Pressure Cooking Your Characters

Hmmm. "Goth Lolita" keeps getting longer, and I've got some witty dialogue and motivation and physical action, but in all this movement the main POV character seems like he's only along for the ride. (Both figuratively, and literally as well. He's about to be picked up in a van. Do I really need a van scene?). Sure, the other characters want something from him (oh look, motivation!), but I'm only getting a sense of detached amusement from him in return. I have no idea what he wants for himself, and what he's like at the core.

"Detached amusement" may indeed be the state in which I spend much of my day, but then, I wouldn't make a very interesting character in this story either.

Time to push this character and see what's under that detachment. He's a smooth guy, and things have been going smoothly so far. But smooth surfaces don't cut.

A wise woman once told me if your main character's not breaking a sweat, it's time to turn up the heat. Bring on the trouble, then make that trouble worse. Put them under pressure, ask them to choose between two bad alternatives. If you love your characters (and we all do), yes, it's going to be hard to see them hurt. But have no mercy. Kick them while they're down.

Time to turn up the heat, and tighten the lid on the pressure cooker.

Building Momentum, One Page at a Time

After quadrupling yesterday's meager production, today the new draft is up to 541 words and is about to move to a second scene to start the third page. I still have no idea what the story is 'about', although there are hints starting to appear. (Sex. An overbearing mother. Music.)

I used to ALWAYS know what my stories were about, plot and characters and meaning and all. I had to know those things, in fact, before I could start writing. And sadly enough, most of those stories turned out to be predictable to the reader as well, which usually meant they were pretty bad. It's only been in the last half a dozen years or so that I've stopped imposing structure on my work from the get-go. Nowadays I end up producing a lot more false starts, but when a story finally does take off I find not knowing where it's going keeps at least my own interest up (and hopefully the eventual reader's), and definitely gets me to more interesting destinations than did the trips where I followed my highlighted guidebook.

Here's to hoping "Goth Lolita" (and already I'm thinking that title may change) ends up... well, somewhere. I'm definitely still in the discovery phase.

To Be Continued.

103 Words More Than Yesterday

Total writing production this evening - 103 words of fiction.

Don't laugh. That's 103 words more than I've written in a while, and it took me an hour to get them out. But in those 103 words I've introduced three main characters, brought them together at a blackjack table (hey, when things are going slow, write what you know), and left myself with a lot of questions to answer. That's a good thing.

Oh, and I've got a title. "Gothic Lolita."

It's a start. Of what, I don't know yet. But it's a start.

To Be Continued.

"So, did you give up on the Blog, or what?"

I checked into my Blogger Dashboard (to edit the blogs I'm subscribed to) today and happened to notice this line:

19 Posts, last published on Apr 18, 2010

Gee, and it seems like only yesterday I was at Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace Conference (that would have been in early May), where a member of my writing group asked me, "So, did you give up on the Blog, or what?" Now it's July.

Time flies when you're writing regularly. Time flies even faster when you're NOT writing regularly.

For the past two weeks I've been in a writer's ditch, a writer's drought, a slump, a block, a... well, a whatever you want to call it. That is, I haven't been writing. In fact, I've been finding excuses not to write, to be precise.

(By the way, the only good thing about actively avoiding writing is that if one of your favorite not-writing excuses is 'I'll just go the gym and clear my head first' you end up getting some cardio out of your angst.)

But now I'm sore (from the gym) and tired (of my own avoidance behavior). I have a review that's overdue, a writer's group meeting coming up, and almost no submissions in circulation. Rather than dwell on the many character flaws that brought me here, I'm going to do something about them. Re-opening this Blog editor window and typing the words you're reading is the first step.

A three-day weekend starts tomorrow. If I don't have some new writing by the end of it, you'll hear it from me here. Feel free to boo and hiss if that happens, or send encouraging words to prevent it from happening.

New writing from me coming up. And Blogging Doesn't Count.

Happy Independence Day, Everyone.

Two weeks since my last post

and this post's going to be a short one, too.

Ten of those 14 days I've been fighting off a nasty cold or the flu, and I haven't been writing, reading, or even thinking any more than necessary to get through the days. Of course, during that time foolish me started a new Grub Street class (10 Weeks, 10 Stories with Chip Creek) with two assignments due already, and I promised delivery to various folk of a flash fiction piece and a lit-mag review.

I was barely able to crank out a new piece to my writer's group that I revised and ended up reading at a fantastical literary salon last night, although now I want to revise that piece again and send it out for possible publication.

So why am I even bothering to blog?

Beats me. Warm-up exercise, avoidance behavior, guilt, I'm sure they all play a part. Oh, and a desire to plug Cathy Elick's Run for Grub fund-raising efforts. Help support a worthy cause.

The good news here, maybe the only news, is that I'm feeling well enough to think again, and therefore well enough to write regularly. Hope you're all feeling at least that good.

Everything That Doesn't Look Like an Elephant

Editing my flash fiction, stories under 500 words, reminds me of the old joke: How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Start with a block of marble, and remove everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

Except that you don't only carve away -- with words, unlike marble, you can also choose to replace the offending piece. This makes the writer's job easier than the sculptor's in some way (infinite supply of material), and worse in others (infinite supply of material). After chipping off a misshapen 'trunk', for example, you'll typically want to find a new word to take its place. (portmanteau, suitcase, or coffer might do).

I wrote the first draft of a new flash yesterday, revised it then and there for overall shape (yep, sorta looks like an elephant), and today I've been doing serial, iterative, revisions, first sentence by sentence and now word by word. Lots of them. Halfway through the day, I wondered what the piece would look like if I'd turned on "Track Changes" in Word, but I'm probably better off not knowing.

End of the day, it definitely looks like an elephant to me. Tomorrow I'll be reading it out loud, to see if it sounds like one.

Slowly Getting Back on the Horse

You take a week off from the gym (or a month, or a year), and that first trip back hurts. I'm told it's the same with bronco busting. And I know it's the same thing with writing.

If it weren't for deadlines, or for Carrie Heim's blog contest, I'd likely still be looking up at that big scary Arabian stallion of a blank page and wondering what the hell am I doing -- because I know this is gonna hurt.

I squeezed out five hundred words tonight. I doubt if they're any good, but there they are.

I wonder how much pain I'll be in when I look at them tomorrow.