reworking a few lines here and there (rewriting a couple of passages, or perhaps one chapter, at most) will suffice? Or is what lays ahead of you a major overhauling of plotlines, characters, and writing style?

If you answered yes to that last question (as I recently did), I strongly urge you to go down Burn-That-Book Road. Just remember, we're talking about a metaphorical burning here. Tuck that first draft into your "writing graveyard" folder and open up a brand new Word doc. Do just what that Tweet said and launch into your rewrite from memory. I think you'll be pleasantly shocked, as I was, by how freely and quickly the ideas flow, and by how much more you like the words falling from your fingertips the second time around.

Walk the Walk!

2009-11-28T08:29:00.020-05:00

So my husband and I came down to the city for our annual gorge-fest with loved ones, and to spend the weekend. Aside from hanging out with friends, catching a show and eating all the wonderfully exotic foods that are so lacking upstate, another thing I was looking forward to doing while here was "walking in my characters' shoes." My novel opens on Wall Street, on a mid-day in September. I hadn't been down to Wall Street in quite a while, and the last time I was there, I certainly wasn't studying it through the eyes of a writer.

So that's where I headed late afternoon yesterday (perish the thought of getting out in time to actually be there at noon, when the lighting and general mood of the place might be more akin to how it would be in my book.) It was probably just as well that I arrived right before sundown, because there were only 25 or so tourists loitering about, as opposed to the usual 200. I was free to whisk between streets, craning my neck and talking to myself. (Yup, that's exactly what I did - I was in full-on eccentric writer mode!)

I'm so glad I made the pilgrimage; while what I currently have written would certainly pass, now that I have sharper visuals of where the opening events take place, I can add heightened color to each moment leading up to the catastrophe that sets my book in motion.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: I often wonder how much artistic license we writers are allowed to give ourselves when it comes to place-setting. There will likely come a time in all our writings when we'll have to rely on diligent research and imagination alone to bring a certain locale to life. However, when visiting the real thing is possible, I strongly urge every writer to do so. There's something extremely inspiring about walking in your characters' footsteps!

Finding Your "Zone"

2009-11-20T09:15:00.009-05:00

No, this is not gonna be an adult-themed post, I promise! I think you fellow-writers know what I'm referring to ... that time/space/mentality (somewhat akin to nirvana) that you somehow reach - when writing becomes pure (or close to pure) joy, as opposed to a loathsome task that depletes your self-esteem. I believe the key to finding your "zone" is by getting to know yourself as a writer, and this takes trial and error.

I want to digress for a moment (but this digression will lead back to my main topic) and talk about Nanowrimo. As you may recall from an earlier post of mine, I credit Nanowrimo with kickstarting my writing "career." I had been boring my friends to death for over a year saying, "I really want to start a novel." The problem was, I didn't know how. I'd had several "false starts" since college ... cracking my knuckles and sitting down to the computer to feverishly tap out 10 or 15 pages, which I would then revise, despise, and promptly dump. This seemed to be my destiny - to be a mouthy, wannabe-writer with nothing to show for it.

And then Nanowrimo came into my life ... it revolutionized my way of writing because it went against all my instincts. "You're telling me I just need to sit down every day and write? No time to stop and critique, cry and self-flagellate?" It kinda sounded like a crazy waste of time, because surely all I'd produce under such an intense schedule would be drivel, right? Well, yes, sort of. But I also produced some kind of brain chemical (adrenaline, maybe?) that popped me out of bed every morning at 5:30 and powered me through my 2+ hour daily writing frenzy. By the time I met my 50,000 word goal (the LAST DAY of November), I had gained several things:

25,000 words-worth of somewhat interesting writing, which would later be developed into my first finished (unpublished) novel;
an amazing work ethic I didn't know I was capable of ... okay, that's not quite true ... I'd just spent 6 miserable weeks (11 hours per day) the previous summer studying for the New York State Bar, so I knew I was capable, but perhaps it taught me that I was capable of diligent work when the deadline was arbitrary; and
confidence in myself. Shortly into the process, I realized, "Hey, I'm doing it. I'm actually writing a novel!"

As I continued working on my WIP after the contest ended, I carried the skills and discipline I'd developed during Nanowrimo with me, tweaking them to fit into my normal daily life ('cause, as all you Nano veterans know, there is no way you can keep up that break-neck pace and stay out of a mental institution!) So now, two years later, I still get up early in the morning (even on days when I'm not going into work) because I know that's when my mind is freshest and most creative. I no longer hold myself to a word count goal, because my own inner motivation sees to it that I don't slack.

Bringing us back to today's topic, it's thanks to this "zone" I've created that I can proudly announce the completion of Part 1 (15 chapters, 36,000 words) of my novel rewrite. The next step is to give it another revision, and then ... gulp ... send it out to my (ever-growing list of) Brilliant Editors for the first big beta!

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: What's your "zone"? Don't try to force a routine that doesn't work for you, because it'll ultimately end in disaster. Go easy on yourself if you're having a bad day - give yourself a break and take a day off from writing. But just remember how good it feels when you get into your rhythm. So if the bad day becomes a bad week, try to revisit your writing as soon as possible, before a grand funk sets in ...

When do "suspenseful clues" give way to paint-by-numbers predictability?

2009-11-12T11:52:00.014-05:00

I'm currently reading a book by an author who shall remain nameless ... (Can you tell this is leading up to a criticism? I'm trying to keep this blog positive, so I'll only name names with books I love. The cruddy ones will be granted anonymity.) Anyway, this was someone whose books I read during college (before I became a "serious" - and critical - writer.) I always thought she told a good story, so the other day I picked up one of her bestsellers which I'd never read.

As I began reading, I found the how-husband-and-wife-met set-up a little rote, and was not really taking to the protagonist-wife's character, as she didn't seem to have much character, other than being the guy's wife (argh ... I might be coming dangerously close to revealing the book's identity ... well, at least my heart was in the right place!) So I'm reading along, with the suspense around the central issue in the book building, when I come to page 100, where the protagonist's daughter randomly blurts out the fact that she had sex at 13.

Now, all along, the author has been dropping little clues about the protagonist's troubled marriage, like how her husband started to grow distant when their daughter was about 11. There are also lines about how close father and daughter have always been, while the protagonist and her daughter have had trouble relating, especially since the girl became a teenager. These subplots remain in the background, while the suspense around a tragedy involving the husband stays in the foreground.

So there I sat, only one-third of the way through the book, and all of a sudden, I knew exactly what I was going to read in the remaining 200 pages. As the mystery around the husband slowly unravels (thanks to a dashing, doting, divorced man assisting in the investigation), we the readers are going to learn that the protagonist's husband was molesting their daughter. Hence his depression, hence the tragic act on which the novel is centered. Protagonist and Daughter must come to terms with the horror of it all, thanks in no small part to Dashing, Doting, Divorced Man, who will end up becoming a permanent fixture in their lives. The End.

It's a complete cliche. I personally steer clear of pedophilia in my writing because I hate when it's reduced to a "big reveal" climax, which is what I'm afraid is happening here. (Compare this to a book like Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," which treats this horrific subject with the depth and sensitivity it deserves.) But I digress ... this post is not an admonition against putting sex crimes in suspenseful novels. It's an admonition against paint-by-numbers predictability in anything one writes.

I hope it goes without saying that I don't consider myself an expert on avoiding predictability. And in all fairness, while my BEs complimented many of the twists and turns in the first draft of my current WIP, they also pointed out a couple of "I could see that coming"s. So how do we writers skillfully intertwine foreshadowing clues into our narrative without giving away the whole plot? I doubt there's a simple answer, but incorporating reversals into your work is a good start.

