My Writing Process - Blog Tour

So guys, Mark O’ Brien, a stupidly funny Twitter friend who once made me walk into tree branches while replying to a tweet from him, tagged me in the My Writing Process blog tour.

Now you shall learn all my secrets to…um…not being published as of yet.

*cough*

What am I working on?

Two things. I just finished a sprinted-through, book-in-a-week rewrite of one of the first WIPS I ever considered salvageable. Despite this “salvageable” status, the book defies owning up to its own awesomeness, and has instead lingered in varying states of blah since 2009, when I wrote the rough draft at around age 15.

I love this book—these characters—with my heart and soul, but it’s not high on my priority list in terms of “trying to query” it, because it happens to be a spin on portal fantasy (ex. Narnia) which is notoriously hard to sell.

Working Title: Spider Silk -- Five years after helping dethrone an evil king in another world, David Archer has been thought crazy for so long he’s starting to believe it, until his former worst enemy—a young assassin with spider-powers—shows up and drags him back to the Toppling Kingdom where everything has fallen apart in his absence, or maybe because of his prior actions. Former friends are now enemies, former enemies are now allies, and nothing is as simple as it seemed when he was younger.

With the newest (better, but merh) draft of that out of the way, my focus is returning to earnest revision of the WIP I finished last week with 30k words in three days.

Working Title: Shameless, but oft-referred to on Twitter as #fairyprisonbook

Warden Smith III is trapped by his family legacy, as caged in as any of the blood-thirsty fae that inhabit the abandoned prison they’ve guarded for three generations. No one else can do the work because almost no one else can see the fae. Those that can have never felt guilt: they’re either naïve enough to believe themselves innocent or psychopathic enough not to care about the consequences of their actions. Being a warden has meant training himself out of a conscience his entire life, giving up a future as anything but a warden, until one day Warden is faced with a screw-up he can’t talk himself out of. He loses his Sight, along with the faerie who takes over Warden’s temporary coworker and escapes. Searching blindly, alone and feeling guilty for the first time ever, Warden’s only chance at preserving his future is to right his wrong and regain his Sight, or figure out what a new future would look like.

(If you have any thoughts on these rough plot blurbs, feel free to share!)

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

SPIDER SILK differs from other portal fantasies in that it kind of turns that whole trope on its head, exploring potential repercussions of some of the childhood stories we know and love…Were the heroic kids who stumbled into other worlds and saved them actually necessary, and what if they made things worse? I love portal fantasies, so it was interesting to come up with a fresh take on them and follow that kind of plot set-up farther than usual in-story events take them. I’d like to think my spin on portal fantasy is unique enough to make an agent take a second look, but…*shrug*

I was telling my sister about SHAMELESS last night, and she at least said that the moral/ethics questions I was exploring with it sounded interesting, not like things she’d seen in other novels. So that, I suppose. I’ve worked on it kind of focusing less on what characters have done, and more on how they feel about what they’ve done. Two extremes show up: feeling guilty about nothing or everything, and it’s a topic I got really interested in analyzing through the process of writing it.

Just in general, I write mostly YA fantasy (some scifi), but I like to try and come at the story from an angle you wouldn’t expect. I know that might be everyone’s goal at the core of things, but… *flail*

Why do I write what I do?

I went to a Maggie Stiefvater signing last night (Pics and fangirling next week, probably!) and maybe I’m just still on a high from that, but I think I might like to steal something she said in the middle of a longer, hilarious spiel about how she came to write Sinner (I think).

She mentioned that whenever she has a question, she writes a book to answer it.

And I think that sums up a lot of my motivation, too.

Like, for SPIDER SILK, I started thinking about what happened afterward. How could someone go back to a normal life after kind of peaking when they were like 12 and stumbled into something way bigger than themselves. What issues would they never have recognized at the time?

If I’m not intentional about seeking out more answers/information, I have a bad habit of accepting the simplistic, summed up view of things, often the view that I grew up with. My default concepts of right and wrong and life in general are sometimes the things I was told growing up, just because I haven’t sought out any other answers. Maybe those defaults are fine, maybe they’re not, but more and more I’ve been feeling that the looking is important.

Kind of similarly, I can often feel guilty about stupid things that aren’t really my fault and are totally not a big deal. So, for SHAMELESS, I wanted to poke at what it would be like to go through life not feeling any guilt, and what would it take to maintain that.

