Tag: writing characters

What Happens When You Try to Force Things to Happen

Back last year in the wake of getting a contract for Looking for Home (that was sadly cancelled), I decided to go ahead and start on Book #3. I wanted to revise another old manuscript, so I pulled it out and reread it.

While reading, I realized it was such a fundamentally different kind of book than Hurricane Baby and Looking for Home. Southern, yes, but only Southern because it was set in Mississippi. The theme of the book was very different from the other two; it was a very contemporary story as well. No deep, dark, past secrets to explore, etc.

So I wondered if I needed to work to make it more Southern, more gothic, and more spooky. I decided I did. I went to work on the POV, the setting, the chain of events. I introduced a supernatural aspect to the book; I changed the fundamental theme; I changed the struggles of the characters drastically.

And a voice in the back of my mind kept telling me that it wasn’t going to work this way.

But I ignored it. For months.

I probably wrote fifty pages of new material. I started a new document in my computer called RANT just to dump all the angst I was having doing this work–talking about what I wanted to do but talking about how much trouble I was having doing it, too. I thought I was just suffering from writers’ block again.

After not fooling with it for the past three months while I wondered what I was going to do with my creative life and after taking the initiative to cut about two-thirds of the material, I now realize I was just trying to force a new vision on a book out of fear. I had wondered if I built a fanbase on historical fiction if I could pull off a move to something more contemporary. Wondered if what I had tried to do then would work for the market now.

I finally realized I was just trying to make the story something it wasn’t.

Each story is its own creation. I was not the same writer I was back in the late 2000s, but that didn’t mean that every book I wrote had to do what I had done in revising Hurricane Baby, either. I was allowed to write whatever I wanted to write. And if I wanted to still do a story exploring those themes that were issues in the 2000s, that was fine. Did that mean I could do it differently to account for changes in society? Yes. But it did not mean I needed to chase a “brand” at this stage of my writing life.

If the story wants to be something different than what you normally write, let it. That’s how you grow as a writer. Challenging yourself to do something you haven’t done before.

Book #3 (which I’m currently calling Our Little Secret as a working title) is going to be different from the other two. And now that I’ve accepted that, I feel excited to work on it again. Don’t write scared. That’s the takeway.

Happy writing!

Stripping the Work Down to Basics

So I have actually been thinking about Book #3 quite a bit lately. (I know. I know. I said I wouldn’t work on anything until Looking for Home sold. I also reserved the right to change my mind.)

On Friday night while I was out of town, I remembered one of the guiding principles I used when revising Hurricane Baby–cut all the boring parts! For this rough draft, I figured out that meant to cut every part of the book where the two main characters weren’t directly interacting with each other.

Well.

I set to doing that this afternoon after we got back from the conference.

And that process cut the manuscript from 321 pages to 115.

Yikes.

While doing it, I realized that much of what I was cutting was extremely wordy setup for the next interactions between these two main characters. I was using a lot of words/dialogue/description/character thoughts to explain everything that was happening behind the scenes–then summarizing all that action in the next encounter between these two main characters.

So. What’s next?

I’m going to let it sit for a week or so–until April 1. Then I’m going to go back and re-read the stripped-down version, looking for what may need to be done to further develop their relationship. Because their relationship is where the heat is, the smoke. The action.

So we will see what happens.

Literary Criticism

I was thinking a couple of days ago about my various experiences of writing, and my mind uncorked a long-buried memory from the back of my mind. I may not have all the details straight, but this is the gist of it:

I was in school (not sure what grade), and my class was given a homework assignment (or maybe extra credit)–to write a play about Paul Revere’s ride at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. This particular class was where I had fallen in love with history to the same degree that I was in love with writing, and now I had a chance to combine the two! I couldn’t pass this opportunity up.

I remember coming to the assignment with the utmost seriousness. I wanted it to be as accurate and honest as I could make it from the version of the story presented to me in my class history book–I populated the play with farmers, churchmen, soldiers, and Quakers. I had Paul Revere complaining to his horse about the weather and about being tired and about how he hoped he didn’t get saddle sore. I went all out.

