Fiction Writers’ Seed Swap

Anyone up for a fiction idea exchange?

Sometimes I come up with an idea for a story, but it doesn’t quite resonate with me, or doesn’t feel developed enough to work on right away. When this happens, I write the idea down as a possible seed for future stories, because maybe it’ll work for me better when I’m in a different mood, or maybe it will be a subplot for a novel I write in the future.

I was thinking  about all the other fiction writers out there who must have the same sort of stash of story ideas, or ‘seeds,’ that I do.  A list of story ideas that they may or may not ever use.  What if there was a place that we could all share them? This would not only give life to old ideas we may never use, but it would give us a place to go when we  just can’t figure out what to write next.

What if someone steals my idea and gets published? you ask.  I am not talking about sharing  entire plot outlines or first drafts.  I am thinking much smaller.

If I tell you about my idea to write a dystopian story about a society where global warming and fuel shortages have gotten so bad that employers are required by law to allow full-time employees to live in offices with their families (which are air conditioned in summer and heated in winter), and then you put that in your story, with an actual plot, you did all the work. I will take a thanks in the acknowledgements if you remember though .

One small idea like this could add to different writer’s stories in such different ways. For one writer it is just background. For another it becomes a major challenge for a character who needs to find a full time job because it’s been a brutal winter and one of their children is near dying from the brutal cold.

So, I propose a fiction writer’s seed swap right here and now.  I will share a few idea seeds for fiction stories, and please, anyone who wants to share their unused (or even slightly used) seeds, feel free to do so in the comments below, or blog about them and share a link to your blog below. Share a situational idea (what if…), a setting idea, a magical power, a character. Whatever you want to share (but lets keep it under 200 words per seed please).

Please Note: This blog entry and its comments are a copyright free zone.  If you put it out here to share, it must be your own, and it is to be shared free of charge.

My Seeds

Seed 1:  What if you were held up at gun point? You gave the man your purse (or wallet), and he ran off. But he was never caught.

What if a month later your home was destroyed in a tornado/hurricane/earthquake/tsunami and you met the man who’d pointed a gun at you, while waiting in line for assistance at a shelter? He is carrying his injured daughter in his arms, and has another child hanging on his coattail. You hear him tell someone else in the line that their mother didn’t make it.

Seed 2: Judy is a self righteous woman on a tour in Egypt. Given free time to wander around the ruins of a temple in a remote location she loses track of time and the tour bus leaves without her. She doesn’t speak Arabic, nor does she understand (or care about) the culture. You might say she is so uneducated about Egyptian culture that it scares her. What should Judy do?

The what?

The other night I went to my writing group where we critiqued one of our wonderfully awesome members novels. Some of the more experienced members started talking about the characters’ arcs.

The characters’ what?

Rather than spend valuable critique time asking what exactly was meant by an “arc” (or, rather than admitting I didn’t fully understand the concept), I decided I would research it later.

So now I’ve done some research and want to share the goodies of my quest for knowledge with you.

It turns out that the arc they referred to was not a boat (ark) with two of every type of animal.  Nor was it the organization I donated my last ailing car to. The arc they referred to is a delightful aspect of characters. One that, once you understand it, will really enhance the tension and excitement in a story.

A character’s arc is their internal struggle and growth during the story. The character starts out with a flaw, a weakness, anger at a past event, or anything which makes it hard for them to accomplish their goal. Throughout the story this trait is hacked away at or worked on by that character, until, at the end, the character has (hopefully) overcome their obstacle. Coming out a new and better person. Their journey towards overcoming this obstacle is their arc.

It is a really neat concept, and once I started to understand what it was about, I saw the potential for it to make my characters and my story much stronger.

I thought about the main character in my story. She has an arc already, but recognizing it made me see opportunities in the story to bring out the specific character flaws more, and make her metamorphosis more obvious to the reader.

I also discovered that the MC’s love interest had no real arc at all.  He is really cute, and sweet, but there didn’t seem to be any reason the reader should care or worry what he does. There was nothing that really needed to change about him.

Boring.

The discovery that the male interest in my story is bland was not a real surprise to me. I’ve been having a hard time writing him. He doesn’t pop into my head and talk to me the way the other characters do.

Once I started thinking about what his arc was though, he  started becoming more clear to me. I started thinking about his past and how he had become who he is in the story. I found that the potential for an arc is there, I just hadn’t used it. There is a lot of grief and guilt in his past that I should be using to fuel conflict. He has healing he needs to do, and his healing would make a great complimentary arc to my main characters story.

I am so excited to get back to working on my WIP now that I’ve learned about character arcs.

Of course I just finished a rewrite (the magic rewrite was a success!) and the WIP is doing mandatory shelf time right now (one month off). But once the month is over, I will have a great time going through and adding depth to my characters.

Links for info on Character Arcs:

http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Character.htm

http://www.plottopunctuation.com/blog/show/five-steps-to-building-a-believable-character-arc

Fiction Critiques: How To

I recently blogged about when to join a writers group and got a lot of great responses that pointed me towards joining one sooner rather than later. So I have. I am excited because now I get to work with and learn from other writers. I am also scared though, because I am new to this, and I don’t know all the rules about what is expected of me.