I also write about things that just plain interest me. Stuff I think is cool, like assassins with spider powers, plant mages with plagues, talking gargoyles and a boy who can speak to pigeons, faeries no one else can see in the middle of a creepy old prison in the middle of nowhere. If an idea comes to me, I can’t help but get excited about it.

Sometimes these ideas spring out of subjects I love in other books I’ve read, thinking, “Okay, how would I do this? How could I make this mine? What if this completely different thing happened?” Sometimes they just pop out of things I come across in my everyday life—which is impressive because my everyday life is in Iowa, where there are not so many cool things to come across in the first place.


How does my writing process work?

Confession time. There are two main reasons why I have not queried yet:

1) I have super high standards for myself.

2) I have written/plotted at least 15 different novels during the course of my life, 8 of them deemed “salvageable,” and loving all eight of those means that none of them have been revised to meet those standards I mentioned above.

I’m really bad about leaping on to the next idea and sprinting through drafts for NaNoWriMo and book-in-a-week and my own satisfaction.

This is fabulous for my overall prolificacy.

And super bad for getting those drafts query-ready.

I’m getting better at throwing myself into revisions, and (I think) my more recent sprinted-through drafts are improving over their predecessors at a base level. That said, I’m still a long way from where I want to be, and lately I’ve been devouring posts on scene structure and craft knowledge, trying to get better in that respect.

As far as drafting goes, my process is this.

1. ·         Writing anywhere, but most often my dorm room or my parents’ living room couch.
2. ·         Headphones in, instrumental music turned up (film scores are my lifeblood). I make lyric-y novel playlists but cannot write to them without getting distracted by the perfect lyrics.
3. ·         Writing fast, often wordsprinting with other people because I take pride in beating their pitiful wordcounts beneath my feet like a monstrous giantess.
4. ·         Using placeholders, as I talked about briefly in this post, which ties in with the reasons I have not queried yet.
5. ·         Making mental notes on what sucks as I’m writing, then manifest those notes in the physical world, to be reviewed before my next rewrite/revision.
6. ·         Juggling all 8+ stories I’m still hoping to revise to awesomeness in my head, all at once, in my subconscious, every day. This is a thing that I am good at. I went through the notes on my cell phone a few days ago and it was kind of humorous seeing detailed plot and character notes about like four novels over the course of three days. My brain cycles through all these stories and fills in perfect plot fixes like three years later. I don’t even know.

As far as more revision goes...

I’ll let you know once I find a system that gets me past the point of drafting.

Next week on the blog tour:

KT Simpson resides in the very-not-made-up city of Kalamazoo, where she studies Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. When she’s not working on papers or working for the university, she can be seen in local coffee shops working on young adult novels. They might be about feral children or they could be about magic schools. KT also enjoys drawing/painting, dancing, baking, and a whole assortment of music, films, and television. She can be found far too often on her Twitter and neglecting her blog.

Julie is a book blogger, freelance editor, college student, and crazy cat lady. And sometimes she's a writer. Her first novel was written when she was nine about twin 14-year-olds coming to America with the Pilgrims. They both got married and had quadruplets because Julie couldn't decide on names. Her writing has probably improved since then. You can find her at http://nyccollegeliving.blogspot.com/ or on twitter @JulieHeartBooks

Mirroring Characters: Suggestions for Stumbling onto Similarities

A thing I like to do—but often don’t realize I’ve done until later drafts—is mirroring characters.

Mirrors, foils, twisted distortions, however you want to refer to the end product. I like putting different characters in similar situations or giving them similar characteristics and seeing the different ways things pan out. I like reflecting themes across from the heroes to villains and everyone in between.

I’m noticing this tendency in my current WIP especially—a book that’s been around since 2009, when I was fifteen. This is my fourth time trying to rewrite it, and I think I’ve made more progress than in past drafts, but more than anything I’ve been noticing the connections between characters. Perhaps in part because I’ve cut at least four characters this time around, so there’s no longer so many to work with.

These examples might be kind of vague, so bear with me and I’ll try to keep them coherent.

• One character serves as a kind of path-not-taken, someone very similar to my MC in childhood. Had MC not undergone a certain inciting incident, he would have turned into someone very like this other character. The fact that they were friends as kids also opens up the potential for this character to question how MC is viewing things, and remind him of how he has changed.

• There’s also a former friend who’s turned into an enemy, and a former enemy who’s turned into an ally. Both have served as the sword arm of awful kings. Both are asking for MC’s trust. Each cannot stand the other, in part because everyone compares the two and they remind each other so much of themselves.

