Writing Process? It all depends... It's so interesting (to me anyway) to think about how we imagine.

 >Hi, Alicia!  I know everyone has their own writing process, but I am intrigued by the idea of starting with character.  Do you think that it might be easier to work on the goal and motivation part as part of the character bio first and then use those aspects of what you learn about your protagonist (and to a lesser degree, the other main characters in a romance) to outline the story incorporating conflicts into turning points?

>>>>>

--

Well, I think one important step for authors is to find their own ideal writing process, and modify it as needed (different books might require different processes). At some point, most stories will benefit from being outlined or structured with acts and turning points based on character development study (including GMC- I do other analysis too). But that doesn't have to be in the beginning of the process.

For me, the sequence I do things is dependent a lot on what I "know" about the story ahead of time. There are books where I've known the characters in some guise for a long time. My last published novel's main characters have been in my head since... well, I was a teen, probably. The first book I wrote (never completed) had a mysterious Russian lady named Natasha (though she was mysterious in a different way than she turned out to be in the last book). The first  book  I  sold had a cynical "best friend" character that was named John (later changed to Tom when I rewrote the book decades later-- complicated reasons to change his name). Now these two actual characters never "knew" each other in the jungle-story-world of my imagination, but I knew them. She was always Russian but spoke English with very little accent, and she was always sort of shadowy, always named Natasha, and usually married to a sea captain. None of those stories ever got written, but I kept trying her out as the star of a story, then usually never writing or finishing that story, or replacing her with some other heroine. "Tom" actually showed up in his original form in several books, always as Tom and always the cynical friend of the hero. 

Anyway, I -knew- these characters. It's weird to say that because I kept changing aspects of them that might seem central, like their backstory and (with "Tom" -- who became Matt, see :) his profession and social status. But in my head, Natasha was always remote and yet vulnerable, and was a widow  of a man who loved her but never knew her. In my head, "Tom/Matt" was always a cynic, a "scientific" man (this was always set in the Regency time, so "science" meant being rational and curious) who withal that was kind of a super-loving person who was cynical partly to protect himself.

I'd never tried to bring them together before in my head (because, see, Tom/Matt was always the best friend of the hero, never the hero), but then one day I just thought of them talking together, annoying each other, and I thought, "They don't even like each other much."  I knew at that moment they were the only people who really understood each other.. 

So then I had to build a story ("Brighton") around these two characters who were -known- to me in their essence, but didn't have the right story yet, or pairing.. I already knew them, so doing exercises about their characters just helped me pinpoint more about what I wanted them to -do, rather than her just drift around my head being remote and vulnerable, and him in my head making sardonic comments.. 

Once I came up with the goal of them solving a mystery together, it all clicked. They could bring their disparate skills (hers intuition, his forensics-- oh, I'd transformed him from an Army  intelligence captain to a navy physician) to this task, and of course, in the meantime, fall in love. It really helped then to think of their motivations to help me plot..... I already KNEW them as characters, see.... so his external motivation became keeping her from getting arrested (she was the prime suspect), and her internal motivation was to hide from her past (the murder victim was a friend from Russia who knew her late father).

After that, well, plotting a mystery is never easy, but the goal/external motivation/internal motivation helped me a lot. I knew that while Natasha also wanted to solve the mystery, she would still be concealing something about this victim/old friend until she trusted Matt, and that should happen right at the "reversal" or midpoint scene.

So.... point is, when I already knew the characters, I used the exercises to help me fit them into the plot (or more, rather, get the external plot to develop them and the romance). 

And as for process, well, long before I got much plot done at all, I'd written several of the "romance" scenes between them, like the first scene where he comes to her aid when she reluctantly asks for it ("They don't even really like each other”) and the situation-setup where we learn that they were in-laws-- he was married to her sister-in-law, she was married to his brother-in-law (that is, their late spouses were fraternal twins who had died in the same flu epidemic years before), so they could be connected without, you know, really liking each other much.. That was sort of hard to explain, but I knew it would "fit" their emotions towards each other and the reason why she would ask him for help.. 