I have always been a big fan of reversals (even before I learned they had a name at Gotham.) Here's how I would define a reversal: you have your character(s) going along one path, and maybe the reader can sense by the too-good-to-be-true nature of the storyline that something's about to go awry, but they certainly have no idea what. And then BOOM! You hit your reader with a dramatic (but plausible) change of course. The reversal doesn't necessarily have to be a big "boom" moment - if you're writing a literary, emotion-driven piece, it could be as subtle as an overheard conversation, a letter which was supposed to arrive but didn't, etc. The key is to take your reader in a new direction, one that keeps them turning pages and thinking, "I can't possibly imagine what's going to happen next ... but I'm dying to find out!"

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: I think reversals are one of the best "weapons" against monotony and predictability that a writer can arm themselves with. Reversals should be frequently employed, and should vary in size and gravity. Most importantly, they should always be plausible, which is not to be confused with predictable.

Rewrite Update

2009-11-07T08:45:00.005-05:00

I don't have a lot of news at the moment - I just wanted to check-in with my progress on the re-write. I currently have 25,000 words and am definitely getting back into the flow of my story. I still have some concerns about my writing style, though. Because I've been through all this twice before (with my first novel and the original version of my current piece) I am starting to detect distinct patterns in my style. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I mean, I've already identified my writing flaws, but beyond those, even the good stuff seems a bit predictable at times (at least to me).

A concrete example of this would be the way I structure my chapters. I try to start with a scene so that the reader is grounded in place and time. Then I usually lapse into a flashback, which might be a few paragraphs or a few pages long, in order to give the reader a better sense of context of what's going on in the present time. I'm working hard to cut down on chunks of exposition (my #1 weakness) by replacing them with scene (even in flashbacks).

I guess the reason I feel that my writing is becoming predictable and formulaic is because I have analyzed it to death in order to continually improve. I'm just hoping the unsuspecting reader will be too entrenched in the narrative to be as aware as I am of all the thought I put into structure. I suppose that's every writer's goal - to make their labor-intensive work look effortless!

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Before I started seriously writing, I never really took the time to think about how much intense planning and scrutiny go into producing a half-decent piece of fiction. It really is a fine art. I suppose we writers just have to remember that non-writers reading our manuscripts/books simply want to be engrossed and entertained. They probably won't care whether this is accomplished through flashback, (well-written) exposition, or whatever other "crutch" we tend to employ.

Blog-to-Blog: Selling YOURSELF on your book

2009-11-01T17:06:00.017-05:00

So here are two more terrific blog posts to get you thinking about your writing (and of course, by "you," I also mean "me" ...)

A Walk in My Shoes

Natalie Bahm

They both basically deal with the same question, which might be distilled as follows: "What motivates you to write, and is it, at the end of the day, sellable or strictly personal?" I shall answer this question re my own writing in my characteristically tangential, long-winded fashion ... ;-)

As a child, I spent a lot of time writing because I loved to write. As a teen and young adult, I spent a lot of time thinking about becoming a writer for the fame and glory of it. It should be noted that I did not actually write very much amidst all this day-dreaming. When I hit 30, I started thinking more seriously about becoming a writer because of my original love of the craft, and within a year I was actually writing again.

Why did I do so much thinking and so little writing between the ages of about 14 and 30? Well, I could write an entire blog around this subject, but here's a quick word-blitzkrieg: boys, distraction, immaturity, insecurity, identity, education, career, friends, boys ... i.e., the standard rights of passage that one has to go through once they let go of their childhood I-can-be-anything-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up outlook. At some point, you realize that you have to take proactive steps to reclaim that sense of possibility if it's ever to be reclaimed.

So back to why I write. When I started to seriously write again, I somehow got it in my head that I was going to be the next Harper Lee. My writing style, however, told a different tale. Literary genius I am not. But I can tell a good story, that much I believe. And that's why I write - I love to give deliciously layered accounts of human interaction. I love the subtle and not so subtle ways in which people please and deceive one another. I don't write graphic sex scenes because I'm not interested in the physical act of sex, but all the manipulation, ruse, vulnerability, fear, lust, hope, etc. that's behind the act. I think these basic truths woven into a well-told story make for a very sellable book. (Mind you, I'm not saying I've "arrived" at this point yet, but this is my aspiration.)

Re the inspiration and personal connection aspect, one little "trick" I've found that not only enthuses me to write, but which hopefully translates successfully onto the page is what I like to call "writing your own extremes." In other words, think about something you would never do, or maybe something you almost did, but sure are glad you didn't follow through with. Reflect on a thought you had at your lowest or highest moment - one that you might be too ashamed to say out loud. And then have your characters live these things out.

As I write this, I'm not harboring any deep, dark secrets that I'm dying to get off my chest and onto a printed page. However, like everyone, I've experienced a whole slew of extreme emotions in my life, most of which faded away as soon as they arose. I must admit that I'm rather curious as to what might happen if someone were to ever act upon those emotions ... I'm hoping Lila, Rosemarie or Marcus will indulge my curiosity!

Blog-to-Blog: What your tastes can teach you

2009-10-28T15:52:00.035-04:00

I'm starting a new feature within My Mental Marathon called Blog-to-Blog. It'll come up from time to time when I run across a particularly thought-provoking post. I found a couple of them during my weekly blog surf the other day, and will dedicate the next few posts to discussing what I read, and how it applies to my own re-write.

First up, Booknapped. Click on the link and see why I thought this was a worthwhile post to blog about. So I tried to come up with my own original list after reading this, and found myself searching the far reaches of my mind for the most impressive-sounding works of literature I've read. Then I thought, hey, what better way to keep it real than to take a list of favorite works I'd already created on my Facebook Info page. And I decided to go with movies, not books, because I think my movie list might be easier to make overarching assessments about. So here goes ... I'm going to cut and paste the list, and then start grouping the films by category and describing their appeal in a few words.

COMEDIES:

DRAMA:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - triumph of the human spirit; delves into the subtleties and frailties of human relationships; no self-pity or sentimentality
Dancer in the Dark - I've seen this film 2x and each time I was bawling as if a member of my family died; I'm not articulate enough to be able to express what it is about this movie that got to me ... shall we chalk it up to some je ne sais quoi factor? No, I can do better than that - how about: vulnerability; being doomed despite being loved and supported; using imagination to transcend the here and now
La Vie en Rose - talent and success don't lead to happiness; vulnerability; moxie; loneliness; the tragic heroine whose inner demons get the best of her; romanticized era

Okay, now to synthesize all this ... so I like the 80s, that much is clear. Putting on my psychoanalysis cap, I take that to mean I enjoy extremes and larger-than-lifeness, which is what that decade symbolized. I've often thought of the 1920s as the 1980s of the 1st half of the century, which is probably why I always gravitate toward both eras.

Let's see - I like quirkiness and strong supporting characters (both supporting in the literary sense, and supporting in the emotional sense). I want to see some kind of triumph or redemption of spirit (or conversely, degradation of spirit), and I want to really feel it in my bones, but at the same time, I don't want trumped up sentimentality.

Argh, I don't think I'm very good at this self-analysis stuff. Anyone out there with a psychology background want to help me out? ;-)

Plodding Along and Plotting Away

2009-10-24T10:26:00.005-04:00

Before I get into this week's topic, I want to take a moment to revel in this amazing online community of writers (YOU GUYS!) which I am now a part of. As I stated in an earlier post, the only reason I started blogging was to keep myself on track throughout my novel rewriting process. In essence, I was simply creating an online diary for myself, and a handful of friends and family generous enough to take a few moments out of their week to check in on it. What I ended up with was a fantastic support system of fellow writers with intimate knowledge of the agony and ecstasy that is producing a work of fiction. So consider this a shout-out to all you writer-bloggers out there - you help keep me going!

There ends the Hallmark card. Now back to my weekly update. I've been reading Flapper by Joshua Zeitz, and it has provided me with more detail about certain elements of life in the 1920s that Frederick Lewis Allen's book touched on. As you can probably tell from the title, this book takes a close look at women in the '20s, but it also analyzes women of prior eras to give the reader something to compare these "modern" women to. Once again, I'm finding my current reading is giving me inspiration for whole plotlines and characters. Who knew non-fiction could be so much fun!