Currently I am reading one of my groups  manuscripts so that we can critique it at the next meeting. As the newest and greenest member of my group, I want to be able to show the other members in my group that I am willing to carry my weight, which means that it is now time to learn how to critique.

I know there is going to be a lot of learning by doing and by paying attention to what the others have to say during the oral critique process, but I decided to do a bit of research to help me understand the process more.

The following are what I found on how to critique and what to look for.

The Basics:

• Critique the writing not the writer
• Find something nice to say (what do you like about the piece?)
• Be specific when critiquing (what is missing, or what would improve a piece?)
• Golden rule: Critique how you would want to be critiqued.

There’s a lot of stuff out there as far as what to look for when critiquing.  Here is a list of a few.

What to look for:

• The hook – is there something in the beginning of the story that draws you in?
• Is there conflict?
• Plot – Is it evident what the plot is?
• Scenes – Do scenes hold interest? Do they further the plot?
• Transitions – Are there smooth transitions from one scene to the next?
• Pace – Does the story move too fast or not fast enough at times?
• When are things confusing and why? – Can you tell who is talking, who is being referred to, where they are?
• Point of view consistency – Does the narration change POV?
• Characters – Are they interesting? Believable? Consistent (No changing eye colors)?
• Are the 5 senses used? Where could they be used more?
• Setting – Can you visualize where they are?
• Is there a good narration vs. dialogue balance? (Does it feel like a script because of too much dialogue?)

Question: What is on your list of things to check for when you critique? What do you wish people would look for when they are critiquing your work?

Where I found stuff:

Schrodinger’s Petshop

But I don’t know how to critique!

How to form or Join Writers, Writing  and Critique Groups

Be a Reader First, Writer Second

Life: The Good Parts Version

As I am new to the process of writing a novel, I am constantly discovering new things to look out for in the editing process. I am currently struggling with a certain trend I’ve noticed. I seem to have written a large part of my novel as a continuous thread of time.

It is not like I bring the narrative into go potty with the MC or anything as crazy as that, but I have a hard time letting time pass in Julia’s (my MC’s) life without me writing about it. This has since gotten better in the revision process, a little. I can see actual scenes now taking shape, but I don’t think I have gone far enough yet. I need to get more comfortable with leaving my MC alone every once in a while.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I read a piece about rewriting by Holly Lisle. In it she said that you should “Think of your novel as “A Life: The Good Parts Version.” It really stuck in my head when I read it, and it has sort of become a mantra for this read through.

So now any part of the story that doesn’t serve to further the plot will be scraped.

Q:  Does Julia eat dinner with her dad most nights?
A:  Yes.

Q:  Does it help the reader to eat dinner with them every night?
A:  Heck no!

So, now I am working on tightening up the scenes and focusing on Julia’s Life: The Good Parts Version.

Contributions to Information Overload

I read several articles/blogs today that talked about/touched on the fact that there is just too much information out there. So I thought, in the spirit of those articles, I would add some more information about too much information.

The first article is not fun to read.  It’s called “Too Much to Know” in Inside Higher Ed (March 16, 2011).  I am pasting the best part of the article here:

Many books seemed useless or deleterious, and finding the useful ones was time-consuming and not always successful. Today we have powerful and helpfully redundant search tools and yet we too often do not find what we’d like to and we also need to remember that we might be missing something, especially since not the Web does not contain all the information that might be valuable to us….

The overload we experience today is unique in a number of ways. The sheer scale of accumulation of digital materials is of course unprecedented…

Blog Skim Query Push from Kay Camden talked about how the saturation on the internet of information is so insane that it is really hard to keep up with what you are interested in and stay on track. (Her blog is worth reading so I won’t quote it here.)

We have way too much information to digest on the internet and in scholarly writing. So as a novel writer, I started wondering if there are too many works of fiction out there as well.  Considering the indie publishers, self publishing, and electronic books, maybe there is just too much out there. And what if it is all just valueless dribble? Or even worse, what if it is all awesome and we just won’t ever be able to read it all?

So maybe I shouldn’t write this novel, there is already so much out there, what makes me think my story is worthy enough to stick out and be read? And why do I keep on adding to the pile?

For me it is hope and the love of my story. There is also a part of me that doesn’t think there can ever be too much information/fiction out there, even if it is a lot to comb through.

Thank goodness for “save as”!

Lets just say I had no idea how messy things would get when I thought I might try to add magic to the already finished manuscript of my young adult fiction novel. Turns out it is not only hard, but may also cause the collapse of my story.  I don’t know what I was thinking.

I just wanted a little magic at first, but then I realized that the story wouldn’t work with magic unless I put a lot more in.  So the magic became this thing that grew and grew into this huge plot devouring monster.  I am only half way through now, but I noticed how many holes were appearing in my story as I made the changes, and decided that I needed to switch from changing the manuscript itself to pulling out an outline and adding in the changes to see where the story would end up.

Turns out the magic actually manages to kill the point/climax of the story.  Good to know. So I am panicking a lot.