So I had several "romance" scenes drafted before I even knew this was going to be a mystery! Plotting then from the motivation became the way I made the characters have to open up to each other (they had known each other 13 years without doing that, after all) enough to fall in love.

Okay. So that was my-- and only mine, I'm not suggesting this as a MODEL, goodness knows—starting-with-character process.

There was another book (The Year She Fell), however, which very much started with plot, in fact, a story question-- why would the richest girl in town commit suicide (this happened in the small town when I was growing up--IIRC, she shot herself in her white Cadillac convertible, right in front of our high school, using the pistol her great-grand-daddy had carried as a confedrut gennel -- that's how we pronounced it <G> in the Civil War, or so the story went). That's all I had -- the richest girl in town. Suicide. Why.

So I started having to figure out "motivation," as that's the "why," right? (In the actual event, her motivation was never clear, though I -- who knew her and didn't much like her-- uncharitably assumed it's because someone finally told her "no" and she couldn't live with it. There was a really weird "only in rich families" twist where her parents had legally adopted her best friend when the bff's family was going to move away, so that Little Princess would never have to be sad for a single moment... and I ended up using that in a different way in the book.) 

And from the external motivation-- the why she killed herself-- I worked back to what her goal was (what she was trying to hide-- you can tell "hiding information" is a favorite theme of mine), and then to the internal motivation-- why she had to hide this.. And that was the original storyline, but it was too... depressing, and I started playing around with a mystery plot on top of that goal-motivation-- her sister trying to figure out afterwards why this had happened. (This is actually kind of the story-structure of the Hitchcock film Psycho, though in that it's not suicide, but  the sister is the one who becomes the "detective".)

Well, along the course of ten years or so of noodling around with this basic plot, I ended up changing most everything except that central story question of the richest girl in town and the odd twist of the family adopting the girl's best friend. I'd read a couple Susan Howatch novels where the story is told from several different (often opposed) viewpoints, and I wanted to try that for some reason, and I ended up deciding she had not one but three sisters, and each had some valuable piece of information about the death that they didn't know they had (and was irrelevant in isolation, until joined with the other two). And... well, it wasn't a romance, but I added the viewpoints of two of the sisters' fellas, because I wanted to experiment with first-person male POV.

In the end, what was there of the original idea? The suicide question, and the adoption, and that was about it.. The whole POINT of the book became experimenting with alternating first-person  POVs, and the idea of the suicide just was the vehicle for exploring how limited any one understanding of an event is. And as I drafted each POV section, I realized that the REAL question (and that it should be revealed as the real question after the middle) was not "why did older sis commit suicide," but "why was younger sis ever adopted?" 

In every book I've written, I think, I had a different sequence of processes. But usually I drafted some scenes or passages early to get a feel for the voice of the book. This is always "my" voice, but you know, is this book-voice curious or cagey or optimistic (I contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said!), and sometimes to set down conversations which had arrived complete with inflection and tone of voice in my head that I didn't want to forget.. I'd usually draft scenes, just pieces of them, and completely out of order, scenes that woule arrive in my head or I wanted to work out, until I ran out of the glimmering scenes and passages. Then I'd stop and get to plotting or character work or whatever I could do next.

That is, I'd run through what was easily accessible- what I knew, the scenes I'd come up with those last few moments of semi-consciousness before the alarm clock rang--and draft those, sometimes just in bits, never fully formed. I might jot down the dialogue but not the setting, the emotion but not the description. And then I'd usually have to get more logical and analytical because inspiration had run out.

I'm not advocating this process, lol. But in every book, no matter how good I got at this, there was a point I had to get analytical, usually when I couldn't avoid plotting any longer, or when I had to figure out the why—like why does Natasha ask Matt for help rather than someone else? OR I had to have a good reason why they were stuck together long enough to overcome their conflicts and fall in love. 

Or I might finish a whole draft and know it wasn't really working, that I'd missed the point somewhere, or that it didn't evolve into some strong theme, or there were long stretches of nothing happening, or the romance didn't cohere. And then it was time to outline the whole story and go through and figure out how to fix. Often that would be when I'd start re-inventing -- come up with a better goal that allowed for more external action, make the internal motivation something worth fulfilling in the end, and so on.

