Draft 3, here I come!

November 2009, I sat down at my computer thinking "Okay, I can do this: I can write a novel." As the months wore on, I started to question the validity of that statement. Could I really write a full novel? I knew I could start one, I'd done that dozens of times before, but could I actually finish one? Most days, I wasn't so sure, but I kept at it anyway. Then in February 2010, I did it: I finished...the first draft.

Then a few months later, the second. In July, I sent out copies of my manuscript to a few willing participants who had promised me feedback. One of them responded with notes on the entire novel, another on the first twelve chapters, still another on the first chapter (though, to be fair, this was all she had received).

And now, in November of 2010, a little over a year after I first began this project, I am beginning work on the third draft of Zenith.

I once compared rewriting to surgery:

For years I have heard authors toss around this phrase, that all writing is rewriting. I want to tell them they've got it backwards, that all rewriting is writing. You have a fully formed first draft and suddenly, you are starting from scratch. There is no such thing as a minor edit at this point, this is not plastic surgery. This is orthopedics, the breaking and reforming and placement of bones, the bare skeleton of what you wish to create. This is heart surgery and brain surgery, this is fixing the insides of a story so that it can live and breathe and speak on its own someday. You recreate the story, instead of making it look better. You rewrite it. Re-write. Write again. You essentially write a second novel, by fixing up that first draft. 

 I stand by everything I said then and I am happy to say that my patient is out of the woods and stable these days. No more trauma surgery, no more heart or brain surgery. I now get to move on to the less threatening issues. I can focus on the lacerations and bruises, make sure everything is okay and stable. I get to comb my novel for inconsistencies, make sure my characters and my story get across well enough, and destroy all evidence of typos and grammar faux-pas. This is plastic surgery, the surface reformations and beautification stage. I hope it comes out pretty enough, in the end.

The Monsters of Writing

We as writers risk our lives every day, trying to give the public what they want. We are like gladiators, facing terrible monsters and opponents all for the sake of entertaining others. Writers are no strangers to fear and frustration, believe you me.

The Biggest Monsters You Will Be Asked to Face as a Writer

• Research - after coming up with an idea and forming a rough plot, you might be asked to face Research, one of the biggest monsters of the Writing World and one that will pop up again and again. You cannot ever truly defeat this beast, it is immortal. When you face this creature, keep that in mind; you are not fighting to kill, you are fighting to survive. Still, facing Research is essential in your quest as a writer and each time you face it, you will grow stronger, gain knowledge, and be able to face your novel with more courage and confidence than ever before.
• Doubt - This is another creature that will spring up time and time again, generally when you least want it to. It's always hard to beat and afterwards your confidence is shaken and you constantly question your ability to complete your Journey. Doubt generally coincides with other challenges, such as The Wall and The Unmarked Path. Sometimes the best defense against this monster is to simply ignore it. Embrace that 5-year-old mentality that if you don't acknowledge its existence, it can't truly exist.
• Revision - This beast often attacks at the same time as Doubt on the second leg of your Journey to Publication. You've acquired your basic skills and materials and you've finished the first draft of your Novel, but now it's time to revise. Don't be afraid to really fight this monster, cutting out words, sentences, chapters, and limbs. Don't hold back, because if you do, you'll only have to face it again later. Each time you face this dreadful foe, it's harder and harder to put up a fight, as it wears you down. You thought you were done and Revision rears its ugly head to remind you that you aren't. It's like starting over, but it is survivable.
• Querying - This is the true test of your strength and skills. Your Novel has to be the Best in Show, able to blow away any obstacles and impress the judges like no one ever has before. This is not quite the final battle in your Journey, but it is the turning point. Every foe you've faced up until now has been in preparation for this terrifying beast. Luckily, there are many guides that can help you train for such a match scattered about on the internet. I urge you to study them before you charge into battle.

That said, know that I am facing the first Monster on this list with my next project, as I've defeated the somewhat lesser foe of Lack of Inspiration, a close cousin to Doubt.

If you have any other Monsters you feel should be included in this Survival Guide, or any additional notes on how to defeat the ones above, please leave them in the comments.

On Querying and the Loss of Inspiration

Hello all, thanks for being patient with my lack of posts as of late. It feels like my desire to write and be inspired has been on pause for a few weeks, no doubt due to a mass of real-life drama, but I'm doing my best to get back to the thing I love most. Unable to truly get back into it full force, I opted for editing one of my short stories, The Damsel, which I speak about here.

When I write and edit my works, I usually know which ones I'm going to query and which ones are mostly just for practice. I get a feeling that Hey, this is really something special, I could maybe do something with this. Or, it's good enough that I'll let my friends read it, so I should try it out with agents, too! And then sometimes I get a feeling that okay, yeah, this is not going anywhere--but I do try to finish those pieces anyway.

With Zenith, the feeling was most definitely I Could Query This, and I will, once I go through one more round of edits (and hopefully hear back from more than one of my beta-readers). With The Damsel, the feeling was more I Need to Share This. I've gotten quite a bit of good feedback on that one, so I hope that no one is lying to me, as this is what I generally assume of people reading my works.

So, yeah, I'm querying The Damsel today. I did some research (mostly utilizing AgentQuery) and will be sending off the queries themselves either tonight or tomorrow. I'm waiting to hear back from two agents that I would love nothing more than to be represented by on whether or not they represent short stories. If not, I'll go directly to my #3 choice whom I am especially excited about also. I'll keep you all updated on the process!

