BUTT IN THE CHAIR

Whenever anyone is fool enough to ask me for writing advice, I'm sure my responses are vague or cryptic at best. But having spent the last many (many) moons finally wrestling my next book into shape, I may have discovered a viable answer.

 

Get your Butt in the Chair.

 

Make time to get your butt in the chair every day. Even if you're only staring at a blank screen, even if your keyboard in encased in cobwebs, chances are, something is cooking in your subconscious — triggered by the mundane physical act of going into work mode. 

 

Ignore your email, social media, or whatever you forgot to take out of the freezer for dinner. This is your work time. Trust your inner writer to rise to the occasion.

 

Granted, it doesn't sound as sexy as the Narrative Curve Graph, or the 9-Box Plot Diagram, or some magic alchemical formula. Or voodoo. But it's an improvement over the Spaghetti Method (throw it on the wall and see if it sticks), which I realize is the way I tend to write my first few drafts.

 

Stephen King assures writers that nobody but you is ever going to read the first draft (nor should they), so you might as well throw in everything, including the kitchen sink, the whole enchilada, the kit and kaboodle, and any other stale cliche or ludicrous idea you can think of to get some semblance of an actual story up onscreen. Most of it will be (mercifully) deleted in the comb-out anyway.

 

You can pop a cork and do a happy dance as soon as you type The End on that first draft, but understand that the real work is just beginning.

 

 

This is no time to be like Mooch, the Cat, chilling out while waiting for inspiration to drop in. You can't stalk it, or bully it into submission, either. Inspiration is a fragile, often fleeting thing. You have to be ready at the keyboard with your doc open, your mouse in play (tinkering over this sentence or that parenthetical note to self, or some random snippet of dialogue), with the scope of the story simmering away in your subconscious, when that tiny idea glimmers briefly to life that's going to Make. It. Work.

 

But that the idea comes at all is absolutely the product of all those hours your butt has logged in the chair. Even when you're not writing actual prose, it's the busy work you do in the margins, Grasshopper, that empties out space in your brain for the next idea to be born.

HOLD THAT (DEAD)LINE

After 40-odd years in journalism (some of them damned odd), I respect deadlines.

It's not that I grudgingly obey them, or that I've had to coach myself to accept them. I need them. I cling to them. They are the dangling carrot that propels my life forward.

Obviously, deadlines determine when I go see a movie (remember going to the movies?) in order to get my review in the paper. Sometimes, they influence which movie I see, depending on which showtimes are more favorable to making my deadline.

My entire week is orchestrated around seeing a movie on Friday, writing my review on Saturday, and sending the finished piece to my editor by Sunday afternoon — all to make my Monday morning deadline.

The entire book-publishing industry also runs on deadlines. They exist for turning in that first draft, for each new revision, for providing front and back matter, author photos, Q&A guidelines, PR material — everything depends on each successive deadline being met in a timely manner. Miss one, and the entire infrastructure stutters to a halt.

The habit has spread to every other part of my life. I pay bills according to which due date is looming next, and plan meals around which item in the fridge is most likely to rot if ignored much longer. I'm inspired to clean house when I know visitors are coming, and dress according to whatever events are going to take me out into the public eye.

But now all that's changed. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed yet another casualty: the deadline.

Five weeks into lockdown, and my schedule is completely out the window. Movie theaters are closed and I'm taking my yoga classes on Zoom, so I'm liberated from the task of having to actually go out in public. I don't drive any more, so I'm not even shopping; kind-hearted friends are picking up my groceries and bringing them to me. Some are intrepid enough to come in the house; others do a porch drop. Most days, the only one I interact with is my cat.

Did I say "liberated?" I'm in freefall. Without deadlines, where's my motivation?

The decline was gradual. First, I stopped strapping on what I call my ID bracelets every morning, vintage Celebracelets by Faye Augustine with my book titles spelled out in tiny silver alphabet-block beads. I never used to appear in public without them, but now . . . 

Then, I stopped washing my hair every single morning, a big adjustment for someone as psycho about her hair as me. Maybe once or twice a week, if it doesn't look too hideous, I dare to let it go. Who's going to see me?

Some routines are still inviolate, in the absence of actual deadlines. I have to get dinner on the table by 7 pm in time for Jeopardy, and cleared away at least by 8:30 to have time to read before bed. Monday night is still Pizza Night, without fail — but the rest of the week, all the days tend to run together.

I don't go out, so the clothes I wear in public (you know, the ones that are still intact) stay in the closet, while my comfort outfits (sweatshirts, jeans, pom-pom slippers) get worn all day. I still wash my clothes every Saturday — even though the loads are smaller — but I'm down to washing my sheets only every other week.

I used to make jokes about Miss Havisham — until she popped up in my mirror.

Meanwhile, my living space is showing signs of — let's call it benign neglect. If those discarded slippers are littering the stairs all day, or a cobweb the size of a volleyball net is hanging from the hallway ceiling, who's going to know?

I'm starting to feel like that tree that falls in the forest. Am I still a sloth if there's no one to see me?


(Cartoon by Mick Stevens)
(Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss Havisham, Great Expectatons, 2012)

THE IMPOSSIBLE MEME

Okay, we've all seen that meme: William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while under quarantine in London during the Bubonic plague.

The intention of circulating this (probably relatively true-ish) factoid, of course, is to make us all feel like a bunch of whining slackers. Want to feel even worse? Remember that Anne Frank wrote her famous Diary while hiding from the Nazis in a cramped attic in Amsterdam with her family of four and three other people. For two years. 

The fruits of these labors, composed under impossibly stressful conditions, are inarguably masterpieces, Frank's Diary for its honesty, optimism and compassion, and Lear for its brilliant and enduring insights into the human condition.