Again, this is just me, but this "character-plotting" of goal/motivation/conflict can be really useful over and over again in the process of a novel (and how and when it's useful might vary with every book), not just at the beginning. I use that process to help explore the characters, to build a plot around these characters, to give the characters a reason and way to change, to turn motivation into action, to make the internal manifest externally, to make a more logical sequence of plot events.

So developing the character goal and motivation is very useful, but it's not the only development task, and you don't have to do it the way I suggest.. Mine is a way of tying character development into plot structure--making "deep structure"-- but there are other ways too which might be more effective. This is more about "deepening and intersecting" character and plot than, say, creating a more dramatic and exciting plot.

Well, that doesn't answer your question, probably, but that's what you made me think about! I'd say- different writers, different processes. There's no one way to do this. When does inspiration fail for you, when does the basic raw material you started with run out? Maybe then it's time to start looking at character development. Or maybe you need to do this first to jumpstart your inspiration, and later to fix plot problems or understand the romance.

It all depends. ;)

And I think most writers who have written a lot of books will say, it depends on the book too.. Some writers evolve one type of process, one sequence of tasks, and use that for every book (this is useful when you want to write several books a year- wish I did that). Others meander around a story idea until they find the process which works for this particular story.

So …. well, stay open. Experiment. Be unsparing with yourself and yet generous. Figure out when you need to let creativity flow, and then when you need to step back from the flow and get analytical. Most of all... experiment. There isn't any one way to write this story, or any one way this story can develop. Try things out. You won't lose the essential seed of the story by experimenting with the soil and water and fertilizer combinations. To mix another metaphor!

What about you? Can you think back and track the process of one of your stories?

 Alicia

Get a free plotting article! http://bit.ly/AliciaRasleyStory

Learn more about the Building Bolder Scenes course:https://bit.ly/building-bolder-scenes_blank

Learn more about the Plot Blueprint course-- https://bit.ly/rasley-plotblueprint_blank

--

The five bad habits of good writers

I did a guest blog in the spring for Jane Perrine on the Five Bad Habits of Good Writers, and thought I'd move it over. I start with the person/writer and end up with the businessperson/writer.
 

 1. Bad habit: Thinking that you have only one book in you. Many writers start out because they want to tell one particular story, a story that’s been inside them for a long time. They write that story in a white heat, and then… then what? Are they done being a writer now that they’ve written that one book? No. If you have one book in you, you have more than one book in you. In fact, now that you’ve gotten this story down, the story that has preoccupied you for years, you might find that you’re liberated now to invent new stories. And you’ve learned something about your writing process and about the structure of a story that will help you when sheer inspiration fails. (And besides, you can always write a sequel to Book #1. Did the Harry Potter series end after his first year at Hogwarts?)

2. Bad habit: Writing 3-chapter proposals, one after another. It’s tempting, yes, to just move on if an idea doesn’t work or a proposal doesn’t sell. But don’t get into that habit. Serial quitting wreaks havoc with our writing process, makes us feel like impostors instead of real novelists, and leaves us empty-handed when an editor says, “What else you got?” And now, when we can sell our books directly to the reader with indie publishing, it’s great to have a few uncontracted novels to put up for sale. But no one is going to buy a dozen partial books. Try to push past that third chapter and finish at least a sketchy first draft. You’ll probably find you fall in love with the book!

3. Bad habit: Deciding you’re good enough and have nothing to learn. You’re never good enough. You’ve always got more to learn. We all do. The moment you decide you know enough and write well enough, that’s the moment you stop being a writer and become a hack. You don’t want to be a hack, do you? Of course not. So with every book you start, determine what you want to learn, whether it’s how to design an action scene or how to hide clues or how to embed more metaphor into your verbs. And then apply yourself to that lesson. Do research. Experiment. Find models in authors who do that aspect well. This will make the writing process more interesting, and will also help individualize each book. And finally, this will help you stay current with what’s going on in fiction, as you’ll be open to new ideas and new techniques.