• One character is compared to another through the whole book, then turns out to be more like someone very different.

• Another wants the same things MC wants, but has already followed that path to its conclusion and sat down at the end of it unfulfilled.

• A number of characters have the same hurts in their past, but they’ve handled them different ways. They’ve held different grudges, or let each slight go completely.

• Some characters are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the goal they all share. Others have had enough and are ready to slip back into the margins.

Because of their different personalities, pasts, abilities, interests, and willingness to take risks, I find it really interesting to play off the similarities and bounce around differences until I find something cool to work with.

Sometimes the MC makes these connections, sometimes he doesn’t.

Sometimes they help me tie together a perfect character motivation or internal epiphany, sometimes they don’t.

Either way, I have fun.

Book in a Week: Numero Uno

First, let's attribute this properly. Scroll past this next paragraph if you don't want to see references to awesome people (whose names I have linked to their twitter pages).

To be read in a stereotypically breezy, gossipy teenage girl voice:

So the other day I saw Julie doing this #bookinaweek thing on Twitter, based off of this #bookinaweekend thing that Taryn does because she's freaking awesome, and then Julie was like, "I'm totally going to do this again on June 30th!" and John and Olivia were like, "We'll try it too, the week before!" and I was like, "OMG, I'll try it on the 30th too! But first I've gotta try to make progress on my current WIP..."

Long story short, I wrote like 30k in three days.

Julie and Taryn have posts on these things, respectively, but I figured I would recount my own experience of how I wrote more in three days than I have in the last three months combined, and wound up with a finished novel draft and energy to spare for the next book.

I did not keep as detailed accounts as Julie or Taryn, mostly because I went into it thinking, "Well, I'll just get as far as I can, but I'm not actually officially doing it, officially."

So the night before John and Olivia officially started, I wrote about 6,000 words that I didn't really count as part of the experiment. That alone was a great writing day for me, because my motivation had really been flagging this summer (despite loving the project I was working on and getting really inspired for it while on my study abroad trip to Greece).

Then came Day 1.

And here is what I did:
I sprinted.

Starting at around 1 PM, I started wordsprinting with John and Olivia (and sometimes KT).

For the most part, they were 20-minute sprints in which I wrote as fast as I possibly could, generally hitting around 800 words each time.

We'd done seven sprints by 4:30, and I'd gotten around 6k.

Started up another five(?) sprints around 9 PM, stacked up another 5k in the next hour or two.

So in total, I would have ended the first official day with 11k picked up from twelve wordsprints.

But then I powered through on my own for a while because I was in the middle of a huge scene that involved kissing and you do not just stop in the middle of a kissing scene, especially not when the playlist you have on shuffle is hitting the perfect dramatic heavenly children's choir song to complement the momentous kissing...

So I actually ended the first official day with 13,117 words.

And no, I have no freaking idea how that happened.

They were all written somewhere between 1 PM and not-long-after-midnight? With lots of breaks. And if I didn't have a mandatory summer bedtime of around midnight (or my parents get cranky), I could've kept going.

Day 2

Again, all the sprinting.

We started around 10:30 AM, but there were bigger breaks in the middle that day. My sister came home, dragged me to the fair, there was food eaten and socializing done and all this other stuff that broke up the sprints. I did not mark down times along with my sprint results.

But after another ten sprints and (I think) a chunk of solo writing time, my total for the day was 10,574.

Three days earlier, my WIP had been around 20k, I think.
Somewhere between 11 PM and midnight, I finished my draft at 51,218 words.

 Book in a week was interesting because I've done NaNoWriMo since I was twelve, and have long touted its usefulness in building determination and persistence etc.

But there have been plenty of years where I started scraping toward the finish line (generally around the dreaded Week 2), and I never had that in this manic sprint toward finishing over half a novel in a couple of days.

My theory is that things flowed so easily because I never had to worry about Week 2. Week 2 wasn't going to be an issue. And things were moving so fast, I was whipping through my outline so quickly, that any time I reached a scene that had the potential to feel kind of blah or slow-moving or boring to write, I could just zip through it and was back to the fun scenes.

All of the big moments I'd planned, which felt so far away when I started plodding through the new draft. They were all right there, within reach, and that kept me excited to keep going.

