Tag: writing plot

Surprise, Surprise.

I had another real gut check moment this week. Two, actually. I got into my revisions and suddenly realized I have to rewrite almost every bit of Tommy and Cindi’s storyline. The first story is fine–now. I have to totally rewrite the second for it to be from Tommy’s point of view, then that means that every other story in that arc has to be rewritten, too.

So I resigned myself to doing that. Scared I would mess it up by doing it, so popped out all five stories into their own document to revise on in case it’s too hard and I have to give it up.

Then Saturday I realized that once that one is beefed up the way I want it to be, that James and Lori’s story arc was terribly weak compared to the others. I needed more juice for it too. I started fussing to my writing friends. It was so demoralizing for about a day to think that just when I thought I was done, that those characters were crying for more development as well. But since I had already decided on one set of revisions, it seemed deciding on another set wasn’t as hard.

But oh, I fussed about it to my writing friend for this project. She listened so patiently over Facebook Messenger as I went “Augh!” over and over talking about how I knew it all needed to be done. She first advised me to not do it at all if it was going to drive me this crazy. Send it out as it was and see what happened.

I realized I’d rather not send it out at all than do that.

And then I thought of a book that just got published recently. By someone I knew. Who isn’t even a writer by profession–he was an accounting professor at my alma mater. By a press that had rejected Hurricane Baby when I first was sending it out.

So. I thought “Boy howdy, if he can get a book published in this environment, SO CAN I.”

So I am making the changes. Started last night during a rain delay of the football game I had been planning to watch. And I went in hot on it and am now on my way. I am going to succeed with Hurricane Baby as far as it remains in my power. I’m going to write something I am proud of, even if it never gets published. And I’m enjoying ever second.

Protecting Characters

I have fallen into a peculiar trap I don’t think I’ve ever made for myself before. I have three characters whose stories I am trying to write more of, give them a voice–Holly Seabrook, Cindi Edwards, and Tommy Hebert. I suddenly don’t want anything bad to happen to them in the endings of the books.

I never felt this way about characters in the first drafts. And where I have let other characters experience consequences, I haven’t taken a lot of thought about it. But suddenly I’m very protective of these three.

I think I’ve gotten over it with Tommy, who is one of the new characters I am spinning out his story from bit player to major player. And his girlfriend Cindi I am thinking I just don’t know very well yet. And I feel a lot for Holly because of what she is going through in the story. But I think I need to remember three things:

Number One: I am not dealing with real people. I am dealing with figments of my imagination. If I were writing about real people, it wouldn’t be fiction. But one of the goals is for everyone to come off as very real, so I suppose I’ve fooled myself into thinking that as well.

Number Two: I am not chronicling real events. The book is based on a real event–Hurricane Katrina–but everything thing else is fake. Invented. By me. I am master of the domain. Don’t like what happens when I get through writing it? I have a delete key for a reason.

Number Three: Static characters are boring characters. Change has to come. They have to come to earth-shattering realizations. They have to see things fall apart and somehow rebuild them. So we will stay invested in their stories.

So that is what I am going to be working on–how to think about my characters as characters in a book instead of the living, breathing people I’ve come to think of them as. And that’s going to be interesting.

Downslope

So I feel like I am on the downslope of drafting the last three stories. I know what I plan to do in them, and unless I have somehow misjudged the characters and they surprise me in some way, I should have no trouble rounding out the final few scenes I have to do. I am still waiting on other beta readers to send me comments, but I am satisfied with the changes I have made so far.

I am going to continue to revise and edit up until August 1, when I will switch manuscripts with another writer I have connected with in my workshop this summer. Then I will revise based on her feedback and start submitting to presses in mid-September.

I am really excited to hit this part of the drafting/revising process. I don’t know as the process has been very orderly, but it has worked so far to take the stories in some unexpected directions and that is always good. I will keep you posted on my progress in the coming weeks as usual! Thank you for reading.

Story Continuity

I have been having fun writing the new installments of Hurricane Baby and cleaning up what I call “continuity problems”. Since I am adapting a huge mass of already-written material to a new purpose, I have to watch for continuity problems.

These could range anywhere from calling a character a wrong name to putting someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, one story had been set between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And I didn’t realize that until I was doing yet another read through and realized that it couldn’t be set during that time because of changes to the timeline occasioned by the new stories I’ve written and other changes to the timeline of the book itself.

How to solve? I’ve started keeping a list that consists of when each event happened and what it was. So if Lelani announced she was pregnant in early January, if she went into preterm labor in the sixth month, the baby would be born in June. If, if, if. Asking a series of If questions make the dominoes of the story fall into place with minimum disruption.

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.