4. Bad habit: Making business relationships personal. Your agent is not your mother, and your editor is not your friend. You might think they’re terrific. They might think you’re terrific. But let me brutally frank here. You have to be emotionally able to fire the agent if she stops working for you. You must be ready to stay with a publisher that has fired your favorite editor.  Loyalty is a virtue, but temper that with discretion. Too many writers have thrown their lot in with another industry professional who doesn’t in fact have the writer’s best interest front and center. (Nothing wrong with that—everyone must deal with her own career.) This is not a big problem unless you make the relationship personal, so personal loyalty is expected on one or both sides. I’m speaking as someone who made this error and couldn’t fire an agent who just about tanked my career. (We were best buds! How could I fire her when she was losing all those other clients? Was I going to be a traitor too?) Business relationships are about business. Save your love for your family and friends.

5. Bad habit: Forgetting that this is all about the reader. When we start to write, quite naturally it’s all about us. We have a story to tell or a problem to work out.  Then when we start to submit, it’s going to be all about the agent and editor—we want to craft the query letter and the book to capture the attention of the elite industry professional who can make our publishing dreams come true. That’s all perfectly normal. The danger comes when we forget that the whole purpose of writing novels is to connect with readers. When we do what touches or moves or surprises our reader, we will be fulfilling our mission. This means we have to stop being defensive. If our work doesn’t entertain the readers, we should find out why. Often we can make that connection without losing what we personally love about our story—but we can’t get to that point if we decide the reader doesn’t matter. The reader matters most of all. That’s why we write.

The publishing world is changing radically, and we have to change with it. So next year, I might have five different bad habits to report!

So— can you add to this list? What are bad writing habits you notice in yourself and other writers?

Alicia

What reward for writing?

-->

Many of us assume, wrongly, that all writers pretty much have the same desires, that we define "success" in the same way, and that it's all about sales figures and royalties.

So I've been thinking about what writers want out of their writing and their writing careers. We're coming off three decades of growing sales (until recently) of popular fiction at least, and most of us know at least one writer who hit it big and made a million or more during this time, and maybe a few others who have made pretty good livings just on their royalties and advances.

Okay, I'll stipulate that at least the latter, if not the former, has probably become less likely than in 2002. That is, it's not going to be all that common for novelists to make good upper-middle-class income solely from their novel-writing. (Maybe it wasn't COMMON before, but it was certainly achievable in certain genres.) There will always probably be the blockbuster novel and the novelist who gets and stays on the bestseller list and gets advances of more than a million (that was always pretty rare, and probably won't get that much rarer), but $80K writing income a year-- fewer and fewer of those, I fear.

Anyway, this will of course make literary writers grin, because they (most of them) probably never expected to make a living just on their writing income. But I think maybe we pop fic writers might need to think about the motivation for writing now too.

What do you want out of writing?

Usually when I ask that, writers will say that they want to be on the NYTimes bestseller list, or they want to make enough in writing income that they can quit their jobs. But these were always pretty unlikely for most writers, and with industry compression and consolidation, the likelihood might be somewhat less. The consensus I keep hearing is: "More writers published, but less money for each." Kind of good news/bad news.

I'm reluctant to say this, because I grew up in a union family and tend to suspect that whatever justification comes from less money is justification for exploitation, etc. I mean, really, we OUGHT to earn good money if we write good stories! But so far the universe has never rewarded my "ought" with "t'will be," so no matter what I want for all of us (weeks on the bestseller list, long lines at mall booksignings and our agent begging to go down to Cinnabon and buy us a magical no-calorie pecan sticky bun, and advance checks with a lot of digits before the decimal), reality bites. So leaving open the possibility of fame and riches and Jude Law optioning our latest opus (co-starring Robert Downey, Jr.), let's talk about what we really want.

Let's say you accepted -- like poets and lit fic writers do early-- that Jude and Robert and fame et al are not likely. What would constitute writing success to you? What would make you content and/or happy with your writing career?