If I hadn't run out of plot, I could've kept going. At no point did I feel burned out or tired or ready to just stop for a few days. I'm excited to try a full draft starting on June 30, and hopefully that goes as well.

Some notes to keep in mind:

1. I wrote a bare-bones draft of a book. This is probably not an ideal method, but I tend to fall into using placeholders when I'm sprinting, then go back and fill in details later. That's why I'm not freaking out about how my urban(?) fantasy book is only 50,000 words (a relatively short novel, as far as fantasy goes). I know that it's going to gain a whole bunch of length when I go back and revise. I didn't worry too hard about coming up with descriptions on the spot; if I hadn't planned how something looked, I decided to skim over it and add it in later after I'd had time to think. Same with character motions and emotions. There's a lot of telling, and there's a lot of nodding, shrugging, smiling, etc. I wrote enough to remind myself what kind of feeling I was looking for, then moved on. I used place-holders. Again, probably not the greatest method, and I know I'm going to have a lot of work to do later.
2. I wrote half of a book. I was only doing this for two, three days. We'll see how the full version goes.
3. I wrote the latter half of a book. This means I'd already been with the characters for a while.
4. I wrote a rewrite of a book. Not only had I been with the characters recently, I had a whole other draft to use as a basis. I'd plotted everything out before, and I'd been working out how I was going to fix it for quite a while. As I mentioned, I made a lot of notes for this novel while I was on a trip to Greece.

It's not like you have to do a rewrite for this, but I cannot emphasize enough how much it helps to know your plot. Know your book. Know where you're going next. The hardest part I went through was at the very end, where I hadn't plotted out exactly how my final conflict was going to go. The more prep work you do at the start, the smoother this will probably go.

If you are looking to write a well-structured, meticulously-crafted, publishable work in seven days, you will probably be disappointed.

But one thing is for sure. It gets you on such a writing high, and that feeling of powering through is amazing.

I'm doing it again on the 30th. Feel free to join in.

And while I'm at it, is there anything else you'd like me to keep track of while doing this again? Any stats you're desperate for?

No Longer a Teen

So what I forgot to mention last week during my sum-up/update thing is that I had a birthday on June 2. I spent the entire thing (plus eight hours with time zone shenanigans) in airports and planes and still didn't get home that day because the last leg of our flight was canceled... *deep breath* But it was ok because the hotel we stayed in had excellent cake.

It was my 20th birthday.

Which means I'm no longer a teen.

And I know for some people that's one of those weird in-between birthdays where you've been an "adult" for a couple years already and you're still not old enough to drink alcohol... I "beat teen pregnancy," but that might be one of the 20th birthday's only claims to fame.

But for me it's been kind of a big deal.

Because I read YA. I write YA. I plan to be spending a big chunk of my life--personal and professional--taking in and putting out books meant for the teen population which (up until recently) I was a part of.

I am now officially not a teen. Which means
A) I'm pretty firmly older than most of my characters
B) There exist certain growing concerns about the age gap between me and the fictional characters I crush on.
C) My experience as a teen is now officially split off from the experience of current teens, and I am now officially in danger of being out of touch.

Legally, I became an adult at 18. But this birthday feels more like growing up. Friends laughed at me when I mentioned that, that I was "finally an adult" or something, but really. It's official now. It feels bigger.

 And also, I feel slow.

I know 20 is not old, especially when it comes to writing, and authors, and I know I'm farther along in the process than a lot of people my age. But sometimes that's hard to remember when people from all the "young/teen authors" websites and other circles I've frequented through my youth have had so many great things happen for them.

Their success does not detract from any of my own, and I'm so happy and proud of the young writers I know who are making things happen, who are getting it, who are there already...

But I want to catch up. And I'm wondering what I've been doing. Why I haven't gotten myself there yet...

Just after I started writing, I briefly entertained the idea that I was gonna be the youngest author EVER.

And then I heard about some really young authors already published, and that turned into the slightly more realistic, "Well, I'll publish when I'm like 13."

And that turned into, "I'll publish before I'm out of high school."

And I've figured for a while that I probably wouldn't get a book published as a teen, and nothing's changed in terms of my wanting to get published and be an author. I still know this is what I want to do. And I still believe I can make it happen.

But there's still something melancholy about watching the landmark pass. About wanting it all to happen faster.

Ugh. Getting older. How does one do it, and how does one deal with one's [not really] bitter reflections upon their youthful aspirations? Should one simply...read more middle grade? Thoughts?