When I get around to working on my own stuff, it will be the swordfighting ms. However, it wasn't the swordfighting ms I was thinking about today while Tyson and I were walking; it was the former GN. Technically that's closer to being finished than the swordfighting ms is. Most of it seems to be in place. The story is all laid out, I've got a goodly portion of the actual writing done, and when I do sit down to work, the GN ms tends to go faster than the swordfighting ms just because the writing itself is so streamlined.

The problem, I decided today, is that I don't have a character arc. Without a character arc, the ms is just a bunch of words set down in order. I have the story arc, and if you asked me I could probably tell you what and how the character feels and changes. But I don't have a grip on it scene by scene.*

I had a lot of thoughts about this (I think T. and I walked about three miles), but some are fading and they were scattered to begin with. Some of them had to do with girl characters, about the goals that girls have in real life vs. the goals they have in books. Historically, a girl's goal was to marry well. Period. But that's not the kind of goal that makes you want to read a book. Some other thoughts were about how a lot of the time people (esp. kids and teens) simply don't have one strong goal they struggle to attain, the way book characters generally do. There are more Bella Swans in real life than there are Harry Potters. And still other thoughts were about the same old problem that keeps rearing its head, the problem of a negative character goal.** Do you have to reframe a character's negative goal as a positive goal in order for a story to work? Even if you don't, does it have to happen subconsciously--I mean, would a new, unbiased reader see a positive goal for your character, even though you were never really thinking about it or writing in that direction? Or are there things to keep in mind if you want a story to work with a negative character goal? Or is it a matter of the reader's goal for the character being different from the character's goal for his/herself?

The main thought that stuck with me from today, though, is that it'd be best to set the former GN aside until I know what my character wants. Or rather, until I feel what she wants. I can talk about what she wants all day, but if I'm not feeling it, it'll never get on the paper.




*It could be that I should feel discouraged by not having a grip on the heart of the story. But it could equally be that I should feel good to be struggling with the same basic problem in both my current WIPs. Both have an already-laid-out plot; I'm not just throwing character-driven scenes against the wall and seeing which ones stick. In both of my WIPs, I have to figure out how to have character-driven stakes in every scene and how to raise them in every scene--even though the stakes have already been decided for me in advance. So maybe I should feel good because it seems my writing mind is determined to force me to crack this problem, even though my two current mss are nothing alike and shouldn't have the same issues at all.


**Like, the character doesn't want something, s/he wants something not to happen.

Have been thinking about something a writer friend said a few days ago, re. a scene WF wrote. The scene reads great, smooth as butter, not a word wasted. What's interesting, though, is that it moves. It pulls you in and next thing you know you've already read four pages or whatever. I recalled seeing the same scene back when WF was still reworking it, and it didn't move, the way a WIP doesn't move while you're still in the middle of trying to fix it.

The reason this is interesting to me is that WF says the scene opened up and started moving when WF changed the setting. That was all, just put the characters in a different place. They were still doing and saying basically the same things, but the background became different. For some reason this allowed WF to progress and fix things and get them moving.

This has been niggling at me (mildly, because I'm effing BUSY) over the past couple of days. Somehow switching the setting jostled WF's mind, right? It sounds like not a big deal just hearing about it, but the more I think about it, it seems important. A very small change that took place mostly in the writer's head rather than on the page clarified and enlightened and opened the door to progress--perhaps substantial progress, because when you've got one scene that moves, you knows how it feels to get a grip on the story, so you know what to shoot for in other scenes.

It especially seems important to me because it may speak to some of the issues I'm having right now. I've got scenes where I know what happens, but they're just not quite right. I know how it feels to have a scene that's not quite as it should be, and then you suddenly see that scene in a slightly different light and rewrite accordingly and then it falls into place. It would be nice if that happened to me right now.

Because sometimes when you have one scene not quite right, everything that comes after it is therefore a tad off, too, and the problem multiples as the story goes on, till you come to a point where you can't work anymore and you don't know why.

If I understood this process better--if I understood more details about what makes a scene click versus not click--maybe I could make more progress, or give a jolt to my approach re. my own WIP. Will try to see if WF has any light to shed on the subject.

Note to self: re. chapter revis.

Try breaking up first part of chapter 3 and sprinkling it into chapter 2. See if you can use the interesting narration re. sex, etc. to move along boring description of trees and grass.

Take a good hard look at chapter 2 and see what can be put off till later without confusing the reader.

