It's Not A Rolls Royce

Just got back from an Easter trip to a place called Pauanui, where all the nobs in Auckland go to spend their holidays by the beach. Strangest place. You might get a vast mansion with a helicopter out the back and a huge boat in the garage and then right next to it will be an empty section with only a rusty caravan parked on it and tents with people sitting in deckchairs. Presents possiblities perhaps? :-)

Anyway, got some great thinking time in. Have come to the conclusion that I need to change my process. Yep, the way I write has been great for twenty years but if I want to write something for publication, I need to do things differently. Not radically so, I hasten to add. I'm still a pantser at heart and probably always will be. But the thing I need to do is concentrate on my characters before I begin to write. Normally I have a scene in mind and I dive right in, only to come up against the 'what would he/she/it do now?'. And I stop right there because I don't know my characters well enough to know what they would do. For months I've been thinking that it's the conflict I haven't sorted but it's not, it's the characters. I know who they are in the present - when the story starts - but I don't know their pasts, what made them the people that they are. And when you're writing character driven stories, you kind of need to know those details.

The ways you can get to know your characters are many and varied - character sheets and interviews and writing out scenes from their lives - but I've tried them before and they've never actually worked for me. Thinking does though. When I'm in the shower or folding the washing or just tidying up, I've found that thinking about my characters, their childhoods, their relationships with others, the kind of people they are, really works. For example, I'm rewriting a story I wrote two years ago but the conflict never gelled and neither did the characters. But I spent a lot of Easter thinking about the hero and heroine, trying to figure out what their conflict was and whether it fitted with who they were at the beginning of the book. Normally once I'd got one aspect right, I'd quickly whip onto the pc and start writing. But I couldn't this time round and it's a good thing, because I thought I had it all sorted and then realised I hadn't considered another aspect of their backstory which then didn't fit with the actual premise of the book. Sigh.

I don't find this easy. I'm a very impatient sort. I want to get to the good stuff, the real, emotionally wrenching stuff. I love the torture and the black moments. The joy and despair. I don't want to write the set-up and introduce the characters and their conflict. But of course that part is almost the most important part of it because if you don't do it properly, how are your readers ever going to be invested in these characters? How are they ever going to care about what happens to them and their story if they're not fully realised people?

Dr Jax has a great saying that he is fond of when he's building or preparing something:
"It's not a Rolls Royce." This basically means not to sweat the details, it doesn't have to be perfect.

I've always really liked this saying - it suits my impatient personality. But I think that if I want my stories to be good ones, I'm going to have to change my thinking around them because when it comes to writing, the details do matter. And when it comes down to it, I want to write Rolls Royces not Daihatsu Miras.

Anyone else ever changed their process? Did it work for you?

Trying to Get Back Up Again

Well, I did think I would do a few more posts than this but my inspiration to write continues to go up and down like a lady of the night's underpants. Plus, my direction and confidence are wavering all over the place. It's frustrating. The worst part is not having anything else out there. If you haven't got anything on submission, it's like there isn't any hope and I hate that.

I do actually have a good many finished mss all stacked up on my harddrive but they all suffer from the same problem - chronic lack of coherent conflict. Yes, it's a medical condition. Incurable. Or given that the course of treatment is rewriting them completely, pretty much incurable. Am I being too hard on myself about them? Possibly. But I don't want to send anything that I'm not happy with. True, I'll always have doubts with whatever I send, but when I can see glaring faults, I just can't do it.

So what I'm left with is starting something new or rewriting. And at the moment, I am too daunted to do either. It all feels too hard. Especially writing plain old contemporary romance. Category makes this easy because that's all they publish. But if you don't write category or paranormal, or urban fantasy, or steampunk, or erotica, or suspense, how do you make your contemporary romance different to eveyone elses? Do publishers even want plain old contemporary, internal conflict driven romance? Or do you have to put a spin on it?

Sigh. Some days it's easier just to take to one's bed and eat chocolate. Happy Easter everyone.

Getting Back Up Again Or How Buying a Handbag Is Always a Good Thing

Okay, so I've been laying on the mat after the big KO for a while now. Plenty of you guys have told me to take it easy and be good to myself. Now, I'm not very good at doing that. My solution to feeling crappy about writing is just to keep writing. This is not a good solution. Not only does it only reinforce my feelings of crapness, but it doesn't help my writing either. Who writes well when they feel they suck? Not me.

So what did I do instead? I bought myself a handbag. There are two good things about my Hammerpants ms, the main one being prize money. Hehe. Here is a pic of the Handbag of Hope (Purse of Hope if you're American). It is blue, slouchy, soft and best of all, my phone doesn't get stuck waaaaay down the bottom so I don't hear it.

Oh and I said there was a second thing didn't I? Well, the second thing is that I'm pretty certain that I did something right in the first five pages of that ms. And I know what it is. I think I've said before that I suspected it was my conflict and character that was at issue and, yup, it is. The first five pages of the ms certainly sounded like I knew exactly who my characters were and what sort of conflict they had. The problem was, I actually didn't. Because I didn't think about it enough.

It's like when you do a mosaic. You set out some parts of it beautifully and it all looks good. But then you find some blank bits you didn't really see before. So you try to find bits to fit but they don't quite. They're the wrong size or the wrong colour. You jam them in somehow and from a distance it looks good but when you get up close, it's all wrong. The bits of you've jammed in don't work with the ones that are all set out beautifully. And the worst part is you kind of know you're wrong but you don't know quite why or how to fix it.

All my stories have been like this mosaic. They all look fine from a distance but when you get in close, there's a lot that doesn't fit, that doesn't work, that doesn't hang together nicely. So I have been trying to sort out all my pieces BEFORE I start the mosaic. This is - for me - extremely difficult because it's changing the writing habits of twenty years! Argh. Even the Handbag of Hope doesn't help much with this.