Oh, and here's a post-script on last week's little motivation meltdown. I think I'm over the hump (at least for now.) I implemented the dreaded edits, and am back to writing. Plus I'm doing something which I find extremely helpful in laying the groundwork for my book - I'm plotting out upcoming chapters. My husband actually suggested I do this before I started my rewrite, but at the time, I didn't want to constrain myself. However, now that I've completed 7 chapters (about 17,000 words), I have a better idea where my rewrite is going. When writing the first draft, I found chapter plotting extremely useful, especially once I was in the "home stretch" (about 10 chapters from the end of the book.)

For me, writing consists of a delicate balance between following a road map and allowing myself to be open to my characters' wishes. Any writer knows what I mean by that last comment. At some point, your characters begin to find their distinctive voice and take on a life of their own. You might plan for Bob and Sue to fall in love in Chapter 5, but in Chapter 3, you find Bob's eye wandering across the room to that cute new girl, and there's not a darned thing you as the writer can do about it! ;-) I mean, I suppose you can try to steer him back to Sue, but it might seem forced and contrived ... something your reader is likely to pick up on.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: It's good to have a general plan as to where your book is going, and this will likely become more and more specific as your story unfolds. However, don't be afraid to follow the natural flow of your characters' lives, which may require a dramatic change of plan along the way.

The Roller Coaster Ride of Writing, or "The Post I'll Regret Having Written"

2009-10-21T07:07:00.004-04:00

This blog post can be likened unto those emails (letters pre-1990-something) that you sent in the heat of the moment and then regretted the minute they were out of your hand. I say that because I shouldn't even be writing this post - I should be implementing the handwritten changes I made to the first 5 chapters of my novel rewrite. But I don't feel like doing that. I feel totally uninspired. I look at my red scribbles and think, is this what I have to look forward to for the next 6-9 months?

If I'm sounding generally whiny and non-sensical to you, you're probably not the only one with that impression. See why I shouldn't even be writing this? Here's what I think is happening: I'm doing what I did the last 2 times I wrote a long-form piece (and which generally works for me) ... I write for a week or 2, and then I start to edit. It's not my definitive edit, just a first pass in order to clean up syntax errors, and add exposition and dialogue that come to me after I've finished the chapters. It's an amazingly time-consuming task, and very uncreative-feeling. Plus, when I start marking my work up, I see just how flawed what I had initially felt was fantastic during the writing process really is.

Like I said, I've been through this before, so why is it suddenly draining me? Who knows - gloomy weather, hormones, it could be attributed to anything. And yes, it will pass, I know that. That's kind of why I hesitated to post this ... best to keep a stiff upper lip when writing, and not mope and moan at every turn, right? Well, this blog was created to reveal the good, bad, and ugly sides of writing, so I suppose nothing is off-limits.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Feeling fussy. Going to go clean my messy kitchen instead of typing up my edits. No words of wisdom to share at the moment.

The "Flow" & A Short Retrospective on My Writing "Career"

2009-10-17T08:18:00.009-04:00

Call it mojo, inspiration, muse, whatever you'd like - I finally got mine back! I call it my "flow" because that's what it is, literally: words flowing out of my head and down through my fingertips onto the page. I got over the hurdle of my introduction. Is it flawless? Likely not, but once I got it to a satisfactory place, I decided to move on. I can always go back and revise it later ...

I'm going to spare you a play-by-play of my week's worth of rewriting. Suffice it to say that I feel like I'm in a good space - I'm happily getting to know my old characters, and a few new ones, all over again, focusing on their subtler mannerisms and ideals this time around. And guess what, I'm having fun writing once more!

I've decided to take a short stroll down memory lane for today's topic and talk about how I got started "seriously" writing. Perhaps of more interest is how I'm managing to keep it up on a regular basis after 2 years. This is the kind of discussion I would have craved 3 years ago, when I would bore anyone who'd sit still long enough with my angst over wanting to be a novelist. (They would, of course, say, "Well then why don't you just start writing a novel," to which I would reply, "Yes, I plan to do that someday.")

"Someday" came when I got sick of hearing my own voice. It was Fall of 2007. I had a good job with reasonable hours, I was engaged to be married, and I had a wealth of wonderful, supportive friends in my life. My excuse in my 20s for not writing had always been, "I'll do it once my life is in order." (Whatever that meant!) It hit me that autumn that this was about as orderly as life was ever going to get. Plus, I was 6 months shy of turning 31. (So much for being the next Francoise Sagan!) I had not time to lose ...

So I decided to take a class - but which one? Living in NYC, there was no shortage of choice.

Naturally price was a consideration, but most importantly, I didn't want a course that focused on theory and the blah-blah-blah of great literary works. I wanted something practical, hands-on ... a workshop. I soon stumbled upon Gotham Writers Workshop. There happened to be a class just down the street from where I lived (although, FYI, they also have a very successful online program for any of you in the market.) The price was extremely reasonable considering that the course was 10 weeks long, 3 hours a week. In fact, that much time commitment scared me at first ("What if I decide I'm not that serious afterall?" my @#$%^& Inner Demon whispered.)

With a little push from my Guardian Angels, I signed up for Fiction I and was in heaven for the next 10 weeks. I met some terrific fellow-writers and produced some first class drivel that got torn from limb to limb (in a constructive way!) The instructor was terrific, and one little comment he made at the end of one class quite possibly changed my life as a writer. The course focused on short stories, which have never really been my thing, either as a writer or a reader (Having read "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" in Junior year English, my bar was set very high at an early age!)

So back to what the instructor said at the end of class: He said, "For any of you interested in longer form writing, there's this online contest called National Novel Writing Month. Check it out."

Now, many of you are already intimately familiar with the madness that is "Nanowrimo" so I won't go into it here. Let me just say that I rose to the challenge, got up every morning at 5:30 or 6 (I'm a morning person, so that wasn't so difficult), wrote my 1,750 words or whatever, and by the end of the month, could proudly claim to be the author of 50,000 words of ... well, first class drivel. Half of which promptly went into the garbage, and the other half was developped into After the Rowhouses ... which after being critiqued by my Novel workshop peers at Gotham in the spring, and my 1st set of Brilliant Editors in the summer, also promptly went into the garbage! (By "garbage," I of course mean a writing graveyard folder on my desktop, with the possibility of "idea-zombie" reemergence someday ...)

I'll stop there, because you get the idea. Once I got into my "flow" as a bona fide (although unpublished) writer, it was hard to imagine a time when I was ever not this engaged in my writing. Sounds like a good segue into ...

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: The hardest part about writing, I've found, is getting started. This was true for my initial push into doing any kind of creative writing, and again when I knew I had to start my novel rewrite. I guess it all just comes down to the human tendency to procrastinate and dread the unknown. You know you should "just do it" (Nike, please don't sue!) but sometimes those words aren't motivating enough. Having community (like a regular workshop or writers' circle) and structure (a class or writing contest) definitely helped me set to the task at hand, and eventually, my own inner-motivators took over.

Starting My Rewrite with a BANG

2009-10-10T10:17:00.009-04:00

Ok, let me fess up - the title of this post is more aspiration than reality. It all started after my last post, when I sat down in front of a freshly created Word doc and set to the opening scene of my novel. I chose a very dramatic moment in history, and was confident that my now-honed (or so I believed) writing skills were going to create an amazing first scene.

I wrote the opening - less than 2 pages, double spaced - and read it to my husband. His face grew confused and he had to stop me before I had finished. "Wait, where is this taking place again? And who are these characters you're introducing?"

I had done it YET AGAIN ... I had launched into exposition about characters the reader had not even met yet. A very dark, sinking feeling crept over me, and even my husband's statement that I shouldn't worry, I just hadn't gotten into the flow of rewriting yet, did not comfort me.