So what are the rest of us waiting for? Now that we're all under house arrest, we have nothing but time.

But consider too that Lear is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, in every respect. It's full of howling storms and furious rages, delusion, betrayal, calamity, madness, folly, treachery and despair. Hard not to see at least a psychological parallel between the work itself and the temper of the times in which it was written.

Colette: Holed up like a Parisienne

So, if I wanted to write something gloomy and despondent, this would be the perfect time to do it! Indeed, there would be no excuse not to spend these grey, wet, solitary days hammering away at the keyboard, grappling angst and uncertainty into something (hopefully) brilliant.

But, no. Me, I'm trying to cobble together a lighthearted romantic comedy, full of magic and music, for Young Adult readers.

It's the second book (although not a sequel) stipulated in my contract for Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, which was already too dark and perverse for the general YA readership, according to my Goodreads reviews. This new one is supposed to be fun and upbeat.

Hah.

Blissfully untarnished by reality

Not that it couldn't be done. When the Nazis marched in to occupy France, the celebrated novelist Colette was 67 (the same age I am now), and nearly bedridden. Yet, holed up in her Paris apartment for the duration, she produced Gigi. Harking back to France's golden age of the Belle Epoque, it told the sunny tale of a spirited teenage girl raised to be a courtesan who defies expectations by charming her designated client into marriage.

And I have no doubt that if my Art Boy was still here to shelter in place with me, he would have turned out three or four of his magical paintings by now, and sketches for many more.

His work was always blissfully untarnished by everyday reality; his ideas bubbled up directly out of the teeming wellspring of his own imagination — flying fish, joyous dancing figures, pink bunnies and all. How he would have relished the excuse to stay home and paint all day!

I'm trying to view this temporary (we hope) dystopian sojourn as an opportunity to be relished. That's what James would do! And who knows? If the present coronavirus lockdown stretches on for another eternity, a deep plunge into the imagination might be just the escape I need.



(Above: Act of Creation, James Aschbacher)

CROWD PLEASING

Okay, here's the thing about Game of Thrones: George R. R. Martin has not even finished writing the sixth and last book of the series yet.


Everything that's happened on the TV adaptation for the last season and a half has been cobbled together by the showrunners and their scriptwriters.

Granted, Martin is their chief consultant and guru on the show. We assume he is shaping the narrative to some degree as the show thunders toward its grand finale next week, giving his team the general idea of where the story is headed.

But how closely does it have to hew to the book Martin is actually writing?

Think about it: If Martin is like most writers with a publication date looming, he's still tinkering with plot details and narrative choices. He may think he knows where he's going, but still deciding the best way to get there.

Martin's ouvre has taken on a life of its own.

Then along comes the TV adaptation, wending its way through Martin's first five A Song of Ice and Fire novels, which becomes a freakin' global phenomenon and earns Martin an audience of untold gazillions — every single one of whom develops very particular ideas about how their favorite character or storyline should go.

What's an author to do?

You know what they say about pleasing all of the people all of the time. So, for the sake of sanity, most authors try to write for the only audience that matters — themselves. (Or a least their inner editors.)

But with an audience as massive as Martin's now is, ready to scrutinize every semi-colon, he's got to be feeling the pressure. Meanwhile, the TV series gallops along at it's own breakneck pace.

But it could work to Martin's advantage. He now has a worldwide supply of beta-readers (okay, beta-watchers) eager to point their thumbs up or down over each new revelation that flickers across their screens. Social media explodes like dragon fire the minute after each new episode is aired.

George R. R. Martin: who's writing this thing anyway?

So Martin is in a unique position to gauge how his narrative choices are playing out before he actually commits them to a published book.

Not that he will necessarily adapt his novel-in-progress according to what plays on social media — nor should he.  Anyone who cheerfully kills off his nominal hero at the end of the first book in a six-book series doesn't exactly fall into the crowd-pleaser category.


But with public outcry (not to say outrage) reaching fever pitch at each new plot twist revealed on the show, he now he faces the kind of integrity test that has so often challenged his characters over the last eight seasons.

Will he do the right thing, according to his own perverse instincts? Or will he strive — for once — to give the people what they demand?

Stay tuned . . .

TIME BANDITS

Books: entertainment the old-fashioned way

We didn't make a resolution, but once the holiday festivities were over last December, Art Boy and I came up with a radical decision for the New Year. We decided to read more books.

It takes some planning, of course, given the finite number of hours in the day. So we came up with three strategies for wresting time away from our usual allotment. Just call us the time bandits!

Strategy 1: In the dark of winter, we designate the hour before we start prepping dinner to reading. What a luxury! I've already read more books in the last six weeks than I was able to read in all of last year!

Time to excavate those bookmarks and put 'em to work!

As a writer, too, I have to keep filling up the well. It's not like stealing ideas from other books; it's more like the act of reading plunges you into the milieu where ideas are created, both on the page and in your own imagination.

As a smart sociologist once wrote, "we create as we read in a way that we do not as we watch Roseanne." Or, I would add, bringing the comparison up to date, as we do not as we watch the latest Looney Tunes emanating from the White House.

(No offense intended to the original Warner Brothers Looney Tunes of classic cartoons. If only Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were running things in DC!)

Oh, if ONLY we'd had this option!

Which brings me to Strategy 2: Unplugging from the nightly news frees up another extra hour — or an entire evening, if you decide to give your psyche and your sanity a break. Stay informed. Seize every possible opportunity to resist. But don't let it occupy your every waking moment. Besides, you'll catch up with the news the minute you go online again.

