Tag: writing

Progress

1 Comment

I got an interesting question today: How do you feel about your past writing?

And wow is that a loaded question. I don’t think it’s any secret that I have hidden my first novel away for the time being. I don’t know if it’s unsalvageable, but it’s bad enough that it would take a good chunk of time to bring it up to a standard I’d be ok sharing with the world these days. It goes back to the “Your first novel is never as good as you think it is” point I’ve made a few times before (such as at the end of my recent interview here [look around the 3-minute mark]). Well, you might know that your first novel is awful, but as someone who has worked in acquisitions I know there are plenty of first novels that get sent out that most likely won’t be considered up to snuff as you get better (like, well, mine…) As I like to say, you may think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written, but that’s only because it has been up to that point. Writing is a skill. You get better the more you do it.

With that out of the way, though, lets break out my dusty old writing folder and see what I have from early on.

1. Librae
Here we go, the infamous first novel. Written at about 15, it’s the first longer work I finished. It still has a special place in my heart, but…shutter. Let’s look at this a little closer.

Length: 200,000 words. Yep this one got away from me, and that’s after a couple of rounds of edits. I’m sure it would have clocked in at at least 225,000 when first written. For some perspective, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is about 170,000, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is about 190,000. Yep, this is hundreds and hundreds of pages of first-time writer fun that outdoes the later Harry Potter books.

Plot: Ok, the plot isn’t too bad. I mean, it’s cliche, but not irredeemable. It’s about a bunch of teenagers who can control different elements (oddly enough, a common topic for first novels for some reason. I’ve seen a ton come through submissions and have edited many more). Honestly, it’s some sort of Harry Potter, Star Wars, The OC mix. Semi-enjoyable clichéd goodness all around.

Characters: Well, I can’t be too harsh on the characters here. They’re my babies. I mean, I spent 200,000 words talking about them (not including the completely useless conversations that they had in the middle of the book that I cut out and pasted in another document when I realized how insanely long it was). Main character is a bit off a Mary Sue–though I’d like to believe she isn’t completely unlikable. And not to be outdone, she has her male counterpart, the Gary Stu (or Marty/Larry Stu if you prefer). A good few of Miss Sue’s friends are based on friends I had in high school, which is always a good idea… Still, for all their problems, I still love them all. Even if hidden away, they are still my first cast of characters and will be defended beyond reason.

Writing: Gah. Prologue wreaks of having just watched the beginning of the first Lord of the Rings movie. It has so many beginning writer problems it makes me cringe. Yeah, I would definitely have to take a hatchet to that to make it anywhere near presentable. I have other projects I’m working on, and am not being paid to tackle that, so that’s not happening anytime soon.

2. Two or Two-Thousand: Next up, the yet (and more than likely forever) unfinished novel that was started after Librae in an attempt to keep up the writing pace. Again, a high school (junior year?) project.

Length: 40,000 when abandoned. If I remember correctly (again, this was a high school project, so it’s been a while since I’ve thought about it) it’s one of the “I thought of a better idea” casualties that plagued me up until NaNoWriMo in college gave me a reason to stick to project (and taught me all my writing didn’t have to be giant wannabe epics). 40,000 isn’t too bad (about halfway to a proper novel) but I’ve just finished all the beginning stuff, so it’s likely this would have stretched out to something completely unruly if I ever truly got into the main plot.

Plot: Again, not a completely awful idea. Clichéd again, but somewhere between fantasy and sci fi about a society where water is inaccessible and has to be manufactured (thus making it amazingly expensive). Not nearly as original as thought it was at the time (see my “Accidental Plagiarism” article) but not without merit.

Characters: Generally unlikable. Again, we have some Mary Sue/Gary Stu problems, though not as much of a problem as in Librae. Even without leaning more Mary Sue, the main characters see entirely unlikable reading it now.

Writing: Same beginning writer problems. Same awkward prologue right at the beginning (had to keep “my style” consistent for when these got published, don’t you know) though I suppose you can argue I’m learning a little.

3. Just Farrah: What I abandoned Two or Two-Thousand for. I believe this was senior year of high school. I might be wrong, however

Length: 20,000 when abandoned. I didn’t get far enough to have some idea about what it might have ended up at, but I at least have some hope that it wouldn’t have ended up as some 200,000 word behemoth

Plot: Eh, could be interesting. Not fantasy this time, but about a girl who secretly wants to be a singer, against her parent’s wishes, and thus moonlights in a club. Nothing special, but nothing awful.