Shortly thereafter, I had to go to work. I got in my car and turned on the radio. Crowded House told me to stop dreaming, it was over. I spent the rest of the day yearning to crawl into bed and put the covers over my head, indefinitely ...

But like many a writer-type prone to melodramatic bouts of victimhood, I snapped out of it the next day and set to reworking my intro. The task is proving a lot harder than expected, but maybe that's a good thing. I am fully aware - maybe too aware - of how important the first few pages, heck, the first few lines, of a novel are. And so I am really running myself over the ringer to get my book off to a powerful, well-crafted start. I sure hope I pick up momentum though, because at this rate, I might not finish this rewrite for another 5 years!

Which leads me to a brief announcement re how I plan to conduct this blog over the next few months. My legal workload is ramping up, and this rewriting process is proving more arduous than I had expected (and I had already expected it was gonna be rough!) So I'm going to go back to my original plan of "checking in" here once a week. And of course, I will also be reading posts from all your blogs to learn the latest tricks of the trade, and ways to cope with the stresses of being an aspiring published writer!

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Ok, so maybe revising your novel or short story or memoir isn't going to be as easy as you'd hoped, despite all the how-to's and insightful writers' blogs you've read. That's life! Good things take hard work, right? If you find yourself in a rut, just re-read the helpful tips that you know you should be following, and eventually these techniques will become 2nd nature. Here are 2 excellent blog posts that I have benefited from recently: Me, My Muse and I and Caroline by line

Jumping off the Diving Board

2009-10-06T08:51:00.019-04:00

What's the meaning behind my title, you ask? Well, I've decided that today is the day to put pen to paper, or rather, to open up a new MS Word doc and launch into my opening scene. It's been exactly one month since I started blogging (and as a side note, this whole process, including reading all of YOUR blogs, has benefited me 100x more than I could have ever imagined.) So it seems fitting to bite the bullet, and start my rewrite today.

Do you sense a little trepidation in my "voice"? If so, you're right. It's all fine and good to muse and muddle over how you're going to rewrite your 400-page-not-quite-a-masterpiece; it's a whole other thing to actually do it. The ID ("inner demon") is whispering, "Look out world, here comes another 400 pages of endless exposition and unrealistic dialogue!" Thankfully, my GAs ("guardian angels") are murmuring, "Just think how much your writing has improved since After the Row Houses [1st unpublished novel] ... it can only continue to get better!" So I'm setting to work with the GAs on my shoulder, and the ID kicked out into the cold.

Let me conclude with an update on my recent preparatory accomplishments. I finished that fabulous Frederick Lewis Allen book (I was practically sweating as he recounted the final days before Black Tuesday), and am about 3/4ths of the way through my character attribute exercise. The latter is taking a heck of a lot longer than I'd like, but perhaps that's a good sign ... I've found myself staring at a few of the prompts (especially the ones dealing with character motivation and attitudes) for minutes thinking, "How would So-&-So behave?"

In addition to the suggested attribute prompts in Manuscript Makeover, I added a few of my own, which are as follows:

Most vivid childhood memory
Perfect day
Favorite food
Most guarded secret
Closest confidante
Most shameful/embarrassing moment
Most prized possession
Political affiliation/leaning –
Says prayers (e.g., “when …”/”never”) –

It's amazing how much you can learn about your protagonists by fleshing out their family members. On that note, here's another edition of ...

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: I'm going to do something a little different. Instead of coming up with my own worldly wisdom on pre-(re)write character development, let me send you to an excellent post on the subject ... An Ulterior Motive: Characters Are People Too

So what does it all "mean"?

2009-10-05T08:52:00.009-04:00

The actual question my Brilliant Editor asked was, "What is your book going to be about?" He went on to say, "I want to know the hook you'll pitch to an agent." Okay, let me answer these questions in reverse order:

I have no idea yet how I'm going to pitch this new version to an agent.
That's a really good question ... let me get back to you in a few days ...

So you're probably thinking, oh god, poor delusional writer wannabe-person. If you can't answer those 2 simple questions, why not give up now? Well, from the supportive feedback I've gotten so far, I know you're not really saying that, but of course, my "inner demon" is! But my guardian angels of writing (I commented on someone's blog that that's how I think of all those supportive elementary school teachers who encouraged my creative writing endeavors through the years) keep whispering, "Ignore that d@#n demon!"

So here's the deal: it's not that I'm completely in the dark as to the theme and story structure of Draft #2. It's just that, at the moment, it's sort of like a fascinating dream I've just woken up from. I know it was good, and that it captivated me while I was having it, but upon waking, the edges become blurred, and I can't articulate exactly what it was about that dream that made it so enthralling. That's pretty much how I feel about my current storyline. It's embedded in the recesses of my mind right now, but each day, I come a little closer to being able to put it into words. So I'm confident that, once I work through a few more characterization exercises, and eventually get around to putting "pen-to-paper," I'll be able to share the wonder and glory of what's going on deep inside my head with all of you!

Literary Lightening Bolt

2009-10-04T10:43:00.008-04:00

I'm so excited about my latest burst of creativity that I just had to share it. You all know how I've been going on and on about the necessity of research ... well, I keep finding my imagination jolted into overdrive by what I'm reading (I'm on the 2nd to last chapter of Only Yesterday.) Remember how I cut Lila's current adopted father, Arthur, in favor of a living, breathing (still highly flawed) biological father named Herbert? Well let me tell you a little bit about Herbert Payton ...

He was initially inspired by a chapter in Frederick Lewis Allen's book exploring the rise of salesmanship in the U.S. during the 1920s. As the country prospered, the average citizen found themselves in the position to buy more of the many new-fangled technologies and modern conveniences coming down the pike. Advertising boomed and salesmen were finding themselves pressured by their bosses to outsell the competitor (or even the next guy in the company.) I'm sure you fellow-writers can already see a wealth of potential character development in all this (hey, Arthur Miller did, right!?)

So then today, I'm reading another chapter in my trusted tome of the twenties about the real estate boom in Florida. And while Mr. Allen doesn't go into great detail about the sordid side of the speculation business, he does mention how ready and willing the average Northern Joe was to lay down 10% on "gorgeous beachfront property," sight unseen, which in reality might lie deep in the heart of an inland mangrove swamp.

Does this kind of sordid speculation and risk, just years before a devastating stock market crash, sound at all familiar to any of you? (I hope my Brilliant Editor who's reading this - you know who you are - is proud of me for injecting some much-needed contemporary relevancy into my novel.) I can see so much potential for drama and conflict between Lila and her father, and of course, Herbert and his own inner demons (insecurity, desire for success and recognition, etc.) come to head because of this that I can hardly wait to write about it. But everything in due time ... I still need to finish those character attribute sketches first!

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: This post goes out to all you period-piece writers (and I'm using the term loosely for anyone writing about an era which they did not live through personally.) Get to know your time period! What were its socio-political nuances and eccentricities, and how might your characters and storylines reflect this? Obviously there is no rigid prescription that says every novel must be a direct reflection of its time setting, but I find as a reader that I get so much more out of a book which shows great sensitivity and awareness to the era in which it's set.

Questions Answered & Characterization Exercises Explored

2009-10-03T13:46:00.012-04:00

I'm taking a break from extolling the virtues of research to clear up a few ambiguities from my last post. As expected, some of you were shocked by my decision to nix Cora altogether. One of my BEs also commented that it looked as if I was attempting to rise to the challenge of rewriting Ophelia, despite my earlier inclination not to. So I wanted to "clear the record" on both decisions ...

I decided to cut Cora Morse, my ailing co-protagonist, and her husband Arthur for one very simple reason: the feedback I've been getting has led me to the conclusion that this storyline, and the characters in it, are simply not compelling enough to sustain as much space within my novel as they currently take up. So then I had to ask myself, how would they (and their story) work if they were relegated to the "background"? And the answer was, "not well at all;" the Cora/Arthur/Ophelia subplot either needs to be front and center, or taken out completely. Anything else would just become distracting noise.