Strategy 3: W'eve started getting up one hour earlier in the morning. Yes, it's daunting to try to roll out of bed when it's still dark outside. But once showers are taken, the cat's been fed (and, sensibly, gone back to sleep), and caffeine has been imbibed, I find myself at the keyboard before 8 o'clock in the morning! Which means three uninterrupted hours of writing time before we're off to yoga!

And the more writing I get done in the morning, the more deserving I feel about all that rapturous reading to come!

WISE GUYS & GALS

Their Finest: dueling typewriters

The recent popularity of Their Finest got me thinking about how to make writers dynamic in the movies.

Writing a novel in isolation is hardly a spectator sport. Sure, there have been good movies about novelists, but the act of writing itself is pretty much a snooze-fest onscreen.

But other forms of writing can be made more cinematic because they involve action — and humor.

A pair (or team, or pool) of writers bouncing ideas off each other verbally while concocting a film or television script is an idea situation: the act of creation is achieved as the jokes fly.

Boy Meets Girl: sell that story

One of my favorites in this genre is the 1938 screwball comedy Boy Meets Girl, with fast-talking James Cagney and Pat O'Brien as studio screenwriters hatching an elaborate movie scenario in double-time.

A more updated version was that venerable TV sitcom of the 1960s,  Dick Van Dyke Show, where staff writers Rob, Buddy, and Sally traded non-stop wisecracks while cobbling together a weekly comedy script for their TV star boss.

Another reliably visual writing genre is journalism. You can't go wrong with reporters out there tracking down a story — especially if they're cracking wise the whole time, as in The Front Page (1931, and remade many times).

Or better still, the 1940 remake, His Girl Friday, recasting the second lead as a female newshound played by Rosalind Russell, following leads and cracking the case alongside star reporter Cary Grant.

Wax Museum, Glenda Farrel: girl meets typewriter

One of my personal favorites, less well-known today than the others, is The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Sure, it's a horror movie, but it also features Glenda Farrell as a gal reporter with plenty of moxie, flinging snappy patter in all directions.

When her roomie (Fay Wray) disappears, right around the time the city wax museum begins exhibiting a bunch of new figures of dubious provenance, Farrell convinces her skeptical, hard-boiled editor (Frank McHugh) to let her track down the story — and, boy, does she ever!

The genre inspired its own homage in Woody Allen's Scoop (2006). Ian McShane is great as a recently deceased reporter who haunts cub journalist Scarlet Johansson with clues to a crime, because he — being inconveniently dead — can no longer get the story.

As long as writers are producing the scripts, tales of the writing life will be told onscreen. (Write what you know, and all that.) Here are some of my other favorites.

AHA!

Having trouble dragging the first draft of your novel to the finish line?

Here's a tip from Stephen King: the first draft is always just for you. No one else will (or should) ever see it. This is how you tell yourself the story.

I don't know when, or where King ever said this. It's just one of those tiny infobites that occasionally pops up in the Random Shuffle that is my brain. But even though I've forgotten where I heard or read this nugget, the idea itself is so savvy and reassuring, it's stayed with me.

It's especially pertinent now that I'm working on the first draft of my next book. (The one coming out after Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge.) This is the first time I'm working from a detailed proposal that includes the beginning, the (dreaded) middle, and the end of the story.

My previous book-writing method was to just plunge into an idea and flail around for the next couple of years, but I'm beginning to see the wisdom of actually making a plan first.

Things are, in fact, going more smoothly than usual. But here's the thing: at this stage, when you're still telling yourself the story, you haven't thought of every detail yet. There will be plenty of "aha!" moments in the course of the writing (and rewriting) — but now is not the time to sit around waiting for them!

The job now is to get a complete story onto the page, by fair means or foul, even if it means writing something stupid to connect scene A to scene B. Don't agonize over every word choice, and don't get hung up on details.

And whatever you do, don't stop!

There'll be plenty of time later to throw out the stupid stuff. (And a lot of stuff you think is great now; that's what editors are for.) Everything is going to change, anyway, but until you have something that at least vaguely looks and quacks like a duck on the page, you won't be able to proceed to the next step — revising. And believe me, that's where the real work begins!

That's when you get to those "aha!" moments too. But you have to get there first!

BEAST UPDATE

Hey folks, here's another update in the Beast saga!

This week, I received a hard copy version of Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, straight from the copyeditor! So I was sharpening my quill pen to scrawl my "yea" or "nay" on suggested edits, supply alternate changes, if necessary, and seize my last opportunity to make any last-minute substantive alterations.

Fortunately not too many of those. Intrepid  Candlewick editor Kaylan Adair and I have already re-edited and revised this thing so many times, there weren't even any typos left for me to correct — only my persistent misspelling of one frequently-used word. And my always uncertain grasp on the realities of commas, and when to use them.

(For which, I apologize, retroactively, to anyone who has ever entrusted me to edit your manuscript. My approach to commas is creative and free-form, although not exactly correct— apparently!)

Anyway, shipped my shaggy Beast back to the publisher today. And I'm eagerly awaiting the next step on the road to my expected pub date, March 6, 2018.

Stay tuned!

WRITE ON

The intrepid Captain James Hook continues to win readers, out on the cyber seas!

Last month, I was contacted by the lovely Clare Moore of the online mag, Ampersand Literary.

 She had just read Alias Hook, and invited me to do a Q&A for her site, which publishes fiction, poetry, photography, and artwork, along with occasional interviews with the purveyors thereof.

I was thrilled to do it, and the post is up online as of today!

Clare generously invited me to blather on at great length about Alias Hook and my upcoming Beast novel. But she also quizzed me about the writing process itself, my completely chaotic publishing history, and any tips I might have for emerging writers.

It was a fun interview to do. And while you're there, surf around this diverse, eclectic site devoted to the creative process!

WHY WE WRITE

Primitive desktop . . .