Characters: No Mary Sues this time, but the majority are stock characters/two-dimensional. Main character is stock good girl who secretly isnt’ so good. Love interest is stock bad boy with heart of gold…and it goes on. Would need some serious character development if I were to revisit this.

Writing: Getting there. Not great but it doesn’t make me cringe at least.

And that, I believe, takes us through high school. If any of you are career writers/have been writing for years, I have to say it’s really interesting to go back over your old writing. Feels good to know you’re advancing. Perhaps if people ask nicely, I will be persuaded to share a couple of samples of just how much mine has changed in the future…for now, that file is closing again.

That’s Just…Wrong

2 Comments

In my last post, I wrote about my own take on the old writer adage “Write What You Know”. When you take it with a grain of salt, I agree, it’s a good thing to do. But, of course, there are always things you can’t know. And, there are things you don’t even think about possibly being wrong, just because we’ve read and seen too many things that tell us that the wrong things are true.

So, for this blog, I will make it my mission to correct at least some of these unknown mistakes that won’t seem to die in fiction. (If you feel I’ve missed an important one, feel free to add it in the comments or message me and I’ll add it.)

1. If you’re knocked out for more than a minute, it’s very possible you will have brain damage. Despite what you’ve seen and read time and time again, if you are hit over the head and are knocked out long enough to be moved to an entirely new location (generally by the bad guys) you aren’t going to wake up a little dazed and then be walking around a few seconds later. It’s hard to get knocked out for a reason. If every bump on the head took you out for 10 or more minutes, many more humans would have been eaten by lions back in yonder-times.

2. Gold bars are HEAVY. Ever dream of breaking into Fort Knox (or the New York Federal Reserve if you want to be different) throwing a bunch of gold into a duffel and heading out rich? It’s a great “bank heist” standard after all. Yeah, gold is dense. The men who move gold bars around wear special toe protectors to make sure their feet aren’t crushed by a dropped bar, and each bar is something like 20 pounds. By all accounts, those 20 pounds being contained in such a small object makes each one feel more like 50 (sadly, I’ve never gotten to hold one to see…) Stick a bunch in a duffel bag and you’re either not going to be able to lift it, or the fabric’s going to tear before you get it out of the room.

3. The Middle Ages lasted for 10 centuries. Look it up, from about 400 A.D. to 1400 A.D. Fashion changed in that millennium. A lot changed in that millennium. If you’re doing a historical fiction (or a time travel fantasy, or…) it’s easy to fall into historical inaccuracies by grouping it together as one cohesive time.

4. “Blowing up” a picture doesn’t make it clearer. There’s only so many pixels in a camera picture. At some point, zooming in is going to just make the picture blurry (try it yourself. Find a small picture and start zooming in, or stretching it, on your computer. It will get bigger, but not get clearer).

5. Defibrillation doesn’t bring people back to life. The electric jolt “shock paddles” give actually are made to stop the heart for a split second so that the heart will “restart” with a regular beat. If the heart’s already not beating, it can’t help.

6. Potatoes aren’t native to Ireland. One that’s more important, again, for historical/time travel fiction, even though they are associated with Ireland these days (what with the Potato Famine and all) potatoes did not exist in Europe (the “old world”) prior to the Columbian Exchange.

7. Cars don’t explode. If you watch Mythbusters, you probably already know this, but cars don’t tend to explode (or catch on fire) when they crash. Not unless explosives have been set inside them. Yes, gas is flammable, but car manufacturers are careful about those things. They don’t want to, you know, kill their customers.

8. Sounds doesn’t travel in space. Without any matter (air) to move through, the sound waves aren’t going to travel. Doesn’t matter if it’s a giant explosion or someone talking, there’s some finagling you’ll have to do in your sci fi for that to work.

9. Just because you aren’t in the fire/explosion/lava doesn’t mean you can’t get burned. Heat travels away from things that cause heat. It’s why, even if you aren’t touching the flame, holding your finger over a candle will still end up with you getting burned. Standing next to hot lava will, likewise, burn you.

10. Elevators doors won’t open onto empty shafts. As a safety mechanism, the part of the elevator that opens the doors is on the car. If the elevator is not at the floor, the doors aren’t going to slide open (at least for newer models, I’m not sure about older ones if someone wants to look into that.) It is, however, possible to get stuck in an elevator. I speak from experience there…

Hopefully those will help writers with any plot holes, and–like I said–if you think I’m missing something important, contact me or add it yourself in the comments. Happy writing.