Which leads me to Ophelia. I have no intention of bringing Ophelia's life to the forefront in Draft #2 the way I did in Draft #1. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have no plans, at least not at this time, of trying to perfect my ability to tell a story through a southern African-American woman's eyes. (The Lord knows I'm having enough trouble perfecting my storytelling through the eyes of an average white girl.) I do still believe, however, that Ophelia is a potentially compelling character, and my goal is to give her a lesser role in this new version, but to hone and craft it in such a way as to do her justice.

On a related note, my next proactive step toward starting my 2nd draft is to complete the list of personal and emotional attributes set forth on p. 266 of Manuscript Makeover. I plan to do this exercise for each of my 3 protagonist/viewpoint characters, as well as for their family members. I also stumbled across an interesting blog the other day entitled 52 Weeks of Wordage where the host puts up a new writing exercise each week. I'm definitely going to tune into her blog throughout my rewriting process, just to keep me on my toes re my characters' depth and believability.

This was a rather hodge-podgey post, so I don't have any all-encompassing words of wisdom to leave you with. Just, "keep writing!" ;-)

The Cut

2009-10-01T20:29:00.006-04:00

My brain feels like it's about to explode with all the new ideas and inspiration I've been having lately (which I suppose is a good thing, considering the alternative.) I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s and I cannot rave enough about this book (however, this blog is not for book reviews, so I shall keep my raving to myself.) Suffice it to say that having a better understanding of the era in which my novel takes place has opened my mind up to the potential for new characters who reflect the "zeitgeist" of that period. I'm not talking about 2D cameos, but flesh-and-bones individuals with unique quirks and values which will be enhanced and reflected by the spirit of the times.

Am I being too vague? Probably, so here's a concrete example: Frederick Lewis Allen's book highlights the wave of materialism and aggressive salesmanship that arose during the 1920s. My manuscript is completely devoid of any allusion to this because, well, I knew nothing about it prior to reading Only Yesterday. So the idea came to me, what if I put a salesman character in my novel? And suddenly I had a clear vision of him - Herbert Payton, Lila's father, will be that salesman. There are so many ramifications and character development possibilities with this, for both Herbert and Lila, that I'd be here all night if I started listing them. The bottom line is that this is a good example of how a little research can go a long way in inspiring characterization.

For those of you who have read my first draft, you might be asking, "Wait, isn't Lila's dad's name Wilfred, and isn't he dead? And what about her adopted father, Arthur?" That leads me to my next point of discussion ... I've decided that a few (drastic) changes are in order for Draft #2. Remember when I told you that I was on the hunt for any signs of weakness within my characters (as in, weakness in my writing, not their personalities)? Well, after careful consideration, I came up with a short list (which turned out not to be so short) of characters who aren't pulling their weight. And here it is [BEs, you may be a little shocked by who didn't make the cut ...]

CUT:

Cora Morse [yup, former protagonist Cora]
Arthur Morse
Edward Whitaker
Tobin Whitaker

REMAINING POV CHARACTERS:

Lila Payton
Rosemarie Dauber
Marcus Torrington

That's right people, I'm cutting my two title characters. So now "The Whitaker Boys" has become "Untitled Work in Progress" yet again. Why am I doing it? Because Elizabeth Lyon's wise words about consolidating characters have been haunting me for weeks. Why have four love interests between Lila and Rosemarie (Edward, Tobin, Clayton Starwell - the politician, and Marcus) when I can have two, who will be reworked in such a way so as to bring out essential character revelations and narrative thrust. I am also going to consolidate and trim down families as follows:

Lila will live with her widowed father, Herbert, and Ophelia (the one you know, but don't exactly love ... yet.)
Rosemarie's family remains the same, essentially, although I plan to flesh out her parents' characters to make them more 3D and compelling in their own right. I'm also toying with giving Rosemarie a younger brother, but only if the storyline justifies this.
Marcus's whole family has been scrapped, except for the grandfather, who will be alive during the first part of the novel. I am also transplanting Marcus into Edward's old family, because I'm quite attached to Minnie, his alcoholic, soft-hearted mother. I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I should keep the younger brothers, Barton and Clyde, because, as of now, they're dead weight. Farris Whitaker (Edward's philandering father) will be revamped and renamed Oliver Marcus Torrington II, and will become Marcus's hard-nosed businessman father.
And Assemblyman Clayton Starwell is going to be tweaked and given a much more significant role which may cause a lot of upset amongst all three viewpoint characters ...

That's probably more detail than you cared to know; the upshot is that my changes were motivated by a desire to minimize bodies and maximize conflict, tension, and most importantly, reader interest!

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and take a hatchet to your manuscript. For some writers, this may require chopping away at characters, while for others, it might mean chopping down plotlines. (It looks like I'm going to be doing a bit of both.) A novice writer might be inclined to think that this kind of massive editing is a sign of failure, but I believe it's the exact opposite. How many times have you read an interview with a published author who says something along the lines of, "After working on a novel for a year, I realized the story was lousy and the characters were 2D and boring, so I ultimately decided to scrap the whole thing. Then one day, I got the inspiration to write [insert Pulitzer Prize-winning novel here] and the rest is history." So take heart, Novice Writer - if you're scrapping huge chunks of your first draft, you're in good company. :-)

Writing IS Research

2009-09-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

Take heed, children, because this may well be the most important post on my blog so far! (I'm not trying to patronize, I just liked the way that phrase sounded.) But in all seriousness, I'm kicking myself at this moment for how short-sighted I was during my initial research process. I am truly baffled by the fact that, aside from doing a quick internet search here and there when I needed more information on a topic, I did not see the need to get an in-depth overview of the period in which my novel is set.

I find my decision particularly baffling because I love to research. And I certainly know how to do it - I read upwards of twelve books before attempting to write a 20-page article published in a legal journal. So why did I shortchange myself when writing a 400-page novel? The only logical explanation I can come up with is that I naively viewed novel writing (period novel writing, no less) as a largely creative endeavor, not a fact-based one. But what I dumbly failed to realize is that the era in which my characters exist would and should color their lives on an almost daily basis. And this cannot be successfully accomplished by throwing in an occasional piece of trivia via the front page of a newspaper or a cocktail party conversation.

Looking back over my Brilliant Editors' critiques, I see now how my lack of adequate research fatally affected my writing. A couple BEs thought I lost the "feel" of the 1920s in places throughout the book; one asked, "How is your novel relevant to today?" and another said, honestly, "I was expecting more from the story." Aside from the characterization issues I plan to work on, I think a lot of these problems could have been (and of course, still can be) solved by proper research.

At the moment, I am reading Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen. As the Amazon reviews indicated, it is proving to be an incredibly well-written, entertaining, and informative book. But what really peaked my interest when I was shopping for research material is the fact that this book was first published in 1931! So the author, a reputable journalist, is writing about an era which he and the world had only just lived through. Finding such a fresh synthesis of the decade, unclouded by modern-day analysis, was a true gold mine, and had I stumbled across this book sooner, my novel may have taken very different turns. But of course, all is not lost ... that's what re-writes are for!

POTENTIAL NOVICE WRITER SIN: (That's right, I brought the Draconian terminology back for this one ...) Unless you are writing complete fantasy or an autobiographical novel, do not pick up a pen or tap a key on your computer until you have read several books about, talked to a number of relevant people about, or gone and experienced first hand the events/place/time period, etc. in your book. There is no substitute for adequate research. (As you can tell, I feel quite strongly about this.) If you cut corners during your initial writing phase, you're just going to have to go back and deal with the holes in your manuscript later, so you might as well tackle the research in the beginning. Besides, the extra work will be well worth it, as it may answer questions you're grappling with re character motivation and plotlines, saving you a lot of revision time down the line.