Ampersand Literary, an online magazine for aspiring writers recently asked to interview me. The number one question on their list: When did you first become interested in writing?

Hmmm . . .  I don't remember the process of becoming interested. It's not like I had a plan. It's just something I've always done.

As an avid young reader, when I got really swept up in a book—like the Anne of Green Gables series so beloved by my mom—I'd amuse myself stealing, er, adapting my favorite moments from the book for characters I made up. That should have given me a clue.

When I read I Capture the Castle at about age 11, I was all afire to start a journal. At 12, I was corresponding with two European pen pals because I loved to write letters. At 15, I somehow qualified for a Press pass from Teen Set Magazine as a "campus reporter."

(Although nothing I submitted seems to have been accepted for publication —excellent training for my first couple of decades trying to get a book into print!)

But I had another passionate interest, as a child. I loved to draw.

Alias Hook, graphic novel-style.

For years, I kept an oversize, hardcover picture book, The Giant Book of Dogs, Cats, and Horses, under the sofa, with a bunch of blank sheets of typing paper and a pencil tucked inside. Whenever I was sitting there in front of the TV, I'd pull out the book and paper, and, using the book as a desktop, happily sketch away.

If I had any plan it all, it was probably to "be" an artist. Illustrated books were my favorites —the Alice in Wonderland books, the Oz books, Mary Poppins. But I never wanted to illustrate somebody else's stories; I always imagined writing and drawing my own.

I still have to draw all my characters—endlessly—before I can even begin to write about them. If graphic novels had been invented back in my misspent youth, maybe I would have started there.

Once in awhile, I diagram a scene from one of my books in comic book-style panels, so I can see it all laid out. It's fun for a couple of panels, but trying to construct an entire narrative in pictures would take way too much time away from writing the story.

For me, pictures are for illustrating the story. Actually telling the story takes words—glorious, aggravating, addictive words. And that's the part I still love most.

BABES, DITZES, and MOMS

What I tried not to learn from '60s TV

A few years ago, my friend and colleague Wallace Baine wrote a column in the Santa Cruz Sentinel called, "Jed Clampett, Molder Of Men," his ode to the male role models provided to impressionable youth on 1960s TV shows.

It's a funny piece. (I was especially delighted at his shout-out to Gomez Addams, the sexiest, most impassioned husband on TV. Even after two children, his ardor for wife, Morticia, was undimmed.

She had only to murmur "c'est la vie"—or even "hors d'oeuvres"— and Gomez came unglued. "Tish—that's French!" he'd cry, throw away his pipe, grasp her hand and commence rubber-stamping her arm with his kisses.)

"Tish—that's French!"

But even as my inner editor was smacking me upside the head, demanding "Why didn't YOU think of that for a column?," I knew the answer.

Female role models on '60s TV? There weren't any. Little boys like Wallace could aspire to the panache of Gomez Addams, the witty irreverence of Hawkeye Pierce, or the smart, rationalistic cool of Mr. Spock.

Little girls were taught something entirely different by TV heroines like Jeannie, in her flesh-baring harem costume, whose only desire was to please her "master," the compliant, tabula rasa robot that was My Living Doll, and the backwoods sisters on Petticoat Junction, in their skimpy Daisy Mae outfits.

Men on TV were doctors, lawyers, business execs, detectives, compassionate family men. Women were babes, ditzes, or moms. They had Father Knows Best. We had My Mother The Car.

Mona McCluskey: ego massage.

When I was little, all women on TV were housewives: Lucy, Harriet, Donna Reed, June Cleaver, in their a shirtwaist dresses and pearls, sorting out the problems of their husbands and kids. This was the norm well into the '60s; even Morticia Addams and Lily Munster were stay-at-home moms.

Samantha Stevens of Bewitched, wore the Barbie-style sheath dresses, but one wrinkle of her pert little nose could unleash magical powers undreamed of by mortal man. Which freaked her disapproving husband, Darrin.

Instead of harnessing her powers to oppose evil, ease the hardships of loved ones, or even enjoy a little private hedonism now and then, Darrin, the old killjoy, demanded that Sam keep her extraordinary gifts under wraps.

And consider Mona McClusky, that rare TV woman who actually had a job. She was a famous movie star who earned a ton of moolah in her own right. So, of course, the premise of the series was that she married a blue-collar guy whose tender ego could only be massaged if she agreed to move into his crummy, walk-up flat with the busted appliances and live on his salary. And she did, because, according to the Tao of '60s TV, it was the first duty of every woman to make her man more secure. (Just ask Samantha.) They never said in the show what Mona did with her own money, but I hope she spent it on assertiveness training.

Lt. Uhura: respect.

Laura Petrie, of The Dick Van Dyke Show, had once been a dancer on Broadway, but she gave it up for marriage and motherhood. That Girl Ann Marie was an aspiring actress who was allowed to go out for auditions because she wasn't yet married to her ever-present boyfriend.

And while Julia was justifiably hailed as the first sitcom to star a black woman, the reason she was allowed to work for a living (as a nurse) was that she was a widow—not divorced or single—with a child to support.

These women provided scant encouragement for little girls whose dreams stretched beyond the kitchen or maternity ward. Still, there were a few refreshing exceptions. Lt. Uhura was the only female officer stationed on the bridge in the original voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Even if her duties as Communications Officer amounted to little more than a glorified secretary, transferring incoming calls to the boss, hey, at least she wasn't the ship's cook. Plus, she got to wear that sexy outfit on the job without losing the respect of her co-workers.

Steed and Mrs. Peel: debonair.

And speaking of dressing for success, what about Emma Peel of The Avengers? Here was a woman to be reckoned with, in her skin-tight, cut-out catsuits, a secret agent who could karate-kick a miscreant into submission without mussing a hair of her perfect Mod flip, or losing an atom of her cool.