So the due date came, and I turned in my play. I seem to remember only one other girl did a play as well. My teacher decided to have the class read both the plays and hold a vote for who the class thought had the best one. So she called on people to read mine aloud first, then the other girl’s.

The other girl had not taken the pains to be historically correct. The characters were all named after her friends in the class. The narrative didn’t have much to do with the American Revolution at all.

But the girl was popular. And she had name-checked most of the other people in the class. I had a sinking feeling as I heard the class talking among themselves how much they liked hers more then mine. I just sat in my desk and started at the floor. The teacher had us vote with a show of hands. I held up my hand for mine and didn’t even look up to see if anyone else did. The silly play won.

I was left with this takeaway: my play had lost because I was the one who wrote it.

Silly, yes. Naive, a bit. But anyone who has spent time in writing spaces has seen this happen before, even among grownups. Literary merit doesn’t always bring success to the creator.

However.

My mistake was to turn this incident into a flat statement about my abilities: That my work could never be “good enough” because I would never be “good enough” because I was too smart, too show-offish, too unattractive, too too too–whatever.

My work is as good as it needs to be. And the more I work, the better it will get with practice. And the more persistent I am, the more opportunity I can create for myself and my work. That’s the bottom line.

Candy-Store Problem

A candy-store problem is when you have a lot of choices, and all of them are good–or at least not bad.

I have four ideas for books–a paranormal novel, a double murder mystery with a twist, a father-son relationship novel, and a mother-daughters novel. I have been trying to work on the paranormal novel as it’s an old manuscript that would need to be rewritten, as is the double murder mystery. The other two are fully outlined from beginning to end.

The murder mystery feels the most like a conventional genre book and the most commercial. The paranormal one feels like another small press book with the twists and turns it takes. The other two feel more conventional as well.

When I set back out doing this, I decided I would rewrite the four older manuscripts first, querying indie and small presses for the first three (Hurricane Baby, Looking for Home, and the paranormal book) and query agents for the murder mystery to see if I could get a Big 5 deal. Then I’d write the other two from scratch and maybe be of age to retire if I wanted to or try to think up new ideas if I didn’t.

Now I am wondering whether that’s the proper path to take.

But at least my choices are all good because they all involve writing!

So please think about me in the next few weeks as I chew over my choices. Happy writing to you all!

NEW ADVENTURE!

I finished my first draft of Looking for Home at some point between Thanksgiving and December 1, 2024 (I went back and looked), After January 1, I reread it and did a revision. In February 2025 I sent to beta readers, then a line editor worked it over, and then I swapped work with another professional writer, and she made some very good notes.

All of that feedback needed to be factored in and folded into the narrative, straightening out the chronology and cleaning up finer plot points. As well as cutting the wordcount down a bit. And today I restyled the first few paragraphs to clean up the last of those wordcount cuts, and I am DONE with Looking for Home, and I think it’s ready to query!

It has been quite the journey. I was not as driven writing this book, and it took twice as long to complete. I froze up on the regular, wondering how I could pull such a feat off again. I fought through the grief of losing my mom and quitting my job. And these last couple of weeks, the revisions just seemed too overwhelming to take on.

My writing buddy Shannon told me, “Just work on one page. That’s all. Then try to revise another page tomorrow.”

That did the trick. I got my confidence back, and it was off to the races. I just finished writing the last revised paragraph a few hours ago.

Next is drawing up the first list of publishers to query and seeing what happens!

But that will be tomorrow. Today I will celebrate that Carlton and Merrilyn and Cassie got their happy ending. As they should have. Stay tuned!

New Idea!

So I’ve settled what I’m going to work on for my next writing project.

I wrote out a thought experiment in the late 2000s–could you call a extramarital relationship cheating if the pair never actually had physical relations? What would such a relationship look like? And what would be the fallout if the relationship was revealed?

Now as a society, we have a term for this kind of relationship–an emotional affair–and many writers have explored the ramifications of such relationships in both fiction and nonfiction. So even though it’s tightly written and tightly plotted, I don’t think this story would work for today’s readers.

