Writing Pride

Sometimes I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "I can totally do this!" And then other times I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "Oh, there is no way in HELL I can do this!"

I'm on the "no way in hell" end of the spectrum right now with regards to The Witch of November (although the edits have been going better since I stopped trying so dang hard), so I decided I needed to do this post now rather than later.

I've kept a lot of the fanfic I've written on hard copy. I tend to fall in and out of fandom (I'll go through, say, SVU phases and Sports Night phases and so on) so sometimes I feel like re-reading some of the stuff I've written. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!) Most of the time, I read it very critically, all, "Holy crap, this is kinda horrible." Especially the older stuff. Sometimes, though, I have flashes of, "Hey, this actually might be kinda good!"

So, at the risk of sounding terribly conceited, I'm going to link to the couple of stories I've written that I actually like, if only to remind myself that I do have some semblance of talent lying around somewhere, hee.

-"Lost in Time", a Charmed story it took me three dang years to get out on paper.

-"Stalemate", an SVU story that is kind of AU (alternate universe) in that we were never given any info about Casey's family so I gave her one. It is probably the most dramatic story I've ever written and was therefore very challenging, but I do like the end result.

-"Hide and Seek", the most recent fanfic I've written. It's a Harper's Island fic through the eyes of the killer, so it spoils the end if you haven't seen the whole thing, but you have no idea how much fun it was to write. Which should worry me, I think, hee.

And just so this doesn't look like I'm shilling my old work (because I'm really not ... it's more for me to remember that I can do this and that it's not hopeless), here's a snippet from The Witch of November, a letter from my ghost to her husband, back when she was still alive (there are a few of these scattered throughout the story).

Accepting Change

Part of the exercise of writing something as large as a novel (current word count: 81,457) is being comfortable with change.

As a rule, I kind of dislike change. In my personal life, I mean. I like things the way they are because ... well, it's the way things are. You know what to expect (for the most part). Change brings the unknown. Change is the unknown.

But with writing, change is kind of necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as the story taking a direction you weren't intending (like I said before, that stuff about the characters writing themselves is no joke). Sometimes it's accepting the fact that a story just wasn't meant to be written in the voice you were envisioning.

I had intended on making The Witch of November read as kind of conversational, like you're inside the kids' heads or that the kids are telling you the story. I've successfully managed that voice once or twice before, but that's not my usual style.

Out of all the edits I've done, I edited the diary entries and letters from the 1870s the least. I actually like and am pretty proud of those, and I think it's because I let the voice fit the writing rather than trying to make the writing fit the voice.

Part of the reason I think I found the conversational kid voice so hard is because I was trying to make it funnier than I am. Because I'm really not all that funny. (Well, not consistently ... I'm funny in fits and starts ;)). Trying to force humor is never a good thing, and trying to force a voice on a story that doesn't fit it isn't a good thing, either. Even worse, every time I wrote and rewrote the first chapter (I seriously lost count on what revision I'm on), it sounded less and less like ... me.

So you know what? Screw that voice. I've decided to just write the dang thing in my own style, and in all honesty, it flows a lot easier when I'm just being myself.

Frustration Level: High

Writing is just like anything else: it looks easy until you try it.

I used to think the hardest part was getting the story out. Then I became entrenched in the world of edits.

I mentioned in my previous entry that I don't have a real process. I just write and think of my next steps as I go. I have run into problems doing that, namely when I get stuck, I can't jump ahead to another part in the story and then go back to where I was stuck. If, for example, I get stuck in Chapter Six, I can't jump ahead to Chapter Eight because I don't always know what Chapter Eight is going to be, you know?

So when I get stuck, I have to plow through it until I get unstuck, all the while thinking, "Oh, I can go back and fix it later."

You know what's harder than I realized? Fixing it later.

Part of my problem is I'm attempting a voice I've only written in once or twice before. I managed it in a Supernatural fanfic I wrote a couple years ago called "Corpse Fire" and I remember it being relatively effortless back then. Not so much now.

For some reason, the first draft of The Witch of November is ... not really verbose, but written in a more adult voice than I really want. And trying to change the voice I've already written is freakin' hard.

So, I want it to read roughly like this:

“I’ll be right back,” Allie muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. She could do this, right? Because really, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and run back through the fence. She could totally handle sixty little seconds. Besides, the longer she stood there, the more nervous she’d be. This kind of rescue mission needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But paragraphs like that are kind of hard to come by.