Taking Characterization to the Next Level

2009-09-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

Well, I finished Manuscript Makeover and got a lot out of the last half of the characterization section. Here are a few highlights:

On p. 266, Ms. Lyon offers a list of criteria against which to assess each of my characters. I'm only going to list a smattering of the elements she mentions, but I definitely plan to work through all of them with each of my principle characters before tackling my re-write.

Physical Appearance: Aside from age, weight, eye color, etc., she suggests considering such characteristics as the shape and fullness of a character's lips, his/her habitual stances and gestures, and voice quality (timber and pitch).
Emotional/Intellectual Disposition: This list includes "most dominant emotion", "operating mode" (logical v. intuitive thinker), and "orientation to life" (cynical, optimistic, etc.), among other things.

Ms. Lyon also points out that each viewpoint character's narration must have a distinctive "voice." I have to be particularly mindful of this because I am writing in 3rd person limited, which means that I follow my characters' thoughts closely, however I am not writing as if I were them (i.e., 1st person). Likewise, scene/character descriptions should not be generic, but rather, slanted toward the viewpoint character's personality and the thrust of the story. What this means is, don't just start writing about trees in the forest if those background details bear absolutely no relevance to what's going on in your character's world. [That said, Ms. Lyon does suggest the more-is-more approach to scene-setting in order to immerse the reader in the novel's universe; she says overwritten description can always be pared down in the final draft.]

I really liked what Ms. Lyon had to say about dialogue, so here's a direct quote: Dialogue "needs to sound like natural speech, [but it] should not replicate everyday speech ... it must meet two primary functions: (1) to characterize the speaker, and (2) to move the story forward." p. 278. She also warned against describing dialogue (those awful adverbs!) and over-use of attributions (e.g., "he said/she asked"), especially "clever" ones (e.g., "she giggled/he extolled."). Here's an example that incorporates both offenses: "If that's the way it must be, so be it," Sue grumbled sulkily. I was already well aware that if you can tell who's speaking without an attribution, don't use one. But when I do use them, I must admit (to my great shame) that I often have my characters "harrumph" and "guffaw"ing their words. Never again! I'm also a lover of adverbs (I know, I know, I might as well have NOVICE WRITER stamped on my forehead). Ms. Lyon suggests using action where the dialogue leaves doubt as to the character's emotions. So in my example, I might try something like this: "If that's the way it must be, so be it." Sue slumped down in the armchair and scowled out the window. In trying this little exercise, I'm already getting a sense of how a writer can communicate much more interesting information by ditching the attributions in favor of description.

And of course, Ms. Lyon addressed my Achilles tendon - excessive exposition. "So often in early drafts of a novel, exposition takes the form of what editors sometimes call 'an information dump.'" Manuscript Makeover, p. 294. She suggests weaving between showing and telling to make the passage meaningful and to push the narrative along. I wish Ms. Lyon had spent a bit more time discussing this, but I have a feeling that, with all the other tips and techniques I've gleaned from her book, my inclination to babble tangentially about a character's past will subside during this next re-write.

To round off my discussion on characterization, I'm inserting a mock back jacket "flap copy" I came up with about halfway through my first draft. This will give you a brief overview of my six viewpoint characters as they are currently written. I also wanted to share a terrific idea I had the other day re how to go about "storyboarding" my character arcs. My novel is written in alternating viewpoint chapters throughout (e.g., Ch. 1 - Cora's POV; Ch. 2- Lila's POV; Ch. 3 - Rosemarie's POV, etc.) So to be able to track any specific character's narrative, I decided the best way to re-read my book would be to compile all viewpoint chapters by character. I've created 6 documents, one for all the sequentially-ordered Cora chapters, one for all the Lila chapters, etc. It's going to be a whole new experience reading my novel this way, and will surely expose character weaknesses I had missed the first time around.

Vanderkill, New York is a small town about 120 miles north of Manhattan, a few miles inland from the Hudson River. One day in late 1926, three young men move into their recently-deceased grandmother’s mansion. From thenceforth, six lives will be permanently intertwined in a quest for truth, loyalty and, if such a thing exists, happiness.

Lila Payton, seduced by the promise of a glamorous city life, finds herself repeating the dangerous patterns of her ill-fated, wild-living parents.

Marcus Torrington has lived too long in the shadow of his flashy, debonair cousins to not be bitter. Losing the woman he loves to one of them is almost too much to bear.

Rosemarie Dauber never thought she would have to break out of her role as the good little minister’s daughter. But life, and love, have other plans for her.

Ophelia James believed she had left her devil behind when she escaped the Jim Crow South. She never dreamed that he could find her up here.

Cora Morse is a prisoner of her own failing body, but like any prisoner, she has a plan for escape. It is, however, not without casualties.

Arthur Morse does not ask a lot out of life, tacitly accepting the secrets that are kept from him. And carefully guarding a secret of his own.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Characters are the heart and soul of most fiction, so you cannot do enough to improve upon them in your second draft. Again, learn your "novice writer" tendencies. Come up with techniques to catch those tendencies as you write and re-write so that you can substitute them with better literary choices.

Here ends my overview on characterization ... now onto the research phase ...

Revised Revision Plan

2009-09-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

So here's the plan (I wanted to update my original revision plan now that I have a better sense of the task at hand):

Finish the chapter on characterization in my how-to book by the end of this week.
RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH. My cursory internet trolling while writing the novel didn't cut it, so I have ordered a number of books that I think will greatly aid me in fleshing out the essence of the time period. Several of my Brilliant Editors felt that my novel lost some of its 1920s feel in parts, and could have been taking place in modern day. That's not good! My challenge is to maintain a steady and unmistakable Jazz Age backdrop, without seeming gimicky. I also plan to visit the local historical society library in the next week or so to get a better flavor of this particular region during that period. My research will likely be ongoing, and I will continue to trudge forward with the next steps while I'm reading.
Storyboard each viewpoint character's narrative. This is going to be a time-consuming and incredibly valuable endeavor. I need to chart the storylines for all 6 characters, paying special attention to their motivations, personality traits, and dynamic interactions with one another. This will be the first time I will be reading my book with a "slash-and-burn" mentality. In other words, I'm not going to be approaching my manuscript with a pencil for tweaking lines here and there. It's bold red pen time!
Storyboard a new narrative plan. I'm already committed to re-writing my whole novel. I believe that not only will the characters benefit from this, but my style and tone in general will benefit. That's not to say that I won't lift passages from my first draft, but at this stage, I'm beginning to see my first version as a 400 page character biography. It provides an excellent road map for the task I'm about to undertake, but it in itself is not a publishable product.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Get a game plan, and don't be afraid to revisit and rework it. Staying organized is what enabled you to finish your novel, and it's going to be the only way you're ever going to navigate through the murky world that is novel revision!

The Truth Has Set Me Free! (Part II)

2009-09-23T09:51:00.000-04:00

This post is a continuation on my conversation with one of my BEs over the weekend. I won't go through and detail all of his comments; instead, I want to list a few key points I took away from the discussion:

Give character relationships depth and conflict. Specifically, he did not understand the initial attraction between Cora and her husband Arthur ("Being a 'nice guy' just doesn't cut it.") He also wanted me to bring the growing tension between Lila and her best friend, Rosemarie, to a head, instead of allowing it to subside and letting life return to normal between them, which is the way the subplot is currently written. There were several other relationships (Marcus-Edward, the playboy; Arthur-Ophelia) which my BE also thought needed heightened conflict and climax, and he's right.
Work on dialogue and narrative style. This is technically two comments, but they both deal with my overall writing proficiency. My BE said I need to shorten some of the dialogue to make it more punchy and engaging, and also to pay attention to my point of view. He says I pull the reader away from the viewpoint characters' impressions by asking a lot of rhetorical questions. When he called my attention to this, I thought, by golly, he's right. What I had considered to be a clever little stylistic device was apparently not only ineffective, but distracting.
Finally, my BE confirmed that nagging hunch that has been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. My story would benefit from less viewpoints, and more honed central storyline(s). And what's more, he wanted to see more of two of my ancillary characters - Rosemarie and Marcus - and thought that their stories could actually carry the novel, with Lila being more clearly defined as the antogonist. I still have not completely worked out how to go about this shift in narrative vantage points, but one thing I do know is that the change feels right.

