Tag: drafting

Lull

So now I am already looking ahead to see where I can schedule events in the new year. I have one library event scheduled in early January and applications in to be in several large book events (HOMEGROWN, the Oxford Conference for the Book, and the Southern Literary Festival).

Other places I’ll be contacting are libraries in my county, some civics groups, and possibly some business groups. I’m trying to think outside the box a bit. The only thing that makes me hesitate in contacting these groups is that I don’t know if there will be an expectation for me to bring books to sell. I’ve avoided that because I do not have the requisite tax paperwork filled out to be able to do that. But I won’t know unless I ask! So we will see how that works out.

Otherwise, the writing is going really well. I am maybe 40-50 pages away from finishing this draft of Looking For Home, then I’ll work through another draft after the new year. I’m trying to decide when to let readers see it. I am thinking that since I already know some areas where I’m going add more material, I need to wait until I finish them. That’s probably what I’m going to do.

I was asked in a podcast the other day (here) how being a debut author felt right now. I said that it was like my regular life, but shinier. There’s a deep satisfaction in having set my mind to do this and then doing it, against all odds, in my circumstances as an older author selling a collection of stories (usually a hard sell in the book world), as an author no one had ever heard of. But I did it by the grace of God. And that’s something special.

Perfectionism

Anne Lamott says that perfectionism is the voice of the oppresssor. As long as you have tied yourself up in knots over the perfect choice, what happens? No choice gets made, nothing happens, and no actions are taken.

I’m close to the end of my work in progress. I’ve done about 220 pages since the end of November last year. but these last 80 are proving to be the very devil. Because I want to get it Right when I should be concerned with getting it DOWN. Plenty of time to go back and fix what might be wrong. But right now is the time to get it done.

So wish me well as I try to break the vise that perfectionism has had on my writing. Happy reading!

Progress!

If you remember, my current work-in-progress is a set of three novellas that tell a story of a young couple giving up a baby for adoption in the 1970s and the child finding them in the mid-80s. The final novella from the point of view of the adopted child, had been published in a novella collection, and the rights have reverted back to me, and I’ve been developing into a longer work. I started with revising the section that had already been published into something with more weight to it.

After i completed that section, I started on the first section, narrated by the birth father of his moving to Counce, Tennessee and meeting his girlfriend and how their relationship developed. I still had the original novel written in 2006 that I chopped down into the novella in 2017. I pulled flashback scenes from the novel to set up this first section and wrote more material about his life and . . .

Last night I finished the first draft of that section!

So tomorrow I will start on the middle section from the birth mom’s point of view about the years after giving up her daughter. And I have only a handful of half-bakes ideas for this part–I’ll be drafting almost from scratch. So that’s going to be. . . interesting. Definitely stretching my storytelling chops. I hope to finish it before Hurricane Baby publishes in late August this year.

So that’s my new goal. Wish me well!

Drafting Tips

Writing your story from beginning to end sounds like the right way to go, right? You write the beginning, the middle, the climax, the denoument, and the end. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, once noted that the last third of a book usually took up only the last ten percent of the time to write, either from confidence in your story or maybe the narrowing of options for alternative endings.

But what happens when you don’t know what happens in the next chapter? My solution for that with Hurricane Baby was to write sections as I thought of them. I wondered about if Judd and Laine divorced over Wendy, how long would it be before Judd started dating again? I knew not long—he had a reputation as a womanizer in college and was still relatively young. So I wrote a scene where he met his second wife six months after his divorce was final. Ray would eventually figure out that Judy Ray wasn’t his—studies show that a child’s similarity in looks to their father peaks around two years old, so Ray would notice she did not favor him or his family in any way by then. What would he do?

I put the scenes I was writing in sequential order in the original manuscript as I drafted each one in my notebook. I would fill in what I thought would connect them as I went. The final scenes were the third ones I wrote. I knew where the story was going to go—but how did I get it there?