And she was always ready to pop a bottle of bubbles with her debonair partner, John Steed.

He always called her "Mrs. Peel," out of deference to a mysteriously vanished husband, but the very discretion with which they bantered onscreen while protecting the world from evil suggested intoxicating possibilities in their private encounters.

But my personal Numero Uno TV role model was Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She may not have been as glamorous as Mrs. Peel or Uhura, she may have been a little too desperately obsessed with finding a husband, but she was a self-sufficient working woman with what sounded to me like a dream job: comedy writer on a weekly TV show.

Laura had to give up her career to keep the home fires burning, but Sally was right there in the office all day, trading wisecracks with the guys. If not for Sally's sterling example, I'd never have realized a woman can get paid to write.

Who knew?

Sally Rogers: one of the guys.

CHAOS THEORY

A funny thing happens when you become a published author. People start asking you for writing advice.

Personally, I don't presume to offer advice; if I was so smart, it wouldn't have taken me so long to get published!

But one useful thing that writers can do for each other is share experiences and strategies. One writer's process may not work for anybody else, but the act of sharing them lets us know that we're all facing the same challenges, and not just toiling away in wretched isolation. At the very least, it may be encouraging to know that someone else's methods are even more haphazard than your own!

Recently, I was asked two common questions:

1) Do you outline?

I never used to, which is probably why it took me 8 years to produce a book! But these last couple of years, I've been lucky enough to work with editors who ask for fiction proposals (that is: a lengthy synopsis of the plot as a means of getting an idea approved — as opposed to having to write the whole dang book first!) And having now written 3 of them, it makes SO much more sense to actually know where the story is going BEFORE you start writing it!

Still, my process is chaotic. I start with a doc of Notes, where I put random details that occur to me about storyline, characters, setting, backstory, whatever. Pretty soon, I start another doc called Outline, where I pick out the most important notes and file them in some sort of chronology, to give myself some idea of the shape of the plot.

In Outline, I also try to see where the gaps are that I need to fill to hold the plot together, and figure out what kinds of scenes need to be added. And then, when the Outline gets too wordy, I start a Proposal doc, where I extract the best stuff from the Outline, and put it in an order I hope will be coherent enough to show the editor.

Of course, I'm always working on all 3 docs at once, because I'm not yet organized enough to make a stately progress from one to the next! But the good thing is, once I've streamlined my ideas down this way, I have a pretty good idea of what my story's beginning, middle, and end will look like.

And it doesn't matter if it's not all there yet (the midsections in my proposals are notoriously weak). Because, here's the thing: it's all going to change during the writing process anyway, and everybody understands this. So what you're doing is writing a blueprint for a story you want to tell, and giving yourself a general road map to get there.

2) Do you follow any of the plot structure methods that exist out there?

The ones I've encountered seem like arcane voodoo rituals to me. I tried the 9-box plot thingy recommended by a couple of friends, but the only time I found it useful was to diagram a book I'd already written, to see how well it followed the structure. Attempting to apply it to an idea for a book, hoping to somehow manifest plot, just didn't work for me. 

But it might work for you; like I said, my approach is chaotic, and I don't recommend it. If a box, or a graph, or a diagram, or whispering the lyrics to "Paperback Writer" over a smoldering cauldron of chicken bones unleashes your creative juices, then go for it!

There isn't any right or wrong approach. All that matters is getting those words on the page — how they get there is up to you!

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The promise of books!

The readers website Goodreads is democracy in action. Any reader can post a review, assign stars, and gush great billows of praise—or snark— about a book she or he has read. Every review, from zero to five stars to dnf (did not finish) carries the same validity, and nothing is ever censored for language, grammar, content, or opinion.

I've occasionally heard of a reader launching a vendetta against an author (or vice versa). But Goodreads is a mostly useful place for an author to find out what the Public—as opposed to your friends and family—really think about your book.

The first thing an author learns about Goodreads is there's no such thing as a consensus of opinion. Reviews are all over the map, criticism-wise, at least for my books.

For all the readers who complained about the flashbacks to Captain Hook's past in Alias Hook, there were just as many who loved the historical backstory. For those who accused me of the dreaded "Insta-love" in the love story, there were others who claimed things finally perked up as soon as the romance kicked in. Some thought the thrilling finale made up for the book's dreary, boring beginning, while others thought the drawn-out finale went on forever.

Still, the canny author might discover certain trends threading through these disparate reviews. In my case, the trending theme was reader expectations. Alias Hook was not what they expected.

What do readers want?

Why not? Most of them were expecting it to be a YA (young adult) novel.

Never mind that it was never promoted as YA, that my publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, doesn't even have a YA line. Never mind that it says "adult fairy tale" right on the dust jacket. The subject is Captain Hook and Peter Pan, the genre is fantasy, ergo, according to the prevailing rationale, it must be YA.

This was not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, some readers were indignant about it, as if they'd been purposely hoodwinked. But others praised the difference between my book and the YA genre fantasies they're used to. (Usually in multi-volumes, with kick-ass heroines battling their way through fantastic family legacies, dystopian futures, or sci-fi/fairy tale landscapes.) Many commentators were also pleased by their ability to rise to the challenge of reading it. (One reader—who loved it—proudly proclaimed "this was the first adult novel I've ever read!")

But here's the thing: an author, scribbling away in her bubble, can't possibly know—let alone write to—a reader's expectations. It's out of our hands. Alias Hook was not written with any particular genre, focus group, or reading demographic in mind; the story unfolded the way it wanted to be told as I went along.

Scribbling away in the bubble...