Writing Like Yourself

Today multiple friends linked me to this website which will take a piece of your text and tell you which famous author you write like. About the third time it showed up on my feed, I tried it.

Chapter 8 (my favourite) of Zenith resulted with Dan Brown. So did chapter 1 and chapter 41. Apparently Zenith is written in a style scarily similar to Dan Brown.
My current WIP (which desperately needs a better working title) is similar to Margaret Atwood. Now, I can see the cynical angle here, but I had no idea Margaret Atwood was that sarcastic.
The first chapter of The Conqueror gave me, surprise surprise, Dan Brown. I don't know what it is with me and that guy, I guess I'll have to read one of his books to find out. Strangely enough, though, the second chapter resulted in Douglas Adams. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Don't get me wrong, I'm flattered, just terribly confused.

Here's the thing, though, you will never write like Chuck Palahniuk or Stephen King. I will never write like Dan Brown no matter how many times I receive that result. Every author is uniquely different than all the others, even if they use similar vocabularies or sentence structures, even if they write on the same topics. You could write the same scenes with the same characters and still you will never write the exact same book as anyone else. That's a good thing! Work it! Find your personal authorial voice and expand upon it! Go forth and create something new, not just a copy of something already available.

But hey, if you do have the ability to copy someone else's style, look into ghost writing, you could make a killing.

Real Life: Fears

This blog is for my writing, but it's also my personal blog for anything to do with my writing. This doesn't apply to most writers, but for me, my writing has a lot to do with my health. I have a lot of medical issues and sometimes those affect my ability to write. I can't concentrate, or I can't give up the time, or I can't type. Today I have trouble typing, but I'm here, pushing through because I feel like I need to.

Something personal about me: this is one of my biggest fears. I am not afraid of heights or flying or even dying. I have two fears: needles and not being able to write. It scares the hell out of me, so I'll push through, because I'm stubborn like that. It's a very real fear for me.

Found; General; Inspiration

Sorry I haven't been around much, I've been positively swamped with homework as of late. I spent the entire day on Friday reading and researching and reporting, it was torture, but I got my assignment in with 2 minutes to spare. Saturday & Sunday I was out of town, away from my computer.

Last night and today? Writing and being inspired. That's part of it, this writer thing, being inspired. It's a huge part, about 50/50. You cannot write without inspiration first, it just won't work, at least not well. How do you find inspiration? You just keep your eyes open, it's all around you. My first suggestion is to read, similar to what you want to write. Books are a writer's greatest tool. Find out what makes another book great, why you love it, then use that to your advantage. And watch movies, listen to music, look at art. Whatever worked for them, can work for you.

Find things that inspire you: things you see, things you hear, things you feel. For me my tumblr dashboard is a huge inspiration, some of the time, at least. Yesterday when I was lacking inspiration and direction for The Conqueror, I turned to tumblr. I had 79 pages of backlog from one day's worth of being gone (kind of insane, a new record!) and as I went through, looking at everything, I "liked" the posts that inspired me and decided to write a story about them. Find a way to connect these very different pictures and quotes and ideas, so that's what I'm doing. 79 pages of backlog later and I have a love story about an introverted photographer and a fun-loving indie rock boy and the summer they spent together, meeting up in a forest. It's this girl with this guy, a little bit of this, and a whole lot of these, in a place I once visited that mystified me. That's the thing about inspiration: it can only take you so far, the rest lies inside of you. Do something with it.

The Conqueror; Organization is a Battle

Total word count: 13,729
Words written today: 0

Yup, zero words written today, I know. Same for yesterday. My reason for yesterday is that I had a paper & a presentation to prepare for my Colonial Literature class and I had gotten home late from work/school. My excuse today is that I spent my hour off writing this post on the marketing behind the new Twilight book instead of working on my novel. Why? Because I'm not sure where to go next.

Which brings me to my topic: organization. Not all of the work that goes into a novel is writing. Sometimes you need to stop, take a moment, and figure things out. I have so many ideas bouncing around in my head, build up from the last 6 years since I dreamed up this novel, and I don't know where half of them go anymore. There is a huge hole in my narrative, some of these plots no longer exist, some need to be taken out to spare the world. So tonight instead of writing I went down into The Archives, which is the name I have for this semi-organized mess in my room where I keep all my writing things. I have finished copies, rough drafts, edits, & random loose scraps with notes that make no sense anymore. Tonight I went through, found everything that related to The Conqueror and refreshed my memory on everything. Also in my room I have a bulletin board with all the major plot points from the original idea still up there from 4ish years ago. It makes me wince to look at some times. I took all the scraps & I typed them up into two doc files on my laptop, for characters & misc ideas. I also have a paper from earlier tonight covered in questions about where am I going or notes on what things I definitely need to work towards.

I haven't figured out much, but it's a work in process. Hopefully this weekend and next Monday (no school!) I can do more work on these. For right now, I need to work on the outline for my research project in Ethics, and tomorrow is devoted to a literary review of all my sources for Comm Theory. College is not all parties, my friends.


EDIT: I finished my outline fairly quickly & had about 12 minutes before bedtime. I still don't know what's going to happen next (it's less a matter of what will be in the chapter as which chapter is next, narrator-wise) but I didn't want to spend a lot of time figuring it out, so I put in a blank chapter and moved past it. This was a chapter I had almost forgotten until I went through The Archives, but one I think needs to say. So I wrote 224 words before midnight & before I got word blocked.

Help: What is the word for when someone goes "aargh?" Like out of frustration? There is a word for it. It is a word I can't think of. Please to be helping me with it.

Total word count: 13,953
Words written today: 224