This post's purpose is to collect my common tags in one place, so readers (and I!) can easily access entries on several subjects.

Justine Larbalestier talks about finishing writing projects.

"My immediate response is that no book is ever "well and truly done." They could all be made better. Every single one of them, yes, even Pride and Prejudice. There is not point at which "you shouldn't tamper with a story anymore."

Problem is that if we all took that attitude we'd all be working on the same book our entire lives and it'd only find its way into print when we carked it. Not very satisfactory. So, yes, at some point you have to let your story go. It may not be a forever letting go. It may just be letting go to send out to agents and/or editors. If it does sell it will be return to you and you'll be rewriting it again. I know some writers who continue to revise books after they've been published.

However, as a writer who's had several books under contract, deadlines are my signal to stop."

I also loved this quote, because it matches what I do:

"I stop working on a manuscript when

a) it's due, or
b) I can't stand it anymore."

She also talks about degrees of being finished.

cookie_chef asked for some examples of the edits I've been making. This is what they look like.

Original:
Men stood and read the papers under streetlights and in the street itself, blocking wagons whose drivers cursed. Some men cheered, and some shouted angrily. Singing and pipe smoke billowed from the open door of a beer garden; rats skittered in the garbage in the alley next door.

Edited:
Men stood and read the papers under streetlights and in the street itself, arguing vociferously, blocking wagons whose drivers cursed. Singing and pipe smoke, drunken cheers and angry shouts billowed from the open door of a beer garden.
[Rats seemed out of place; she wouldn't be peering that closely into the alley, given how she feels. Folded a boring sentence into other sentences, created some parallel structure.]

Original:
"Run!" he said, so she grabbed her bag and did so, hearing the sounds of a scuffle behind her through the pounding in her ears.

Edited:
"Run!" he said, so she grabbed her bag and did so, hearing a scuffle behind her through her heart's pounding.
[Cut dependent clauses; still a bit confusing, but better]

Should probably be: ...grabbed her bag, her heart pounding, hearing the scuffling behind her.

Original:
"There aren't so many places that will hire a woman as a chemist," Lucilla said, sharply. "Perhaps you haven't noticed."

Edited:
"There aren't so many places that will hire a woman chemist," Lucilla said, sharply. "Perhaps you haven't noticed, France being full of them. Or no, I'm sorry--those women are cooks, aren't they?"
[added more anger, to more realistically provoke other person to shut up]

These are my notes on the narrative panel at WisCon. Mostly, I didn't write down attributions, or try to make a sequence (or narrative!). This is just the bits that struck me, and that I wanted to refer to later. Also, there might be some of my own thoughts and interpretations, but not a lot.

The panelists were L. Timmel Duchamp, moderator; Carolyn Ives Gilman; Susan Palwick; Pat Murphy; and Eileen Gunn.

Received narrative as a force/atmosphere and combating/resisting received narrative; reader reading subversively, and writer leading/seducing reader into the subversive reading. The latter sounds like the hard part.

How do we make new narratives/stories for which the models don't exist? Subverting the conservative force of narrative: this equals story, this does not equal story. Making new story understood as story.

Narrative arc can be independent of structure; for example a single narrative arc, but structured as scenes going forward and backward in time. Structure can reinforce narrative arc, also. Thematic reinforcement ought to work as well.

The game of reading is to see narrative in a collage of events; seems to happen naturally when you have three random events; even two will do.

If reader is faced with a puzzle, must read interactively to assemble the puzzle/narrative.

Writer can write a story and then distance herself from the story, allowing her to rework it with greater freedom. "That story is done. I am now working on this story." (William Gibson recommended this technique to Eileen Gunn.)

Once a narrative is out in the world, it's no longer yours.

Exploit the holes in the story. [I think this meant, exploit the holes in one story to make a new, more interesting story.]

Carolyn Gilman: narrative is not explanation, it simulates explanation; narrative stresses competition and conflict; narrative tends to stress the personal and private over the public and political. Sequence in narrative implies causation.

500 words Friday night, 1000 on Saturday, and 1500 on Sunday. Not too bad. I'm also reading more bits of my research books, and I made some revisions to my scene list, and am taking Thursday and Friday off from the day job to write.