The result has been me spending at least a week on the first chapters of a number of stories. It's agonising to be honest because I'm desperate to get to the rest of the story, but I have to say, once all the bits of my mosaic have been worked out - the characters, the conflict, at least the inciting incident and a vague idea of the plot (pantser, yes, that's me) - it's amazing how much better that first chapter is. And I've come to the conclusion that if something doesn't quite feel right with a character - a bit of the conflict or an attribute or whatever - then I should NOT write until I've figured out what it is and put it right. Sigh.

Anyway, the main thing is that yes, I have been writing. I have a chapter ready to go for a contest that dear Dr Jax and my CPs think is better than anything I've done recently (yeah, I wanted to put that in there because God knows, you have to grab those lovely compliments when you can). I have another ms that I will rewrite for Carina. And then another couple of stories that I am just going to write and see where they take me.

I have my mosaics all laid out and right at this moment all the pieces fit. It's a good feeling to be able to fix that particular problem. Of course there will be other problems, others I don't know about yet but that's the wonderful thing about learning eh?

So for those of you who are looking for some positive stuff after you've had your heart cut from your chest while it's still beating. By a spoon. Here it is: there is life after rejection. It may take a while but there is still creativity. And there is a lesson to learn from it. Pretty much what you choose to learn is up to you but mine is this:



Yep, I drink a whisky drink....;-)

A Murder of Crows

It's been a while since the last post - I usually blog more than this. But to be honest, I'm trying to drum up some enthusiasm. I've got a cold, which doesn't help, but there's also a murder of doubt crows sitting on just about every available flat surface in my office. Some days it's just not even worth going in there.

I think the hardest thing about this particular point in time is going ahead when there is no glimmer on the horizon, not even a tiny spark. You hear people's miraculous stories about how, when they'd decided to give up writing for good, something would magically happen - a lost sub becomes found or a ms they'd forgotten they'd sent gets the nod - but you know, those things only happen to the lucky few. It's when there isn't the prospect of even the most minor of encouragement that it gets very, very tough.

My last blog post was pretty positive. But positivity is one of those wonderful things that seem to come and go - at this point, it's mostly go. You can't stay positive all the time. It requires a conscious effort and to be honest, it's bloody tiring.

It's probably not the best day for a blog post actually. Because if you're looking for some brave examples of how to pick yourself up after getting the big KO writing-wise, don't look at me. I still haven't managed to regain consciousness let alone pick myself up.

I guess the thing with being on the ground is that you can't fall any further.

Anyone got a scarecrow I can borrow?

Kicking Fear's Butt

So I've been contemplating this mountain thingy here and while I have, I've been thinking about my writing and all those bloody rejections. Especially the last two. I found it very interesting that in the ed's opinion, the Hammer Pants ms, the one I'd written 18 months ago, was stronger than the one I'd written 6 months ago. At first I was gutted about this - wasn't I supposed to be getting better not worse? But then, after I'd thought some more about it, I figured that actually, she was right. Why? Because I remember writing that first chapter. And I remember how I felt when I was writing it: I wanted to write without worrying about stuff, without worrying whether I was showing vs telling, without worrying whether the hero/heroine were sympathetic enough or whether I had enough conflict etc, etc. So I stopped worrying. I wrote it just for fun. And lo! it was good. Of course, by chapter 2 I realised my conflict problems had raised their ugly head again and I couldn't seem to untangle the difficulties, so I put it aside. But that's a whole other blog post. :-)

Writing without fear. That's what I was doing. And that's what I HAVEN'T been doing for the past year. Nope, the past year, I've been writing scared. Scared of getting it wrong, scared of messing it up somehow. Certainly all the Rs I'd got seemed to indicate that I wasn't getting something right and sure enough, that little belief kept getting reinforced and poor Jackie kept getting scareder and scareder. Her writing lost her spark. All the life got drained out of it. And, most important of all, she lost her joy. Nothing like a self-fulfilling prophecy huh?

Fear will do that to a writer. It'll suck the creativity right out of you. And it's a b*tch to overcome, let me tell you.

The good thing is that at least I have an idea of where I might, potentially, be going wrong. So at the moment I'm trying feel the fear and write it anyway. :-) I'm trying to recapture what I felt when I wrote the Hammer Pants ms. I'm trying to just be in the moment with my characters and not think about whether this ms works for Riva or Presents. Or whether my hero is being too alpha. Or whether my heroine is being too unsympathetic. Or what to do with it when I type The End. I just need to switch all that off, immerse myself in the story, and start enjoying it again. I need to stop writing for an editor, for a reader, for my CPs. I need to write for me first.

This is something that a lot of people have been saying to me. And it's not that I haven't listened, it's just that I haven't understood why it's important. Well, I do now.

So goodbye creepy fear. There is no place for you when I'm writing. You can haul your sorry skeletal carcass out of my study and you better do it before I go all Chuck Norris on your hide. Sure, I know you'll be back when I hit the send button again but hopefully by the time that happens, I'll have so many subs out that you won't know which one to attach yourself to. So asta la vista baby!

And while fear is making itself scarce, I shall leave you with the words of wisdom my five year old daughter gave to me. When I told her about my R she said, 'Were you writing quietly and carefully, mummy? You must always write quietly and carefully."

Anyone else writing quietly and carefully? Or alternatively, giving fear a good roundhouse kick to the head? :-)

The Fabulous Rach!

And one of my lovely CPs (name drop, name drop) has just sold her contempory romance to Carina Press!!!!

Break out the champers Hoo, we're having a sale party!!!!

Big huge, mega congrats, Rach my dear!! The story is awesome and so are you. :-)

Check out the call story here!