Too much to do here. I can't even think what order to do what in. I think I'll work on one of the w-f-h stories, at least for the rest of work time today--must tutor tonight. I've got overlapping deadlines, revisions coming back en masse, tutoring, end-of-school sh*t, relative in town, and suddenly today I found I'd put an important ARD (that's Texan for IEP meeting) on the wrong date and I had to leave four documents half-finished on my screen and run like hell to get there. (They were like, "Well, we can go ahead and have the meeting without you," and I was like, "Oh no, you will not!")

It looks like I'll pick up the swordfighting ms when I'm able to seriously get back into my own work, although I have no idea when that will be. Maybe never, is what it feels like at this point. But when I did work on it--not sure how long ago that was, a few days?--I cut the excess I'd become aware of but had been unable to do anything about. What I have now is a Chapter 1 that makes sense and has a point, and a Chapter 3 that makes sense and has a point. And then there's a Chapter 2 that I'm unsure about. I think it's one of those things I'm going to have to come to grips with, craftwise--if I was writing my normal way Chapter 2 probably wouldn't be there, at least not yet; I would probably skip straight to chapter three. So I guess one question to ask myself is whether I should pretend Chapter 2 isn't there and forge onward to see what develops, or whether I should try to figure out what to do with this transitional chapter, because there clearly must be some kind of bridge between events, and there clearly needs to be some kind of set-up for later.

I want to figure this out so much--how somebody like me can write a plotted novel--but there's just not enough time, and then where there is time I don't seem to make much progress because I don't know what I'm doing and the whole process is so unnatural for me.

Suddenly I can't take any more of this. Or rather, I refuse to take any more of this, for the rest of today. If I spend one more second writing stuff to order, my last vestige of humanity will disappear and all that will be left is something more or less in the form of a human being, but stuffed with straw and propped sitting up in front of the computer.

I'll behave tomorrow. But for the rest of today, it's swordfighting.

side note

If you're wondering why kids don't read anymore, don't blame video games and movie and iPods. Blame the boring bland sh*t that's forced down their throats in school in the name of teaching them to read. Why should they have any inkling of the excitement of story and character when they've never seen it? I'd pick video games and movies too, if I were them.

I'm having to remind myself that I almost never get any writing done at the end of the school year. I feel rather empty, writing-wise, like I'll never write again and maybe it would be better all around if I didn't. However, I know that the well always refills, and I think it's just the end-of-school busyness combined with having to meet w-f-h deadlines, which means I have to squeeze out some writing even though there's no time or room for it. I had to work yesterday even though my mind could not get into a creative place at all. Same today.

A couple of worrisome outside/business type ideas have reared their ugly heads lately. One is an article/opinion piece I read talking about Kindle and how most Kindle books are $9.99 and that's not enough for Amazon to make a profit--they're losing money on it, the article said--and they have to raise their prices but the readers won't go for that. Then the article said that the publishers were being squeezed between readers who won't pay over a certain price and authors who are asking for bigger and bigger advances. The article made it sound like the good-hearted publishers just want to provide cheap books to the reading public, but the greedy authors won't let them.

(I had more to say about this but, in an unusual fit of wisdom, deleted it.)

Then on the other hand I saw a site where people are scanning in books they've read and offering them up for download. The authors get nothing from this, and the publishers don't either. It's stealing, the same way people have been stealing music and movies for years. Only it's just now hitting us. And I don't know how I feel about it. I like the exchange of ideas and information on the internet. I love the incredible ease of being able to get hold of things that teach or inspire.

But the big thing--the big, BIG thing is--authors (and artists) have to have roofs over their heads before they can create. They have to have food. And they have to have time to dedicate to creative thinking. It's not always just a matter of sitting down and doing the work; it's also about the brain having time to process and absorb. Brains are exasperating things; they don't always leap into gear just because their owners have an hour-long time slot before having to be at work.

So anyway, re. the internet, all I know is that nobody can stop the changes that are coming; the music industry has tried and failed. It looks to me like people are willing to pay for what they get off the internet, but they won't pay much. Some might say that the solution for authors is to skip the publisher and offer their work straight up, on their own, but the truth is that mss need more than one loving hand and eye to achieve full potential.

(I had more to say about this too, but deleted it as well. I'm being so good today. I deserve a package of Zingers.)

I do wonder if at some point the Internet will right itself. It's such a free-for-all right now, it's like being in a crowd of people all shouting at each other. Surely it will eventually sort itself out.