As most books probably are. The whole idea of YA is a fairly recent construct in the centuries-old publishing biz, this odd notion that a book has to be pitched to a very narrow window of age levels. ("Children's," "Middle-grade," and the very recent "New Adult" are also thriving sub-genres, at the moment.)

Books have not always been so strictly stratified. Once upon a time, a book was released into the world without labels, to find its own readership, regardless of age group.

Consider these literary classics: Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, David Copperfield, To Kill A Mockingbird. All are read by teenagers in high school today. Would they have been published as YA, if that category had existed back in the day? Would readers have been expecting Ahab's Daughter: Blood Feud (Moby Dick #2)?

Back over at the Republic of Goodreads, reader expectations color reviews on every page. (One reader complained that because the word "alias" was in my book's title, she was expecting a spy novel. And was, of course, sorely disappointed.)

Neither authors, nor readers themselves, can control readers' expectations. When I switch into critical mode myself, to review a movie or a book, I'm as guilty as anyone else in that department. I feel the pain of those disappointed GR readers. If one's expectations aren't met, it's hard to review the entity in front of you, and not the one that might have been.

(Above top: Childrens Book Week poster, N. C. Wyeth, 1928)
(Above middle: Beautiful Reader by Christian Schloe)
(Above bottom: Art Nouveau poster advertising ink)

LE MOT JUSTE

Did'ja miss me?

No, I did not fall off the edge of the world in a leaky pirate vessel, nor vanish in an untimely explosion of fairy dust.

I've been right here, hunkered down over the keyboard, hammering out my latest revision of Beast: A Love Story. And as much as I love this book, and as mind-expandingly fabulous my editor Kaylan Adair's suggestions have been for tweaking it into even better shape, let's hope this really in the last revision!

I don't want to dither around too much longer; I want to launch Beast in all his glory out into the world. But I also want him to be as buff as possible—and really, really ready for his close-up. And so I cobble away, word by word, sentence by sentence, scene by scene...well, you get the idea.

Fortunately, I love to edit. By this time in the process, you have a complete draft to work on, so you know where the plot is going, and more or less how it's getting there. (Let's hope so, anyway. Expect delays if you're still monkeying around with story structure at this late date.)

Be ready to kill, or at least cut your darlings

So now it's time for the more detailed wordsmithing—reorganizing sentences, phrase by phrase, and finding exactly le mot juste (as they say in France—which happens to be where Beast takes place, and where the best-known Beauty and the Beast tales originated). Picking the right word—this is the fun part for me!

But editing also involves pruning, and you have to buck up and be ready to kill your darlings. (Wait, that sentence was perfect! Except, that plot point has now been discarded. Oh, the humanity!) In the best-case scenario, you have the luxury of time (as I've had, this month) to approach this process with a scalpel, not a broadsword. 

Instead of the wholesale slaughter of entire paragraphs (although I've done plenty of that too), you have to select the most important ideas in that great slog of verbiage and find somewhere else to slot them in. In the sneakiest manner possible, of course, so it will look seamless, as if each sentence had never been anywhere else.

Not to be too anal about it, but every word counts. And as I race (okay, crawl) toward the finish line, I want to get as much juice as I can from every single one!

(Above: Illuminated manuscript, pre-1492, found here)

ME & MY VILLAGE

It takes a village for me to edit a book.

I never have any less than about three or four docs of plot, character motivations, Notes to Self, and, oh, yes, the ms doc itself, open at any given time on my trusty iMac. I'd need an IMAX-sized screen to accommodate all the docs I could be using!

(Notice, I even have random notes stuck in the clay mug off to the left, sheesh!)

Then I need a print-out of the ms, as in actual paper, to scribble on. (# 2 1/2 pencil: my weapon of choice.) This also helps me to actually see all the typos. I know they're in there, I can hear 'em breathing, but it's much easier for me to see them in print, instead of on a screen.

The final element to a productive work day? All the images I can find for inspiration!

This is my Pinterest page for the book I'm editing now, Beast: A Love Story. Yes, it's a fantasy, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast tale, but it's rooted in a specific historical period (rural Burgundy, France, ca. 1600). And anything I happen upon while cruising the Interwebs—dress, architecture, various objets, the French countryside, or potential character studies—goes into the file for future reference.

I am presently deep into the edit suggested by my terrific new editor, Kaylan Adair, chugging away toward my upcoming July 15 deadline.

All systems are go for me and my village!

CO-ED

I don't know about other writers, but I love to edit. Once a few drafts have been written, and I finally know where the story is going (if I'm lucky), and the plot is more or less in place, it appeals to the Virgo in me to sculpt and shape to make everything stronger and (I hope) smarter.

So I was thrilled to get my first letter of editorial suggestions last week from the editor who just bought my next book, Beast: A Love Story.

No wonder other authors run out of superlatives when discussing Candlewick editor Kaylan Adair online!

In her thoughtful, 7-page letter, she covers four major plot points, and offers several alternate ideas of how I might approach each issue—or not, as I see fit.

This she follows up with a Miscellany section, touching on very small details (like character nicknames), what she thinks could stand to be re-imagined, and why.

None of her suggestions are set in stone; none come in the form of a command. But her ideas are so persuasive, the movie of my book that's on a constant loop inside my head is already starting to play out in a much more interesting way.

I'm in Virgo heaven!

Yes, I'll be going back to the keyboard, but it's amazing how sharp her suggestions are. Best of all? She totally gets this book! I can't wait to plunge back in!

(Love the above illustration for Beauty and the Beast from English illustrator Paul Woodroffe, ca. 1905. That candlestick is especially pivotal in my version of the tale!)