Also-- what do you want? What do you hope to get out of writing your stories? And what does your "want" mean about what you value?


To be more practical, publication can help you get a job. For someone like me who teaches, I hate that aphorism, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Published books mean, so there! I can do both! The value is reputation, but actually credentialism. I can brandish the booklist as a credential of worth along with my teaching experience.

Publications do open doors, especially in academia. In fact, a couple well-published, well-reviewed books will generally substitute for a graduate degree or a PhD if you want to apply to be a "visiting writer". And usually they don't care much how much the book sold, as long as the publisher is "respectable," because so few academic books sell more than a few thousand copies. So "a publication or two that helps me get an academic job," that's another reason we might persist at this even if we don't bring in the big bucks.

What about more personal reasons? For example, a songwriter I know said once that she would be happy if she wrote a song that years later, people sang along with (knowing the words) when they heard it on the radio. That sounds to me like a good "want" and a good definition of success. What's the value that makes that "success" to her? Reaching listeners, having an effect? Mattering years later?

Another writer told me recently, "I want fan mail, not necessarily thousands of letters, but personal letters telling me what the story mean to them." That's about having an effect (and learning about it, of course). Many of us have a bit of the diva in us, and a publication does set you apart (no one writes fan mail to their accountant!) in a significant and flattering way. And there's nothing wrong with that, is there?

What are some other good reasons to go on writing and trying to get published, if fame and fortune on the JK Rowling scale are probably not in the future? Well, proving ourselves, yes. Really, writing a novel and getting it published is such a rare achievement that most people, even siblings and parents, tend to be impressed and might even say, "I guess you're not so worthless after all." :) (The downside—they tend to have an exaggerated estimate of the size of your advance and might expect you to pick up the check for family dinners.) A lot of writers have long-suffering "patrons of the art" (you might call them "spouses") who decide their sacrifices were worthwhile after all.

And take it from one who knows—when a boss says scathingly, "So how's that book of yours coming?" there's nothing like being able to retort blandly, "Pretty well. (Publisher) is releasing it in February."

So a publication can create credentials, some measure of fame, and vindication too. What are your motivations? What is necessary to achieve them? And here's the toughie— is what you're working on and the way you're working likely to achieve that? Let's face it, what we might write if we say our dream is "NY Times list" might be different than if we decide our dream is actually "getting a creative writing teaching position in academia" or "exploring this elaborate world that I have been mentally building for decades."

Barbara Sher suggests that when we think of as-yet-unrealized dreams, we analyze what really fires us up about that dream, and work on that possibly more easily realized aspect. (For example, she mentioned that someone who still dreams of Hollywood at 45 and figures that she'll never attain it might realize that she really wants to act, to be part of a group of actors, and then fulfill what she really desires by joining a local theater group.)

So if your motivation is, "Making a difference in (some social issue) with my writing," you might be frustrated if you keep trying to write trendy thrillers. And if your motivation is "making Grandma Chastity proud of me," you might rethink your career path in erotic romance (then again, you never know… Granny might have a hot fantasy life!).

The best motivation for writing was given to me by Monica Pradhan, who realized that she was likely the only published romance novelist in her age group who was an American woman born of parents born in India. She said that even after a dozen published novels, she realized there was one novel only she could write because of her unique background and set of talents. And so she wrote a novel about modern American women who consider that old-fashioned solution to romantic conflict, the arranged marriage.

Ever since, I've thought of that—what's the book only I could write? That's actually become something of a dream for me. (The POV book, don't laugh, was my first attempt at realizing that dream. What, you thought I wrote it for the fame and fortune? You think Jude Law might star in the screen adaptation?)

I'm not saying that writers shouldn't get paid and well, or that we should all give up dreams of financial security through our books. But I do wonder if in aiming for that we might not be making it harder to achieve something else. What do you all think?

If you knew fame and fortune weren't forthcoming, would you still write? (Pace Dr. Johnson, who said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.")

What would you say is your reason for writing ("except for money")?

What specific reward do you seek? What attainment or achievement makes or will make you feel that you're a success as a writer?

Alicia