One thing has become crystal clear to me by now - this "revision" process is turning into a full blown "re-write." Anything less would be creating a Frankenstein of a novel; cobbling together new passages and chapters and inserting them into what I already have would doubtlessly create a schism in flow and style (I feel I've grown so much as a writer in these past few months from taking in people's comments, and I'd like to think this will be reflected in my future writing.)

So now I know what I have to do ... write a whole new book!!!

The Truth Has Set Me Free! (Part I)

2009-09-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

I was down in the city this weekend and had the chance to meet up with one of my Brilliant Editors. We had limited time, so I said, "Give me the straight story on my book - what doesn't work?" And he told me. And it was wonderful. Basically, one of my viewpoint characters, Ophelia, an African-American woman, is "complete whitewashed garbage" (I think I may have paraphrased his phraseology slightly, but that was the gist of it.) Now you might think that a statement like this would severely bruise my ego or make me run off and crawl under a rock. But you'd be dead wrong. It felt like getting a confirmatory diagnosis on a condition you'd been suspecting you had for a long time. (FYI, This particular BE is very valuable to me because he is a fellow unpublished novelist. He's also a heterosexual male and an African-American, which sets him apart from the other four BEs, who are caucasian females. So his opinion about Ophelia, and my two male viewpoint characters, is worth gold to me.)

So where does this revelation leave me? Well, for one thing, it allows me to let go of one of my too-many viewpoint narratives. Now you might be thinking, why not rise to the challenge and just re-write this character? I would consider doing this, except that what I'm looking for now is reasons to pare away at narratives. In other words, my characters are all in a survival-of-the-fittest contest, and any sign of weakness means they're going to get cut away at, or at least marginalized, in the next draft.

Likewise, my BE thought there was an "imbalance of power" between the men and women in my novel. I've created strong, middle-ground women, but all my men are either too weak or too macho. He asked, "Where's the relatable guy?" I thought this was an extremely insightful question, because I do have a middle-ground, everybody's man character - Marcus - except that, apparently the way that he's currently written, he's not coming across that way! My BE confirmed that, all-in-all, Marcus has a lot of potential, and his narrative could even be heightened so as to make him a protagonist. So my challenge now is to raise Marcus up to the level of a strong, relatable male worthy of carrying the story.

There were a number of other valid, constructive points my BE shared with me which I'll write about in the next post ("The Truth Has Set Me Free, Part II). So let me end here with a ...

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Take your editors by the shoulders if you have to and demand the bare-bones truth from them. The revision process is no time for ego-stroking praise. You know you can write. Now is the time to claw your way above "good amateur writer" status and strive for genius!

Themes and Hooks

2009-09-16T08:45:00.001-04:00

I really like a couple of clever techniques I read about in Manuscript Makeover the other night. Elizabeth Lyon suggests coming up with one word to describe your novel, and then expanding this concept into a sentence that expresses some universal truth. So here goes ...

The first word that came to my mind was "freedom." Coming up with a sentence is harder. I'm going to try a few on for size ... this is a free write, i.e., impromptu and unedited, so don't judge too harshly!

Freedom can be found where you're least likely to look for it or Some prisons cannot be seen by others or True freedom means embracing your past.

Hmm, I may revisit this little exercise later in my revision process. Now onto something that could directly affect the final draft (and the ultimate salability of my novel) ...

Manuscript Makeover also strongly suggests starting your book with a "hook" - that is to say, a first line that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story right away. I have a tendency to do "soft openings," slowly ramping up to the central drama/through-line during the first chapter. I'm starting to doubt this wisdom, especially considering that I'm an unpublished author who's going to have a lot to prove.

I find this exercise quite exciting, but I think it's something I shouldn't even consider tackling until I begin re-organizing my manuscript. I'm considering switching the order of my first and second chapters, because my second chapter, as it currently stands, is the one that throws you into Lila's world and introduces the reader to the Whitakers. One of my trusted Brilliant Editors said that she wanted to be emersed in this plotline much sooner. So for now, I'm going to mentally "bookmark" this exercise, and I'll start playing around with some first-line free writes when I start actually re-writing.

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Try out various quick "free writes" - themes, mantras, first lines, whatever. They take little time, and might tap into something you've been toying with in the back of your mind, but have yet to put into concrete terms.

Attacking Characterization Head-On!

2009-09-15T21:18:00.000-04:00

So I'm halfway through the last main section - characterization - in Manuscript Makeover. I skimmed much of the plot/pacing/tension chapters, not because I'm so cocky as to think I've got those down pat, but all-in-all, I seem to have pretty good instincts re those elements; using the feedback I've gotten from the 5BE, I can somewhat easily reform the parts that might seem sluggish or inconsequential.

Characters, however, are a whole other ballgame, and apparently I'm not alone in feeling this way. The book mentioned that many published authors go back and refine character in their later draft(s), so it's good to know that I'm not way off the mark in sensing that I need more work in this area. I will discuss the specific hurdles and questions that are creeping into my head re the depth of my characters once I actually start rewriting. For now, I just want to touch on some general points.

An earlier section of Ms. Lyon's revision book discussed the difference between viewpoint and protagonist/central plotline (i.e., you can have multiple viewpoints telling one protagonist's story, without creating protagonists out of those viewpoint narrators). This is a key issue (potential problem) with my novel. Currently, I would describe the structure as being parallel plotlines centered around two protagonists (whose lives cross frequently, but who have their own personal journeys, arcs, etc.) The story is told from 6 viewpoints, 3 per storyline. All of the viewpoint characters have their own subplots, but these, in my mind at least, advance the two main storylines in some way.

If you're thinking, "Wow that sounds convoluted!" you may well be right. I believe that I have created a well-paced, compelling work, however, as Manuscript Makeover points out, too many subplots and weighty side characters can diminish the depth and impact of the protagonist and her storyline. A little voice somewhere inside me is whispering that this is likely the case with my novel! Now the question is, what to do about it ...

Ms. Lyon suggests that, where you have two protagonists, you treat one of them as the "main one," giving her 3/4ths of the book. This is a very interesting thought - at this point, I basically give both protagonists equal page time, and then of course, I have all those side character stories ... I have to seriously revisit the structure of my book, not so much for it's ability to tell a compelling tale, but for its merits in regard to presenting rich, 3-dimensional characters.

There is obviously a lot more I can say about all this, but again, I think I will hold off on giving specifics until I am actually in the throws of re-writing. My goal is to finish the how-to book this week, and hopefully begin my phase 2 research next week (looking over old magazines and visiting the local historical society to get a better feel for life around here in the 1920s). I sent out an initial questionnaire to the 5BE re some of the points I mentioned in this post, and am starting to get responses, which I will incorporate into my Master Feedback List. Then comes synthesizing the whole list into an action plan ... argh ... this is starting to sound like work! ;-)

(I'm changing the name of my "Potential Novice Writer Sin" section to something a little less draconian-sounding ...)

FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO: Know your book and its potential weaknesses! I think this is the absolute first step in one's revision process. Know what you have on your hands (and this means learning the basic conventions of novel writing.) Only then can you decide whether you want to try to break the "rules" or conform your book to fit within them. I still don't have all the answers in that department, but I feel a bit more confident now that I understand the "risks" I might be taking with some of my choices.

Anything to help inspire ...