———————————————————————–

Want to carry this and other posts with you wherever you go? Download Write, Edit, Publish for free today.

Write What You Know

Leave a comment

(Pre-Note: I’m planning on doing a YouTube interview answering questions anyone has about writing, editing, or publishing and am currently taking questions to answer over in the NaNoWriMo forums. If you have any of your own, feel free to email me them [jesskdall(a)gmail.com] twitter me [@JessicaDall] or post a comment below).

**********************************************************************************

Anyway, with that note out of the way…

Yesterday, thanks to a LivingSocial voucher, I was brought along to a shooting range. While I’m not sure I was very good (I was told I was perhaps the most focused shooter at least…) I have now fired a gun (Glock 17). Other than thinking ‘Holy s**t, I’m holding a gun’ it got me to thinking of the old adage “Write What You Know.”

Now, if you’re a writer you probably have heard this saying before. If not, now you have. More than a few people have written articles about it (like here, and here) most outlining the fact that it’s much too easily misunderstood. There’s a reason we write fiction. Most of our real lives are pretty boring. I promise none of the stories I have written are about someone with a generally happy childhood, vanilla high school career, and who now spends most of her time working behind a computer. Sure, that might be a good set up for a book, but until aliens attack, or my generally happy relationship falls apart and sends me off on a three year tour of Europe trying to “find myself” there really isn’t a book there.

The other articles tell you that “Write What You Know” comes from a place telling you to use what you know in real life (your neighborhood, a hobby you know well…) in your writing. That’s something I fully support. Last night, I had a friend complaining to me about a character in a novel taking the train from Union Station in DC to Grand Central in New York. As someone who’s taken the train between DC and New York, I can tell you that’s just not possible. The train goes to Penn Station from DC, not Grand Central. If the author had ever taken that train, they would have known that.

Of course, we can’t be expected to know everything every one of our characters will ever do in a story. We’re all going to get something wrong. And we’re all going to have something published that is wrong because both we and our editors never thought it was wrong. So, we should use what we can from what we know, but then jump and write what we don’t when we can’t know.

So where’s the line?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s any one answer. It depends. If it’s something that can be found out in a simple google search. Do it. It takes five seconds on the Amtrak website to figure out what stations you can get to by train. Need to figure out what classes you can take at Harvard, find the course catalogue, look it up. With Google Street View it’s even possible to actually see what it looks like on University Avenue in St. Paul. Yes we sometimes assume we know things that we shouldn’t, but there is really no excuse to not look into things that you can when you don’t know personally. Especially if you’re writing about a controversial issue. For example, if you want to write about a mental disorder, which you don’t have, you can, but please, please, please actually do your research. You can talk to people who have the disorder, you can read blogs about real people, you can learn about it without having to know it. At least not personally.

Still, there really is nothing that can be firsthand experience. If there’s something important to your story that you have the ability to experience, go do it. I’ve never had many guns in my stories. There just have never been a reason for them to be. But if I had tried to write about them before, either I wouldn’t have been able to give any details (Um, “He shot the gun” Yeah…that works…) or I would have gotten them wrong. A big metal thing that shoots something out of it at 1110ft/sec? (Just looked that up, yep). I expected it to be heavy, and the recoil to try to knock me back. Ok, maybe not that extreme, but I expected to find it harder to hold it out and shoot. Honestly, the hardest parts for me were: 1) I couldn’t get the feel for when the trigger was going to set the gun off, and 2) Every time the shell casing flew out after I shot, it made me completely jump through myself (not the best thing when you’re trying to bring the barrel back to level quickly).

So, write what you know. Learn what you don’t know. And experience what is possible to know. The people who do know will thank you. And, hey, it can be really fun. (If you haven’t gotten to try it, learning how to shoot is a fun thing to get to learn).

“Accidental Plagiarism”

5 Comments

Yesterday I talked about how great the NaNoWriMo Forums have been to me. And today’s post has once again been inspired there.

As I’ve said, I’m on the NaNoWriMo forums nearly every day. It’s a great community. And in the couple of years I’ve been hanging around there, I’ve seem more than one post like this one (posted this morning in the All Ages Coffee House):

“I’m watching a wonderful, wonderful BBC show called Being Human.  The story they’re telling is different from mine, but the bones of it … it’s like they read my mind and stuck it on the screen.  It’s so beautiful and amazing and I love it, but it’s also heartbreaking because now I’m not sure if there’s a point in telling my story.  They already said it.”