Most of it is like this:
 
Of course, what should be was never what usually happened. Allie stared at the sheets of paper with a frown on her face for a few minutes. Nothing jumped out at her; the spells or rituals all seemed to have different ingredients and different methods. Some were what Allie thought of as white magic: candles, herbs, blessings. Others were classic examples of dark magic; nothing called for eye of newt or any other cliché ingredients, but most of them called for drops of blood, wilted flowers, and other things that called up images of Halloween and the macabre.
 
Which is ... okay, but it lacks both the punch and the humor I want. It also doesn't sound like an eleven-year-old.

(And people thought I was kidding when I said the first draft was terrible! Ha!)
 
So what do I do now? Try to figure out whatever I was doing when I wrote that first paragraph up there, hee.

Inspiration and Ideas

It's a question almost every author is asked at least once: "Where do you get your ideas?" And it's a loaded question, because there is no real answer. It's one of those things where you sit there and go, "You know, I don't even know!"

Inspiration is funny and fickle thing. I went through a period where I didn't get one little drop of inspiration at all ... for close to two years. It was terrible. And then after that, I went through a phase where I was getting inspiration from everything. Which was also kind of terrible because I can only write one thing at a time. Really, Inspiration, what gives?

Inspiration can come from anywhere. A song lyric (as with The Witch of November), road signs (I had an inkling of a story that never got off the ground about a dead end road that lived up to its name), conversations, funny things that happen throughout the day, plot points from TV shows and movies.

Now, I think of inspiration and ideas as two different things. Inspiration is the inkling of the idea. Inspiration is the glimmer of the plotline, the little moment of, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if ..." Turning the inspiration into an idea--something that you can possibly squeeze 50,000 words out of--is the hard part.

Okay, so your inspiration has evolved into an idea. Now what? Everyone is different. For me, I don't have a real process. I don't create flow charts, and I don't plan the story out from beginning to end. I just start writing and let the story flow. Yes, I've written myself into many a corner that way, but hey, I like a challenge.

Because sometimes the stories and the characters write themselves. I always thought people were kidding or being dramatic or whatever when they said that, but trust me, people, that shit is for real. For example, I wound up writing a small, barely-there romantic thread between my two protagonists in The Witch of November. They're eleven years old and thus in that "Boys/girls are icky but I think maybe I like like her/him" stage, so it's nothing too heavy-duty, but it's there.

I had no intention of writing any kind of romance at all between my two kids. It kind of just ... happened. And it ultimately wound up giving me the idea for my epilogue. Had I not let the story evolve in its own way, I wouldn't have my kickass ending!

Inspiration is all around. It's in the songs you hear and the movies you watch and in the funny thing that happened to your coworker on the way back from lunch. You just have to be open to it.

The Beginning

So. I've been working on a book.

Everyone who knows me knows this was a long time coming, but see, ideas that are meant to carry out over the length of a novel? Not my strong suit.

The idea came from, of all places, a line in a Gordon Lightfoot song. (Yes, I listen to Gordon Lightfoot. Stop looking at me like that.) The line, "And every man knew, as the captain did, too, 'twas the Witch of November come stealin'" in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" jumped out at me. My knee-jerk reaction? "Oh hell yes, I've got to turn this into a Supernatural fanfic!"

Yes, I write fanfic as well. Don't judge.

My original intention was to write about a ghost ship kind of deal, taking the message of the line literally. In trying to come up with a feasible plotline, I came to discover that I know next to nothing (okay, absolutely nothing) about boats and about sailing. The amount of research I would have to do to have even a remote idea of what I was talking about was insane.

So the idea sat on my mental shelf for a while until something new came to me: what if November isn't a month but a place? And what if the witch isn't a name for heavy winds but an actual witch? And thus The Witch of November was born.

Of course there is no place in the United States named November. Well, there is a November Creek, Idaho (thanks, Mapquest!) but what I know about Idaho is pretty much equal to what I know about boats and sailing. I then decided that if other authors can make up places willy-nilly, well, dang it, so can I.

The Witch of November's first incarnation was that Supernatural fanfic (I said don't judge!). I wound up loving the characters and the town of November, Maine, and even my ghost/witch. The finished draft of the short story wound up being 44 pages long and consisting of 21,000-ish words. So I figured if I could get 44 pages out of it in a fanfic, I could take Sam and Dean (and obviously any Supernatural-inspired story elements) out, bring my original characters front and center, and expand on the idea. Oh, and change the ending, too, because a salt-and-burn would more than likely constitute copyright infringement.

After almost a year of work (not constantly ... a little here and a little there), the first draft is finished. The first draft? Is the easy part.

Keep checking back here for my squees when things work, whines when things don't, random observations about the story and the process in general, and the occasional snippet or two. I promise it'll be a good time.