RAISE YOUR VOICE

A journalist friend of mine, making the leap into fiction, once got some conflicting advice about "voice" in a novel. She asked me what the formula was. If only there was one! In my experience, finding a novel's narrative voice is a mysterious process of intuition, alchemy, trial and error. Every book is different, and each one demands its own storytelling voice.

My first book, The Witch From The Sea, had to be written in first-person subjective by my heroine, Tory; her perspective on the life-changing events happening to her in the novel were so much more wry and humorous than an indirect third-person narrative could ever be.

The shaping of Tory’s personality is what the book is about, so I really heard her telling her own story. It later evolves that she’s keeping a log of her adventures, but the first-person narrator doesn’t always have to be setting down her thoughts as part of the story. It’s okay for the author to write from inside the character’s thoughts as she reflects.

Runaways, my sequel to Witch couldn’t be told in the same way because too much of the plot depends on things Tory doesn’t know. So I had to switch to third-person omniscient, that is, switching around between the viewpoints of different characters as the plot demands. (Alternating scenes or chapters from the heroine’s viewpoint, the hero’s, the villain’s etc.) This way, the reader gets more info about the big picture than any one character has, which hopefully creates suspense or anticipation from the reader wanting to see what happens when certain events or characters or agendas on a collision course finally do collide. This is useful when characters are in opposition to each other, but may not know it; it's especially useful to plunge into the mind of the villain/antagonist to get the lowdown on his or her diabolical plans.

Vintage log books: a great way for a heroine to tell her story

One of my novels (not in the Witch series) came to me in first-person present tense. (“Sun stabs through the leaded glass in the window. I can see the way they smirk at me when they think I’m not looking.”) Don’t ask me why, but I was physically unable to write it any other way. I needed to be inside the protagonist’s head, reacting to every little stimuli the instant it happened to her. It made the whole story so much more immediate!

This is also the narrative voice I used for Alias Hook. That’s just the way the protagonist, Captain Hook, started "talking" to me in my head, looking around the Neverland and telling me what he saw and what he thought about it all.

 Readers may need to know more than your characters

This put a few constraints on the plot; I wasn’t able to wander off and follow my heroine around Neverland as much as I would have liked. But since so much of the action depends on James Hook's emotional evolution—letting go of the past, giving up the game, understanding the true nature of his fate, and earning the possibility of freedom—it turned out to be the best way to tell his story. His is also a journey out of isolation, which the reader shares by being right there inside Hook’s viewpoint the whole time.

That he can be such an unreliable narrator—meaning his interpretation of events is not always exactly correct—makes the story so much more interesting! And practically interactive—it's up to astute readers to get wise to James Hook, decipher his fears and prejudices, speculate about what might really be going on, and root for him to (finally) get wise to himself.

First-person present tense used to be thought of as sort of weird and experimental; one story market I submitted to wouldn’t even look at anything written in that format. Then for awhile, it seemed like every other novel was coming out in first-person present tense (including Philippa Gregory's Boleyn family bestsellers).

But these things go in and out of fashion, just like anything else, so best not to worry about the market, or what other writers are doing. If your protagonist wants to do all the yakking, let her. If you’d rather address your readers with a nudge and a wink, like Thackeray, and let them know more about what’s going on than the characters know, then do that. Trust your own instincts, Grasshopper. Just start writing and the story will tell you how it wants to be told.

FIRST THINGS LAST

A great beginning is everything.

Don't you just love it in movies about writers when the author sits down to actually write?

Author sucks at the end of a pen, or flexes his fingers over the the keyboard for about 3.2 seconds, then commences to churn out the first two or five or ten pages of his magnum opus—as perfect and divine as Athena springing full-born from the head of Zeus.

Ah, such a charming fantasy. But don't be fooled, kids. In real life, the beginning of a book is the hardest part.

Everyone knows the first couple of pages or paragraphs, or sentences are the most important of the book—especially in this ADD-afflicted era, when there is so much competition for our shrinking attention spans. But that doesn't mean those first deathless lines are going to be the very first thing you write.

In my case, those opening pages are the very last thing I write! Or at least the last thing I write well.

Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf, The Hours: real writers write over.

During the first draft of a novel, I'm basically telling myself the story. I know it's all going to change in the rewriting process anyway. For that first draft I'll start anywhere that seems to get me into the story, some conversation, or interior monologue, or action sequence that gets me going. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first word.

Once I've plunged in, I keep adding scenes as they occur to me (and usually not in chronological order) until I have some sense of a story arc heading for a conclusion. For me, knowing how the story ends is essential before I can go back and re-tackle that all-important opening.

There are times, however, when first instincts are serendipitous. For Alias Hook, the very first paragraph I committed to a Word doc remained the first paragraph of the book in print—at least in the UK edition:

Every child knows how the story ends. The wicked pirate captain is flung overboard, caught in the jaws of the monster crocodile, which drags him down to a watery grave. Who could guess that below the water, the great beast would spew me out with a belch and a wink of its horned, livid eye? It was not yet my time to die, not then nor any other time. It's my fate to be trapped here forever in a nightmare of childhood fancy with that infernal, eternal boy. 

The Disney version ends where my story begins.

True inspiration struck belatedly (as usual), and I wrote an entirely new prologue for the US edition. However, that first paragraph remains intact as the first words James Hook "speaks" to the reader as his personal narrative begins—although the rest of the opening chapter surrounding it changed many, many times.

And that's just the way it is. Only after plowing through the entire narrative, with all its drama, humor, and heartbreak, can you possibly understand where your story really begins.

(Above: Russell Brand as Captain Hook, photographed by Annie Liebovitz.)

MY WRITING PROCESS

Big thanks to Persia Woolley for tagging me in the ongoing My Writing Process blog hop tour thingy. She is the author of the splendid Guinevere trilogy (Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, Guinevere: The Legend in Autumn), which imagines the court of King Arthur with enough historical context to make it all deliciously plausible.