I've noticed that when I'm pushing, as opposed to when I have all the time I want, I don't wait for scenes to come to me (scene defined as something with action and dialogue), but write in a more narrative style, describing what happened. Still in pov, but not really what I want. Most of that stuff will be expanded into actual scenes--show, rather than tell--once I get to revisions. But right now, getting the ideas down seems more important, and I think will help me in imagining the scenes themselves. And I have more time to decide what needs to be shown, and what can be simply told.

I think I'm going to move the wordcount bar down to 80,000 for the zero draft. A lot of this narrative will take up more space when it's in scene form, and I don't want to overshoot. So if I'm aiming for 80K, and I'm almost at 43K, then I'm halfway done! And I should have time for at least one revision pass, if I can keep up the pace.

I achieved my thousand-word goal last night, so now I only have 95,000 words to go!

The first scenes I wrote for this book were constructed as standalones, for my own benefit, because I had no idea at the time how they'd be connected. Right now, I'm working on what will probably be chapter one. Since I know what happens in chapter one, I'm writing it in order, start to finish. I noticed last night that the story seemed to be moving slowly, or the writing was. I realized this had to do with the transitions. It wasn't that the transitions were bad, or lengthy, it was just that I had to sit through them while writing them, which was a change from simply writing scenes that were "the good parts" and stopped immediately afterward.

I remember this feeling from before. When writing transitions, I become more aware of myself practicing craft, because I'm less emotionally engaged. Which transition do I need to show? Which can I skip? How can I include a room description in that transition? What bit of character tension can I include when the two people walk across town together? It feels slow because I'm thinking all this as I write, and I at least think through most of the steps necessary to move the characters from one place to another, even if I don't put them on the page.

Transitions are a large part of the book, and the character and descriptive bits I include in them are going to have a cumulative effect. I have a lot of words to use up in this novel, but I don't want to waste any.

My brain feels empty. All the mad whirling of recent days has whirled off into the distance, like that Muppet Show sketch of "The Windmills of Your Mind," with the muppet who has three feet on a wheel that spin faster and faster until he explodes. I'm after the exploding part.

I thought of various things about this method of writing. Normally, I hate having to push and rush and not give myself breaks. I prevent it, by trying to keep a schedule, even if that schedule shifts according to circumstance. Since I was a bit more than a week from deadline when I realized they were expecting more wordcount than I'd thought I was producing, this method wasn't much use, though I did schedule myself so far as wordcount needed for each remaining day. In future, when I sell something, I will find out what wordcount they want as soon as they say they want to buy it. For the second book for this publisher, of course, I know now, and will outline and plan accordingly.

After the weekend's marathon writing sessions, I could have held onto the manuscript for one more day, and added another couple of thousand words, cleaned up the later parts, etc., but on brief reflection, I just couldn't take it any more. I'd burned out. Better to put the thing in the courier box before I read over what I'd done and despaired because it wasn't a brightly shining jewel of perfection. That way lies not only madness, but never finishing anything.

Good things I learned from my writing marathon:
1. I can trust my basic prose level to sound okay on first draft, without me paying too much attention to it as it flows out. I saved my concentration for keeping the whole story in mind. Having done paper edits before all this final writing took place helped a lot on thinking about the story's shape; so did the comments I got from workshop on the partial. Making notes after those comments and edits, on specifically what I needed to include before the novel's end, also helped a lot.
2. Breaks are necessary for me, even in a marathon, even if the breaks are only standing up after an hour or so to put away part of a load of laundry. That's one kind of break. The other is finishing a large section, then taking a think-break and making notes on the next section, so I don't have to waste time flailing when I sit back down again to write. I enforced my think-breaks by trapping myself downstairs waiting for my laundry to finish, with no entertainment but the notebook and pen.
3. I can write a lot in a short period if I need to, but never as much as I wish I could.

Net gain in wordcount yesterday was 2310 words. The material is fine; I am curious to see if any of it will show up in the revision letter, or need more line edits than other stuff, because I wrote so much faster.

Since I decided it was far too late to add a whole new subplot, I'm searching out places that were narrated rather than shown, and putting in scenes. The reason I didn't have scenes in some of those places was pov; for example, pov character in the chapter concerned couldn't have seen certain events with two others characters, so I just didn't write what happened to them. I've wriggled around that by having two flashbacks in two of the weaker chapters that are from the correct povs, and hopefully provide more character depth and, in one case, a substitute for a sex scene we're mostly not seeing. I'm not a big fan of flashbacks, so I guess it's time to learned how to do them. The only other one in the manuscript before this was a chapter on its own, so transitions were less of a problem.

