Rowenna, Writing

In case I haven't mentioned, I'm expecting.  This post makes a lot more sense with that info in hand. To the point--naming babies is harder than naming characters.  I never considered I'd have such a tricky time pinpointing potential names for The Little Stranger, but here I am, a couple months out from zero hour, still dithering on the name front.  Completely unexpected--because character names are never an issue for me. The Bean hanging with the Giant Bean in Chicago Our temporary placeholder name, to avoid calling the baby "It" or "The Uterine Parasite" (for some reason that bothered my husband), is "The Bean."  This was easy to come up with, probably because it's not permanent.  We aren't stuck with calling another human being "Bean" for the rest of our lives (nor is the Bean stuck with being The Bean).  Plus I had just looked at one of those food-chart-fetal-growth comparisons and the Bean was, at that point, the ...

We're all busy--with jobs, families, school, kids, volunteering, laundry...so how do you find time to write? I say it's all about claiming time. Obviously, there's the time you devote to writing--either hitting your goal word count or sitting butt-in-chair for a set time each day.  But that isn't what I'm talking about.  It's the other time--the time when you're doing other stuff--that I'm saying you can claim. Wait a second, you say-- I have to be at work from 9 to 5 .  Or I'm home working my tail off chasing kids around .  Or even But this laundry HAS to get done. Yeah, that laundry does need to get done.  Believe me, I hear you, and so does my overflowing hamper.  Here's the thing--you can still claim that time. I've been painting a lot lately.  The 1870s house that is our new home is beautiful--and covered with kitschy wallpaper and questionable paint choices from the previous owners.  A lot of my time lately has been stripping...

Every writer has answered the question at least once--panster or plotter? I'm sure there is no right way--maybe there are more efficient ways, or ways that produce more creative twists, or, most likely, ways that are the most right for each individual.  In college I had a roommate who literally outlined every paper down to the paragraph.  Beautiful, typed, complete outlines, and they took forever to create--but the actual paper-writing part was shortened because she already knew what she was going to say.  Me?  I never outlined more than what was in my head already.  Even my thesis outline was pretty much section titles and quick notes.  (I think that drove my advisor batty.) Still, a novel isn't a five-page essay, a twenty-page paper, or even a thesis.  Despite that, I pantsed at first.  It was what I knew, and what worked for me.  You know what?  It worked for writing novels, too.  Just not very well. That is, I doubled back...

If you ever watch a movie with my husband and I, you're very likely, if it's not a great movie and sometimes even if it is, to hear me exclaim at some point, "OK, this is total plot crap, right?" What do I mean by plot crap?  And does it apply to books? Are you calling this plot crap? Plot crap does not mean crappy plot.  In fact, it can often have nothing to do with how well a story is plotted.  A great example of plot crap is the movie Gladiator .  Now, I love this movie.  I love the story, the incredibly orchestrated battle scenes, even the soundtrack.  But the historical facts framing the film?  Total plot crap.  Sure, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus existed...but there are a lot of factual missteps.  There's no evidence that Marcus Aurelius ever wanted to restore the Republic, therefore the basis of the film's struggle is historical plot crap.  (Commodus also didn't die in the arena, but was strangled in his bath.  Sometim...

So I'm working on newish projects--projects that haven't yet been revised or edited.  In fact, they're still incomplete drafts.  And I ask--when is it best to start revising and/or editing? Sometimes it's pretty clear when to do what. I crack the eggs BEFORE putting them in the cookie batter.I cut fabric AFTER I take measurements. I lather, rinse, THEN repeat. And of course, first pants, THEN shoes. But when it comes to the writing process, it's not so cut and dried. The posters in my elementary school classrooms would beg to differ--they say you "prewrite" (which inevitably involved bubbles and arrows in my grammar school days), write a rough draft, revise it, which produces another draft, which you edit and polish into a final draft. Anyone else feel like it's not so simple?  At least not for writing novels? Now, I know writers who do keep it simple--they butt-in-chair, hands-on-keyboard plow through a full first draft ...