Thanks, Persia!

Here's how it works: I answer four questions about my work and (wait for it...) my writing process, and then I pass the metaphorical baton on to two more writers, who will blog about same next week. Seems harmless enough! Let's go...

What am I working on?

At the moment, I'm in the final publicity and promotion phase* for my novel, Alias Hook, coming out from Thomas Dunne Books in July, 2014. (*Translation: I'm posting to my Pinterest boards and trying not to check my Goodreads ranking every fifteen seconds!)

Alias Hook is a different take on the world of Peter Pan. It's not a rehash of the familiar play, but a somewhat subversive look at life in the Neverland as viewed from the caustic perspective of Captain James Benjamin Hook, its prisoner and victim. There is no Wendy or Tiger Lily, and Tinker Bell is, by this time, in retirement. There's only James Hook and Peter Pan, and the eternal enmity that keeps them locked forever in a pointless war that Hook can neither win, nor end.

The wild card in their power struggle is Stella Parrish, a grown woman from the other world who dreams her way to the Neverland in spite of Pan's prohibition against grown-up "ladies." In search of a fantasy of perfect childhood innocence she quickly realizes does not exist, Stella opens herself up to the diverse forces of the Neverland—the fairies at their Revels in the Fairy Dell, the secret temple of merwives beneath the Mermaid Lagoon, the society of the First Tribes—in a way Hook has never dared to. And in the pirate captain himself, she begins to see someone far more complex than the storybook villain.

Stella may be his last chance for redemption and release—if he can give up the game and grow up.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I'm not interested in retelling the same old story over again, from a slightly different viewpoint. It's more fun for me to take a setting and characters we think we know—in this case, J. M. Barrie's Neverland—explore the hidden undercurrents, reshuffle the dynamics between the characters, toss in something or someone totally outrageous, and then imagine a whole new story.

I thought the Neverland could benefit from the proverbial woman's touch—and I don't mean a dewy little Wendy, in thrall to Peter. What would a grown woman from, say, 1950 think of the place? A woman who had survived war and turmoil and heartbreak with her humor and spirit intact, who longed to regain a sense of wonder about the world, who was perhaps overly fond of fine, vintage port? How would she get on with Captain Hook? What on earth would he make of her? I wanted to find out!

In my next novel, I reimagine the Beauty and the Beast tale from the viewpoint of a third party, a young woman who falls in love with Beast as he is, and desperately tries to prevent Beauty from turning him back into a handsome prince. But that's another blog!

My workspace, where genius burns—or at least flails around...

Why do I write what I do?

As a baby-boomer, I belong to one of the most over-analyzed, over-written-about generations in the history of media. I have no interest in contributing to the vast literary navel-gazing of my g-g-g-generation; there are plenty of others telling that story.

I started out writing historical fiction because I was interested in other eras, other circumstances, other sets of rules. I wasn't writing about the movers and shakers of history—the Tudors and Borgias—but of ordinary people who might have plausibly lived in those times, who might have fallen through the cracks of the historical record, but still had extraordinary adventures.

More recently, I've been writing fantasy, which is even more liberating in terms of creating new rules, settings, and circumstances for the story a writer wants to tell. When you think about it, fantasy is a lot like historical fiction: in both genres, you're taking readers some place they have never been and where they can never actually go, perhaps with its own specific language, inhabitants, dress code, and cultural dynamics. What gives fantasy a slight edge is you can make ALL of it up!

How does my writing process work?

Vintage me, vintage Mac, transcribing those 900 pages

Sporadically. Okay, let's be serious. In the early days, I had no process; I just blathered on and on all over the page (with a #2.5 pencil, on Jiffy notebook paper) in hopes that I would eventually get somewhere. Which explains why the first draft of my first completed manuscript was 900 pages long.

Thankfully, my process has evolved since then. It all begins with that one nagging idea that takes up residence in the nether regions of my brain and won't be dislodged. (In the case of Alias Hook, it was James Hook's acerbic voice telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought about everyone and everything in the Neverland.)

Once I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm in for a long, novel-length slog, I start a Word doc, into which I start writing random scenes as they occur to me—meetings, climaxes, love scenes, comic relief. As these scenes accrue, I try to arrange them in some sort of chronology. In the meantime, I've started another doc for characters (names, who they are, what they do, how they function in the story) and plot—where I start explaining to myself the trajectory of the story. This is where I hope to discover and work through potential dramatic problems that stand between me and the finish line.

By now, I know myself well enough to realize that if I don't have the storyline pretty much figured out beforehand in the plot doc—right down to the closing scenes—I'll find myself flailing around mid-book with no clue where I'm going. Of course, it's going to take a lot more work, and a lot more docs (with names like "Inserts," "Outtakes," "Weird Stuff," "Orphan Scenes" ) before I get the narrative into some coherent shape.

But once the shape starts to make sense, I start a "Timeline" doc, where I dope out the arrangement of scenes within chapters—and get to work.

And here's the thing: it's all going to change during the actual writing, anyway. Writing is not an exact science, at least not the way I do it! But I have to have a pretty solid idea of where I'm going before I can figure out the best way to get there.

And that's about all there is to My Writing Process. Next Monday, please do stop in and visit my two tagees and read all about their writing processes.

Sailor, editor, guitarist, and Renaissance man Broos Campbell, author of the rousing Matty Graves series of seafaring historical fiction, is transitioning as we speak into the paranormal with a spooky new ghost story.

M. D. Waters lives with her family in Maryland. Her dystopian, near-future, romantic science fiction debut, Archetype, is such a sensation, it will be followed this summer by a sequel, Prototype, and a novella prequel, Antitype.