Sang more Brahms last night, and Palestrina. Palestrina is very soothing to sing. My favorite Renaissance composer is still Josquin Des Prez (no, not Dead Prez, they're good too, but different!), but Palestrina is up there among my favorites, and just right sometimes.

When two chapters from the end of a novel? Which is due in about twelve days? Don't go reading a bunch of articles about how to write and make your book fabulous.

It will just make you crazy, and annoy the pig.

How do you describe your characters?

All at once, the first time we see them, or in dribs and drabs? Or never at all?

How specific are you? As specific as the story requires? On what elements do you tend to focus? (It changes every time is an acceptable answer.)

As a reader, do you prefer being told exactly how a character looks, or do you prefer to imagine them yourself? Does it annoy you when a description does not match your mental picture?

Writing scenes is definitely the right idea to really, really get started on this novel; but so is research. I'd forgotten that when I was stuck on the previous project, I would often return to my research materials, which inevitably struck off some new idea or connection. So now I'm reading one of the books I had piled up, and it's proved to be much more helpful than I'd imagined it would be, because it directly addresses some of the things I needed to know, in conjunction with its "real" topic. I've had whole new ideas for how my narrator got where she is, as opposed to the vague and unlikely idea of before. So now I can write scenes using those ideas.

My writing date with R. last Friday really helped. He reminded me that even if I didn't like what I'd written, it told me what wouldn't work.

I wrote while I was on vacation, for the first time, really, since mid-November. Why so long a break? Aside from a couple of quick scribbles, I didn't have anything to write. I thought I did, but my session Friday told me I don't really have what I need to write this novel. I started, regardless (this was start number three, overall), and after about a thousand words I started over somewhere else, because there was no zing to the scene I was writing. It was boring, and didn't tell anything about the character, and didn't involve the emotions. If it didn't involve my imagination, it certainly wouldn't involve a reader's. My second attempt was somewhat better than the first, thankfully, but it still wasn't how I wanted to start.

I have a scene in mind, and it's a good and true scene, but I couldn't figure out how to make it happen. I still can't. Part of the problem is a major one: is a major character whom we will never see alive or dead? I thought, alive, then, no he dies at the beginning, then, isn't that melodramatic? maybe he's alive. This makes a big difference to the narrator.

So I've been thinking about those things. And last night, I wondered if I really had the right first-person narrator.

The way to find out? Is to write. To try out that other pov and see if it works better. Also, to do what I did long ago with another project, and write some scenes out of order, to take out the stress of trying to find the ideal opening scene. Also, to overcome the fear of starting again. Because it is fear, every time. The fear of will this be any good? And every time, it must be overcome.

"I write when I can and I don't write when I can't . . . I wait for inspiration . . . The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day, when a professional writer doesn't do anything but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it he shouldn't try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing. It's the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules. A) You don't have to write. B) You can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself."

-- Raymond Chandler to Alex Barris, 1949

This weekend, the YA fantasy seemed most urgent to me. I want to have a zero draft done by November, and even though there are a lot of words in the file, a lot of them are old words. I've already cut quite a few of the old words; I am sure there are more to cut. Currently, the file holds about 23,000, and I'm aiming for a total of about 60,000. I have a brief outline of the story. I have not, however, attempted to predict how long each chapter will be, or if I will need more or fewer chapters.

When I'm writing the zero draft--which is my phrase for all new stuff that I am figuring out mostly as I go--I find it much harder to pay attention to length and pacing. This might be, partially, an artifact of me counting words in each writing session. If I'm tired, or losing my concentration, and I haven't put down as many words as I'd like, I will sometimes add in more wordy description, or let the dialogue go on farther than I would if I were being more careful. That doesn't always end up being a bad thing. If I describe a room, and in a later draft decide that paragraph is too long, sometimes I can use the rest of that description in another place where it's more appropriate. Sometimes, letting the dialogue ramble a bit brings me surprising new insights, even if I cut the bits that aren't directly to the point.