Or this:

“So all of November I was writing in speed racer mode, getting as many words down as possible. Come December first I had a week of major writer’s block. Finally I went back and began writing. I started with rewriting my first chapter. I was so proud of my work that I had to show my friend. My friend read it, and immediately accused me of plagiarizing L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries. She lent me her copy of the novel, and she was right. My first chapter looks as if I changed a few key details of L.J’s first chapter.”

While it is never fun to find out that our ideas aren’t quite as unique as we might think they are, truthfully the anguish man writers feel when they find these similarities seems to come from the thought that ideas are what make novels great. This thought is also what leads many new writers to ask how to copyright an idea (which you can’t do) just so someone won’t come across somewhere they’ve mentioned their story and all of a sudden swoop in and take it, as is summed up in this post:

“I’d be gut wrenched to wake up one day and see my plot silently taken and on top of the NY Times Best Seller list – for instance written and published off my synopsis – by another person without my ever knowing. As such I’ve never given a synopsis of it on any kind of forum before. It’s just too risky to me.“

I admit, I fully understand this fear. I was definitely someone who was scared of being scooped, so to speak, back when I first began writing. Scared that someone would tell my story first and all of a sudden I wouldn’t be able to do anything with my baby since it was already out there. And that is the reason finding out something you’ve written seems dangerously close to something already published is devastating. It isn’t so much the idea that people are going to sue you for plagiarism (which they couldn’t do, since it is not possible “accidentally” plagiarize someone) it’s that the idea that has been so precious to you, that you’ve been working with, tweaking, rewriting, and polishing isn’t as unique and special as you thought it was.

In a recent interview I did, I was asked for the top five things I’d tell aspiring novelists. For Number Five, I said, “Trust People.” The longer you write, spend time with writers, or deal with anything in publishing, the more you realize that nothing is truly original. Something can be an interesting idea that hasn’t been overdone, but if you can’t find one part of your book that is like any one of the millions of books out there, you more than likely just haven’t looked around enough. Furthermore, even if two people came up with the same idea right now, the actual writing would be nothing alike. It’s why you don’t get thirty of the same story in a creative writing class when everyone is given the same prompt.

It’s no fun when you have someone accusing you of taking someone else’s ideas. It’s no fun when you find out that your amazing idea isn’t quite as original as you thought it was. But ideas are only one very small part of what makes a good novel good. The writing, the characters, the actual plot…they are all more important than the premise.

So keep writing, trust others, and trust yourself. Your novel is going to be good or bad based on what you do. There are always going to be other people who come up with something that seems eerily similar to your book, but that doesn’t mean yours is any less (or any more) worth reading. Just keep writing, and see what you end up with.

——————————————————————-

Want to carry this and other posts with you wherever you go? Download Write, Edit, Publish for free today.

NaNoWriMo and Me

1 Comment

Ok, it isn’t November, I’m aware, but there is at least still some life over at the NaNoWriMo Boards (I should know, I’m there pretty much at least once a day.) Even without the furious tapping of all of us NaNoWriMo participants typing away trying to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, the organizers over at the Office of Letters and Light (OLL) are still hard at work keeping the site up and running until the next year. Something for which I am very grateful.

See, NaNoWriMo might have been one of the things that finally got me to buckle down and actually finish a novel (rather than getting distracted by a bright, new, shiny idea halfway through a manuscript) but it’s perhaps the forums that have been the most important part of NaNoWriMo to me.

The Braintrust that is the NaNoWriMo reference desk has answered more than a few questions for me while writing a story (and I’ve answered my fair share for other writers) because, really, how much Jello would it take to fill a swimming pool? I might not know, but it seems at least one or two WriMos do.

The All Ages Coffeehouse gives us all a spot to talk about writerly things.

Writing 101 answers all those tough grammatical questions for us (is it lay or lie?)

And Marketing and Self-Promotion, of course, gives all us writerly types a place to talk about our outside NaNoWriMo projects.

And those forums are up all year, helping us all even when we aren’t technically NaNoing.

For anyone who has ever wanted to try NaNoWriMo, or who did it this year but only goes to the site in November, I urge you all to come back and drop by the writing community that sticks around all year. (And donate if you’re able to.) We’re a very welcoming group. And I might not need NaNoWriMo to finish a novel anymore, but I fully admit to being a fangirl.