Nikki M. Pill

I said one more day of edits, and one more day of outline-fussing. I did the edits the other day, and gave myself a Holly day today — so that’s three days before new word count.

Today I spent some more time with Holly’s material — going through some techniques for generating endings and saving a wrecked novel.  The Tease already has an ending in the outline, and I don’t think it’s wrecked, but I wanted to stay open to possibilities.

I’m noticing something very different about my process this year. As soon as I start the very first notes about the story, I’m asking myself what the worst case scenario is for the characters — and I go there. I use at least one or two items from the Very Worst Things — they might not be the ending, and as in this case, they might not show up in the first book, but they certainly do create drama, tension, and surprise.

I have some plot holes to spackle on Sunday, and then we’re off into wordcount-land on Monday. I’ve grown to love Scrivener — I can arrange and re-arrange note cards on a virtual bulletin board, while in RL, I have no wall space and a cat who would bite the pins out of the board anyway.

Since I’ve been away from the novel for a few weeks, I started in on some mid-novel re-reading with Holly’s “Surgical Marks” lesson. Kill this paragraph, this is ok but needs to go somewhere else, this is close, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised that it was a lot like the day I launched edits on “Inner Potential” — this thing is better than I thought! I was pretty convinced that the first draft is total drek and I’d struggle to bring it up to mediocrity, but there’s some good material here.

Lessons learned:

1. I still feel stifled without names. Some of the dancers don’t have names yet, and I’m not comfortable with the troupe. I need to buckle down and name them. “Jeff” and “Michelle” are proof positive that I can write a character with a name that’s pretty close and then change it when I need to.

2. This process is a lot like Chaotic Water‘s first draft was — the first draft is skeletal, but as I get deep into the story, I realize more things that can flesh it out. I didn’t have these ideas in the outline. Getting my hands dirty was part of the process in generating what the characters really need to do.

3. My muse is good with the Law of Unintended Consequences. I’m seeing opportunities to create and tie things in that I didn’t before. I need to trust her more. She always pulls through.

4. Some characters are in this book because they will be important in later books, but they’re not pulling their weight right now. I’ve figured out what to do about Caprice, but not Monica or Dad.

One more day of edits, one day of outline-fussing, and then the Novel Completion Deathmarch begins.

No metrics today — gave myself a “study day” and started working through Lesson One in Holly Lisle’s How to Write a Series. I figure if I’ve genuinely got nothing to contribute to the page today, I can at least get the gears turning with stuff I need to know to plot the series, and then write on a weekend day. Because (duhn-duhn-DUHN) I have the weekend off!

The plot is now all tight and twisted. It looks like the body count in this book will be 4 — and things are going to get really, really uncomfortable for Anna. The one challenge is that I don’t know where the climax will take place… I will trust my Muse to get me there when the time comes.

How bad is it that 4 doesn’t sound like much to me in terms of serial killers?

Next step: Monday, I rewrite my plot cards in terms of the Sentence Lite. Each scene gets a setting, protagonist, antagonist, and twist. The antagonist doesn’t need to be the villain… in fact, in the first scene of the Mythos Story, the antagonist was a doorjamb. Jacy begins the story by walking smack into one. Then, it’s time to Sit Down And Write.

Awful First Draft, here we go!

My original plan was to start writing on October 1st, but the jury’s out.

I’ve spent the past 2 mornings with Donald Maass’s Building the Breakout Novel. As much as I adore Holly, sometimes a different perspective will jar something new out of you, and I’ve been thinking sideways for 20 weeks. I think I figured out how to up the stakes early enough in the book to matter.

A trilogy is a challenge, because I want to be sure I save enough for the last book that it’s got real impact and pushes the protagonist to her ultimate limit. However, I can’t hold back too much in the first two books, otherwise no one will care enough to get through book one — let alone book three!

I love the focus this course gives me.

One of my greatest challenges is Narrowing Things The Hell Down. I tend to write sprawling epics with multiple POVs and multiple protagonists. Step 1 in creating a novel in the Sideways method is to write a 30-word sentence that touches on the protagonist, antagonists, their needs, and a twist. Of course, the 30-word limit means that your sentence has to use words cleverly that imply the conflict, needs, tension, etc. Often you only have 30 seconds when a reader picks up your book and looks at the cover. If the first sentence of the novel or the first sentence of the blurb don’t grab them, it’s curtains for you and that reader.

So here goes:

A fledgling therapist suspects that her client committed a string of grisly murders — and her two worlds collide when the killer strikes a member of her amateur burlesque troupe.

Antagonist and need: The killer is the antagonist, and since there are a string of murders, one can assume that he needs to kill for some reason. We don’t know what drives his compulsion to kill, but if there is a body count, there’s a need behind it.

Protagonist, need, and twist: Fledgling therapist implies that she’s new to the field and has, to some degree, to prove herself. Therapists are charged to help clients overcome their issues (so hopefully the reader wonders: can a sociopath be rehabilitated? what if she’s wrong? what is he seeing her for?) and keep what they say confidential, unless they have reason to suspect immanent harm to the client or someone else. Breaking confidentiality is something they would have to defend to the ethics board — risking citation or losing their license. Burlesque is the twist. She must love it, because it’s not something that a person will do unwillingly. She would also need to keep it secret from her day job, because she could lose credibility or clients. It ups the stakes when one of her troupe members is murdered, because that increases her personal vested interest in it (I’m now personally invested in finding the killer because he took out someone I really like — but is it my client? am I next? do I risk my career by revealing my hobby?)

Thoughts?

Words written:  77 — finished my bio (who knew it would take a week and a half to write a damn bio?) and sent it to the magazine editor. Yay!

Total words: 77

Reason for stopping: Tapioca brain. And it feels like the world is closing in on me (Esp for HH3-related stuff)

Darling du Jour:  ”Contented people don’t write novels” – Holly Lisle. I <3 you, Holly.

Other writing-related work: I really like lesson 13 — should suprise no one. She addresses the Middle Doldrums and the moment you just want to murder all the characters and start another project. She said some really great things about middles that applies, not only to the middle of a novel, but to my past few writing years on a meta-level:

You have not reached the True Middle until

You begin to doubt your choices
You begin to doubt your stamina
You begin to wonder if you’ll make it to the end
And you suspect you might be lost

Getting lost is an art

When you are lost, you find what you weren’t looking for, but needed all the same
You learn who you are
You discover adventure
You become creative because you have to be
You invent new skills
You meet entirely new worlds

(C) HOLLY LISLE

It’s encouraging. I haven’t been washed up — just lost. And getting lost is a valuable part of the process.

I’m still struggling to muster the oomph to get going on the Mythos story. It’s all there, I know what’ll happen. I need to remind myself to revel in writing the Awful First Draft — because it’s never quite as awful upon re-reading as I think it is when I write it. As Amy Sigil told me, inspiration is great, but it’s all abstract until you make it into art.