2009-09-09T21:44:00.000-04:00

This post doesn't really deal directly with revision, but could theoretically be applied to any stage of the writing process. In short, be original in your means of seeking inspiration. Along those lines, I wanted to share some "artwork" I did early on in my novel writing endeavors. Some of you may be thinking, why on earth would a writer waste her time gluing together a collage (okay, two collages) as part of some fantasy that her manuscript actually had a cover jacket? Well, there's your answer - a little fantasy goes a long way in the inspiration department when you're writing creatively. You'll see that the first version is rather busy with people; this did wonders for my ability to visualize my main characters interacting during one particular scene early in the book.

As I reached the halfway point of my writing, I began to feel a cooler, sleeker vibe from my protagonist - she was now no longer a country girl, but a city pseudo-sophisticate. So I

cobbled together Jacket Cover #2 to reflect this transformation.

Who knows what cover art I'll come up with once I start actually revising my novel!

POTENTIAL NOVICE WRITER SIN: Don't be stifled by the conventions of creativity ... sure, free-writes are wonderful, but if you feel like composing a song to your writing, baking a cake your protagonist might make, or slapping together a jacket cover collage, go for it! Getting all your senses involved can only help your writing.

Backstory and Full Speed Ahead ...

2009-09-08T07:53:00.000-04:00

I know I said I wouldn't be doing this everyday, and ultimately, I won't be. But I'm finding this whole blogging process incredibly relaxing, as well as clarifying and motivating in regard to the task at hand. My husband asked, "Shouldn't you just use the time it takes to write your blog to actually revise your book?" I, of course, ignored the question. ;-) I really do believe this serves a valid purpose, because it's enabling me to put my revision goals into concrete terms.

More on that in a minute ... But first, in case this blog ever gets any readers, I feel I owe those readers a bit of backstory on the novel itself, so that I can speak in short hand in the future about the changes I intend to make. So here goes a brief, rough pitch:

"The Whitaker Boys" is a period novel set in upstate New York and Manhattan in the late 1920s. The book is told in 3rd person limited through the eyes of 6 characters whose lives are all somehow intertwined. ...

So you're probably thinking, "Well that pitch sure could not have been more vague," and you're right. I'm not intentionally trying to hide anything, but the truth is, I'm not exactly sure how to describe the plot. Seeing as this is not a "Pitching to an Agent" blog, I won't pursue this discussion at the moment. However it does segue nicely into one of the first points I have taken away from what I've read so far in Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon. The reason I can't easily launch into a plot summary is because I have two distinct plot lines which, though interconnected by familial relationships, each has their own climax and resolution. Let me try to summarize both and see if I have any luck ...

The novel follows headstrong Lila Payton on her quest for freedom, stardom and, more elusively, fulfillment. Meanwhile, Lila's reclusive aunt Cora struggles to maintain secrets which have given her tortured life some appearance of normalcy.

Ok, not only is that lousy writing, but it still sounds so horribly generic and uninviting. I'm not going to beat up on myself for failing to master the perfect pitch (there will be plenty of time for working on that later). But what my stumbling and hesitation tells me is that I may indeed have committed a POTENTIAL NOVICE WRITER SIN which the revision book addresses. It says to have no more than than 3 developed characters telling your story. As painful a pill as this is for me to swallow, I think it is a very valid point. The real question now (and which I will have to present to the 5BE) is "Is my use of 6 vantage points daring and innovative or a glaring beginners' mistake?" TBD ... !

(Ok, here's a new feature I'm going to add to the blog - a "practice tip" series, if you will ...)

POTENTIAL NOVICE WRITER SIN: "Too many viewpoint characters, which for many novices is more than three, can mean that story lines cut one another off. ... Use as few characters as will accomplish the needs of your story and genre, and increase their relatedness. ... Employ as few developed viewpoint characters as possible." Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover, p. 77.

What I plan to accomplish with this blog

2009-09-07T09:57:00.000-04:00

Ok, so this is starting to sound a little like a high school research paper already ... I promise to curb that quick! But I do want to lay out the purpose and general structure of this blog, for my own benefit, it no one else's. As I think I alluded to yesterday, I'm doing this as a way to motivate myself to stay on track with my novel revision process. I had no problem staying motivated while writing, but that was because it was all so creative. This feels much more like work to me for some reason. (Hopefully once I'm in the thick of it, it will feel creative again.)

The plan for this blog:

To chronicle my novel revising journey by offering others helpful tips and lessons-learned -the-hard-way on how to go about it. My goal is to blog at least once a week, because let's face it, nobody is going to want to read a day-by-day account of this process!

The plan for revising my manuscript:

Read the relevant chapters of the "how to revise your novel" book that my mom was so considerate as to get me. I probably would not have even considered such a thing had she not thought of it, and I'm hoping it will make this whole process seem a bit more approachable and cohesive. And by relevant chapters, I mean the stuff that I think applies to my particular writing skills (and lack thereof). After receiving a substantial amount of feedback from my amazingly sharp friends, I have come to learn that I definitely have certain strengths (relatable characters, plot, pacing, structure) but I also have clear weaknesses (tendencies toward predictability, tone, scene-setting, and my biggest challenge ... showing not telling!)
Go back and do more research. Because I'm working on a period piece, this is, of course, essential. While I did a multitude of research while I was writing (any time I had even a vague doubt as to the accuracy of something, I researched it), most of that was done on the internet, with only a few calls to local historical societies and the like. My next step is to plant myself in the county historical society one morning and not emerge until I have stumbled upon some previously unknown gem of information. I also plan to browse the historical magazines that 2 members of my 5 Brilliant Editors team have recommended.
Now is a good time to explain the role of my 5BE team. I have five dear friends who have taken the time to not only read my book, but to patiently provide me with detailed feedback on what they read. They have also agreed to help me through the revision process by acting as a sounding board for my new ideas. Which leads me to step 3 ... I will periodically be emailing the 5BE team questions based on the feedback they have already provided, as well as whatever new inspiration pops into my mind.
Re-read my manuscript with a thick red pen in hand. This step is pretty self-explanatory.
Start revising. Hopefully what this actually entails will be clearer to me once I come to this step.

You may have noticed that I have not created any deadlines. This goes against my nature somewhat, as I was all about strict deadlines when I was writing. I've decided to approach the re-write a little differently. Of course I have to get started and stick to it, but I'm going to give myself a little breathing room if I feel I need it. That's another reason why this blog is useful ... if I find myself writing "Not much to report" for 3 weeks in a row, I'll be shamed into getting off my lazy bum and doing something blogworthy the following week!

Day 1 of thinking about revising my novel

2009-09-06T11:38:00.000-04:00

Hello and welcome to the blog I have created to stay motivated to revise my 400 page novel over the next 12 months! Here's a very brief backstory on how I arrived at this point: I've wanted to be a writer since I was 5 years old and did a retelling of Snow White in orange crayon. Fast forward 26 years (and past several graduate degrees in professions that involved writing, but not novel writing) when I suddenly found myself laid off and with a lot of time on my hands. My husband and I began spending more and more time in our upstate NY fixer-upper and less and less time in the city, and I found myself becoming very inspired by the rolling hills and old farmhouses and steeple churches all around. My imagination led me back in time to the 1920s and "The Whitaker Boys" was born. I wrote diligently from February to June of this year, and then sent my work off to my very literate friends, who have begun giving me constructive feedback. While the book seems to be a crowd-pleaser, there's no getting around the inevitable - it still needs a lot of work. And while I felt relatively comfortable with the writing process, having gone through it 2x now (I wrote my first - unpublished - novella the year before this one, while I was still working fulltime), I have yet to attempt a rewrite. And I'll be perfectly honest with you ... I find the thought of the whole thing more than a little daunting. That's why I'm starting this blog ... so I have an outlet for my frustrations, because I'm sure there will be many, and maybe, just maybe, someone out there will be going through the same thing, and can offer me words of wisdom and encouragement (and hopefully I can do the same!) So stay tuned as I start pacing myself for one of the more strenuous mental marathons I have engaged in to date! ...