If I'm going to add another hundred words of description to my day's work just to make wordcount, I am clearly not thinking about how that will affect pacing, except for stray thoughts like, "I'll fix that later." However, I don't think zero draft is the place to worry too much about pacing. Sure, I don't want the story to be bogged down in ten pages of description. I mean pacing in the more delicate sense, after I've gotten to the point when removal of one paragraph makes the plot snap into place. I can't know if that paragraph is needed or not until I have a whole draft. So, back to the beginning: don't worry, keep writing.

"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."
--Raymond Chandler

Sex scenes in romance novels, I feel, need to move the plot along by encompassing some sort of character change or modulation. But what else makes a sex scene a success? Clearly, it's one of those questions in which individual mileage can vary, but I'm still curious to see if anyone can make a list of what, for them, makes a Great Sex Scene.

Things I like:

At least one character with an emotional stake in the proceedings; something is needed/wanted

A character who is hiding something

Intense focus from at least one of the characters

Something new is revealed about at least one of the characters, preferably a thing that implies many other things

Economy of action: only the actions essential to the scene are described, i.e., those actions that underline the scene's emotional or thematic arc, or explicate character, or both.

What about you?

513 on chapter two of my proposal last night. Since I lost almost all my writing time last weekend by unexpectedly having to go out of town, I will need to really buckle down this weekend, and finish at least a chapter. That would leave one chapter to go, and any edits to either the two new chapters or to the outline.

The outline is in pretty good shape. While out of town I did manage to reread one of Emma Holly's books, Cooking Up a Storm, originally from Black Lace but possibly reprinted by now with some other publisher. From that I knew I needed at least one sex scene per chapter, and I noticed how she tied those in with the characterization of the major pairing and of two subsidiary characters, and how she enlivened plottier sections with erotic undertones. So when I outlined, I noted outcome at the end of each sex scene--outcome in the sense of what the sex had resolved and, more importantly, not resolved. Things left unresolved make the reader want to keep reading, a search for final satisfaction, if you will.

I apparently learned a lot from reading Emma Holly's books in the first place, because when I was outlining, I felt like I already knew what sorts of pairings and actions I could use for variety. All of the scenes do not need to include the main couple; or scenes can include half of the main couple with someone else; or the main couple can have a scene with the addition of another character or characters. I also strove to vary the tone, to have a tender scene here, an exuberant quickie there, a slightly scary unplanned encounter to set up another encounter later.

Even if this proposal doesn't sell, and I never have to finish the book, I've learned a lot from the outline alone.

I've been trying to specify to myself exactly how I went about writing a historical piece, in the hope that it would help me in future, because one of the consistent comments I received on my novel was how well I'd established the historical background.

( I blather. )

I sent off that anthology story to the editor and of course now I just figured out what it was that was bothering me about the story. I used flashbacks to establish character.

Not standard flashbacks, where you insert scenes from a time before the main body of the story, but I did use fragments of scenes from past times. I can't think of any better way to accomplish what I needed to do, but now I wish I'd tried a different approach altogether. Those fragments of flashback, I think, are what made me feel this story wasn't of a piece. Those fragments might as well have been stuck onto the rest of the story with that gummy plastic-y stuff people use to seal gaps in their shower tile.

If this hadn't been a short story, and a short story of under 2500 words at that, I might have shown the two characters having their relationship in sequence, perhaps showing them as they together invented the story's science fictional element, then moving on to the accident that befalls one of the characters, and their subsequent figuring out of a new use for their invention. That would have taken more wordcount, for sure, but it might have been better. I might have been more satisfied with it. Alternatively, readers might have been bored by so much setup before the "real" story began. No wonder writers are neurotic.

I ended up throwing character one, who's the first person narrator, and the sf element into the midst of the "real" story, or what I hope was the "real" story. As a consequence, character two was already incapacitated and could have no lines and could not move around himself to show his relationship to character one (no, he's not dead or in a coma!). Hence the flashback approach. It was all I could think of to give some concrete detail to character one's statement that she and character two had a relationship, the only way I could think of to show it. My worry is that even those one or two sentence-long flashbacks will throw the reader out of the story.

Did it work? Time will tell.

I was just reading in matociquala's journal about developing characters, and I tried to think where mine came from, really came from, and I came up with this answer:

( The Answer! )