So I got to thinking. How could I change it to make it more interesting? I knew I didn’t want to do a romance manuscript–that’s not really where my interests lie. The story was dual point-of-view; I could choose to center the male main character, Steven Burr, or the female main character, Melissa Benedict.

As I reread the work, I realized that Steven experienced no growth during the story as I had it, while Melissa did. So I decided to center Melissa’s story as one of her own transformation as she got older and more experienced at life.

But that would be kind of a plain story, too–a lot of that kind of work is out in the world as well. What kind of spin could I put on it to make it more mine and more Southern Gothic?

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cassandra myth–the prophetess blessed with knowledge of the future but cursed to always have her pronunciations ignored by the people around her. What if Melissa encountered such a person–and her life was upended? Would Melissa passively accept what’s happening to her–or would she seize what control she could muster over her life?

So. The die is cast. I’ll start in September, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

Looking Ahead; Looking Back

So my activities are slowing down at this point. I have one event left in June and only one Zoom event scheduled for all of July. I am hoping to get my latest manuscript back from my other two readers by mid-July and plan to take that open time of no events to do whatever other edits need doing on it. I know I want to look very carefully at the word count, at the pacing of the actual beginning pages, and at making sure the continuities are right. We will see if anything else comes up.

August will be important for three reasons: the book will be a year old, the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is that month, and to that end, I have a lot of events scheduled. the first is an online “Talk To Me Day” on Mastodon on August 3, then there’s a Book Mart signing in Starkville on August 15 and the Possumtown Book Fest in Columbus the next day, August 16. Then another shot at a signing at B&N on August 23, another Zoom event on August 26, and finally a podcast recording with fellow author Rod Davis and my friend Shannon Evans on August 29, the actual date the storm hit Mississippi in 2005.

I am making such a big push because first-year sales are so important to the life of a book. I am probably going to stop hustling for events, press, etc. once the first year is over. The good news is I already have several possibilities for events in the next year; I just have to wait and see how those possibilities pan out. And anything else I am invited to I will need to be very judicious about whether to attend or not.

But I could never have anticipated what all has happened for my book this year–the reception by readers, the accolades from various quarters, the support from other authors, the support I’ve gotten from my publisher, my family, and my work–all amazing and humbling for the little book that could.

Rest

Rest. That’s what I tried doing this week after I finished this third draft. I mostly succeeded.

I read. Some nights I went to bed early. Other nights I participated in chats with friends.

One night I wrote out a very basic note on the plot of the chapter that I’m adding to the middle section. I plan to start on that tomorrow night and hopefully finish a good draft within a week.

But I can tell I’m getting close to done with the writing of this book.

How do I know? I’m not thinking about the characters all the time. The impetus to rush to the computer and type on the draft has lessened. I’m starting to turn my mind to what comes next–another go-around of edits, perfecting a few more places I already know need work, making sure all the little details get cleaned up in preparation for going out to the wide world of querying.

Hopefully I can have a few days to sit with the manuscript at the end of July and marvel that I managed to do it again. A whole other book. YAY!

Better Late Than Never!

And except for some scraps of dialogue here and there, my next revision is in the books. I do have one more scene I am tinkering with including–but it’s not a make-or-break thing if it doesn’t get in–I think the story would be better with it, but it’s fine without it, too.

It’s long. Like 345 pages long–much longer than Hurricane Baby. I may concentrate in the next revision on slimming it back down to 80,000 words. I can ask my next readers to look at repetitious passages, etc. We will see how it goes.

I still feel really accomplished. I want to be able to start shopping it in August 2025, and it looks like I’m on track to hit that goal. I have put a lot of words down on paper in this story. And these characters have really stuck with me for a long time. I just hope I keep doing the story justice.

In other news, I was at a lovely event in a small town in Alabama this past Saturday; I signed books and was in a good Q&A with the Friends of the Library organization there. I made a comment on how sometimes you can work on a project if you remind yourself that they characters aren’t real people and that it’s okay to kill them off. The moderator told me that for many of us, the characters become real people in our minds, and we get really upset when you kill one off. So lots of opinions were had and a lively discussion ensued.

So tonight I’m going to clean up loose threads and put this version of Looking for Home to bed. Wishing you all the best!