Stick with me long enough, and you'll discover I like odd comparisons, a la "How is a Raven like a Writing Desk."  (I also love Alice in Wonderland, but that's another point entirely.) Because I like odd comparisons, I find myself making them to writing while doing otherwise unrelated things. Like stripping wallpaper. My husband and I just bought a Rather Old House and my latest adventure is ridding it of some unfortunate decorating choices.  First up is the laundry/utility area upstairs, which was papered c.1977 with mildly dizzying brown, gold, and orange flowered stuff.  The homeowners managed to find matching fabric for curtains, too.  Pristine vintage, except it's horrifyingly ugly. Can you even *buy* matching paper and fabric anymore? So as I spent hours tearing a harvest gold meadow from hell off the walls, I found myself comparing the process to revision. After all, redecorating and revising share some similarities--the basic structure is a...

So we chatted Tuesday on writing what you know...but how do you write what you know when what you want to write is pretty far from your personal experience?  Research gets you halfway there, but often the tactile and emotional experience can't be found in books or articles. It can, however, usually be found in your experience. You might not have the same experiences as your protagonists, but it's pretty likely that you do have transferable knowledge.  J.K. Rowling had (probably...) never played quidditch--but I bet she knew what it felt like to play on a team, have others relying on her to play hard, to play hard and win, and to play hard and lose.  Anyone who's survived P.E. class has that, right?  It's just transferring what you already know into understanding what you haven't experiences. Everyone has unique experiences that lend all kinds of insider's knowledge that can come to play in writing.  One of my most common sources of inspiration and intuitio...

It's a pretty old adage...but what does it mean ? The quote is attributed to Mark Twain, and if we take him at his word, he did, essentially, write what he knew firsthand. Twain is famous for writing about a world he was familiar with, generally times and places he'd experienced (though not always--I doubt he'd been to King Arthur's Court any more often than the Connecticut Yankee had, but you never know).  Still, we as writers clearly branch out and write what we don't know pretty often, too--for every writer inspired by his or her hometown, there's another writing about space colonies on asteroids or court intrigue in 16th century France. So, can you effectively write what you don't know? I'm going to say no and ask that you hold your horses to let me explain.  A writer can't write what he or she has no grasp on--but there are more ways that living through it to get a handle on a subject.  After all, writers write dozens of lives but only liv...

Tuesday I shared what gets me motivated to write--today I'm thinking about what I can do to hold myself to write.  Having a schedule or goal or other expectation keeps you accountable to your work--and the best partner, I think, to creativity is accountability.  We writers have a little problem most of the time during our writing careers: We aren't accountable to anyone but ourselves and the page--no boss, no time card, no nosy coworkers--so we have to create that accountability for ourselves.  I want more of a schedule-based writing life, and a few ways of doing so have emerged for me: 1) The Clock Method .  This one is basic--you clock in, you clock out.  Your butt is in your chair for a set number of hours each day, hands on keyboard, writing. 2) The Goal Method .  A little more flexible, but also, in my opinion, harder to hold yourself to.  You have a daily (or, depending on your schedule and lifestyle, weekly) writing goal, and you meet it by ...

Slumps happen.  Sometimes they're life-induced--no matter how much of  a superwriter you are, it's not easy to balance giant life changes and normal writing habits.  Sometimes they're creativity-zappage-induced--everyone hits a point where you just don't feel like writing.  Or thinking.  Or being creative or imaginative at all. Either way, when you decide to get back in the swing of things, I find two things help. One is a schedule--more on that on Thursday. The other is finding your happy place. No, seriously.  I don't do the tortured artist thing.  Even if I'm writing something deep or introspective or dark (umm, as deep or dark as I can get, anyway...), I find I do much better if I start with a smile.  Or at least not a scowl. So I've identified a few things that never fail to put me in a better mood--and a more optimistic mood is a better writing mood, at least for me.  Because if you're feeling like a giant pessimist, ...

Why have a writing blog, anyway? Good question.  I keep hearing it repeated--blogging doesn't have the same chutzpah it used to in terms of creating platform and garnering readership.  Not with Twitter, Facebook, and other quick-connect methods for creating a network.  Fewer people are blogging.  Fewer people are paying attention to blogs. So why have a blog? I confess--I don't have a blog to ratchet up a readership.  I agree--excepting a few choice cases, those days are done.  Perhaps fewer people are blogging--but fewer people doesn't mean that the value is gone.  As a writer, I think there are more important reasons than platform to have a blog: 1) I like keeping in touch with other writers .  Sure, Twitter and other sites allow this too--but not on the same level, in my opinion, as blogging.  I get to see what my writer-friends are struggling with, triumphing over, and just thinking about--in more than 140 characters.  Twitte...