Sometimes the characters up and surprised me. Dr. Jack Rawson turned meaner and meaner with every scene I wrote him into. His playing-God ego was huge, and it led to Wendy being so uncomfortable around him that the scenes were excruciating to write.

So instead of writing linearly, where you write the first scene first and the last scene last, try going where the answer to the question of What happens? is burning a hole in your imagination. Write that scene. You may keep it, you may not. Pencils have erasers, and a computer comes with a delete key for a reason, right?  If you’re blocked on the Next Thing, try the next Next Thing and see what happens. 

Starting Revision

So I’ve gotten feedback from a few of my readers and some of the same issues keep cropping up. So I am starting to add more material and take out other material as I revise this month. I still have several readers’ comments outstanding so I am not changing any existing storyline too drastically–just adding a new story arc I dreamed up on vacation and adding a fifth story to each arc to address another comment that I knew likely was going to be said anyway. So I have more to revise and draft.

Luckily some of the new scenes can still come out of the old draft and be suitable with just a few revisions. But I know I have several new ten-page scenes to draft soon as well and will start work on that with an eye to finish August first so I can make a switch with another author I admire very much; I’ll read her chapbook and she’ll read the revised story collection.

I am truly excited about what has been said so far. I really think I’ve found the moves to finally tell this story and maybe reach the audience I want to reach with it. Now I just have to let the comments buoy me along so I don’t freeze up again. Again, I have done a lot of thinking ahead of time on what I want to say and need to just write down what is in my mind.

Where We Are

So I picked “Hurricane Baby” back up this year to try to make it work as a series of linked short stories. I took the most dramatic episodes in the novel manuscript and am rewriting them to show how the hurricane affected the lives of various characters.

Wendy and Ray Magnum have to deal with the fallout of Wendy’s encounter with Judd McKay. Mike and Holly Seabrook work to overcome the damage done to their home and lives with Mike undergoing a serious crisis of faith. And James and Lisa King suffer through a dissolution of their marriage after Lisa decides she is never returning to the Coast again.

Each of the three storylines is told in four installments, alternated throughout the manuscript. Each of the twelve stories is told from a slightly different point of view. Wendy and Ray each have their own story, Mike’s point of view is illustrated through three stories, with Holly closing their narrative with her own story, and James and Lisa’s stories alternate from one to the other.

Characters

I did not plot out the novel and follow a script to write it. I simply kept asking the question: What happens next? I didn’t even ask why? that something would happen. I never told why! that something had happened. I tried to make sure each twist of the story was organic to the first characters as I had conceived them.

Wendy Magnum was a tough-as-nails working-class Southern woman. She worked part-time in a daycare taking care of three-year-olds because she seemed to not be able to have children, although she desperately wanted them, and worked her off days in Ray’s shop. She and Ray began dating when she was fourteen, not long after she lost her daddy in a drunk-driving accident and had married right when she finished high school. They had been married ten years when Katrina came through Hattiesburg. She loved the men in her life and knew how to handle guns but could not handle herself when she thought she was going to die in the hurricane without Ray to protect her, as he had throughout their life together.

Judd McKay was a wild one from Mandeville, Louisiana. He had gone to LSU and had lived and worked in Hattiesburg until his father died, leaving him his childhood home. He moved back home and began working as a traveling salesman selling first chainsaws, then generators, for Jackson Equipment Company. He and Ray had known each other for years. He had been married for three years to Laine McKay, who matched him in wildness and meanness, recognizing what he could do for her as well as what he couldn’t. He never had any sense when it came to a good-looking woman–something that had been his undoing more than once in his life.

Ray Magnum was four or five years older than Wendy and had been a baseball player in high school with blond hair and brown eyes. He owned his own business, Magnum Hardware, with his partner, Tommy Cade, and also worked as a professional firefighter to have a steady income. He was a stoic man who was capable of great love, moving into his mama’s house with Wendy to take care of his mama until she died. But working at the firehouse forty-eight hours on and seventy-two hours off at the shop, he could only do so much–when Wendy needed more.

They were a combustible mix–and I keep lighting fuses.