I have had to put the book down for a bit because I was worried I would kill it if I continued on with it while in this mindset.  I reminded myself that I did a save as before I started this round of editing, so if the magic doesn’t work, I can go back to the previous version.  But I am also thinking I may be able to continue on with the magic version of my story, once I calm down. I do like the way it writes. I may just need to put it on hold for now and consider my options, and maybe come up with alternative endings that work with magic.

What I have learned: If you want to make changes to a story, try it in an outline before rewriting the whole thing.  If it works, cool, but if it doesn’t, look at how much time you saved by not rewriting your story!

I’ve heard that if you have ideas for plot changes after the first draft is finished, you should save those ideas for your next project. That seems like sound advice to me.

Has anyone else had a story collapse on them like this?  Is rescue possible or likely?

That was painfull!

I had a really traumatic experience over the weekend. I was going through my manuscript, doing a few small changes to plot and characters while I edited, when I came upon this scene that had to be completely scrapped because it no longer made any sense.

As I’ve been learning about revisions and such I have noticed that needing to chuck scenes from a book is normal at this stage.  But what really made scrapping this scene hard for me was that once I extracted it, there was a gaping hole that had to be filled with a brand new as-of-yet-un-thought-of scene. Otherwise the pieces of the story no longer fit together.

WHAAAAAAAAHH! I really did almost cry. I was so sure that, even though I had tons of editing to do, the basic story was sound. I mean I already finished writing it right?

So I spent several hours hiding underneath a blanket wondering if I had ruined my book, and how I could possibly come up with a new scene that could fit my story back together.

What I’ve learned:

1. There are no small plot changes.
2. After a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked fro-yo, it is possible to devise a scene that will make a lame story good again.

Pantsering

I have always known I was a pantser. When I started writing my novel I knew who the main characters were (sort of), what the basic plot was and the setting. But I still had no idea how I wanted it to end until I was at the end writing it. Rather than making a neat outline and creating the characters beforehand, I just wrote by the seat of my pants and let the story take me wherever it wanted to go. It is a fun way to write a story, but now that I am working on editing my book, I am not sure if it was the right way to go.

As I have been reading through my book I am finding a lot of editing needs to be done.  I am also not sure that the way it flows–as a stream of consciousness–is really the best way for a novel to be organized.  I am concerned that the lack of structure will be so loosey goosey that my readers will lose patience with me.

So what now?  I am considering going back and doing an outline. Not a full blown 80 page outline or anything.  Just something that will run a few pages and help me visualize how to organize this beast of a story.  I think that will at least help me figure out where the chapters go, what is really necessary and what can be moved/removed, and what is missing.

I guess I am wondering if there are any other pantsers (or non-pantsers) out there who have run into this problem?  How have you dealt with organizing the story?  Did the first draft seem like it was a bit out of control, or hard to edit?

Vampire Cheerleaders

[Not that there's anything wrong with that!]

I know there’s been a huge trend in young adult fiction for vampire stories. I’m not sure if it started before or after Twilight got so popular (but I can guess).

I’ve always liked vampire stories.  When I was in junior high I had a crush on Kiefer Sutherland in the Lost Boys. I’ve already read the Twilight saga, and I loved it.  So I figured I’d try some  of the other vampire novels that are out there.

The first book I picked up was Marked, in the House of Night series, by the mother and daughter team of Casts. The first book in this series was really great. The second was okay, and  I  just finished with book three which was better than the second one. Though I still may pick up the fourth book, this series is starting to lose my interest.

It’s getting hard for me to empathize with the main character. How can someone who has the three hottest guys in the world after her and has come into all of these fantastic powers really be all that tragic? Not to mention that before the horror of being marked she was dating the quarterback of her high school’s football team. As a Sophomore. This girls life is just not that hard.

So while I take a break from the House of Night series I picked up Evermore by Alyson Noel. Maybe not the best choice for me right now.  But how could I have known that the main character in Evermore was going to be a former head cheerleader? There should have been something about that on the back cover.

So I guess that what I want to know is if the two stories I started with are typical of this vampire trend?  Is the new vampire really a former cheerleader or popular girl in school?

I guess I’d always thought that the vampire should be the hero for the tragic social outcast and not the sporty popular chick. As far as stories go, I’m still getting into these books.  I just find myself having a harder time empathizing with this  type of main character.

The novel I am writing now is not about vampires, but I still don’t think I could have written the main character as a cheerleader.  I am not saying that there is anything wrong with being a cheerleader, I just think of that type of character as more of a backboard for more interesting characters.

Whatchamacallit, a novel…

I was looking through a few of the other novel writer blogs today when something suddenly struck me: I don’t have a title for my novel!

Don’t get me wrong, I did already know that I don’t have a title for my book yet, but I started noticing that all of the other blogs I’ve read on novel writing refer to their work in progress by name.

So now I feel like I need to get cooking on one for my WIP.  The problem is that all the names I have come up with sound like I have stolen them from other writers, and the books they sound like don’t have a thing to do with the storyline of my book.

Here is just a sample of the sad possibilities that have crossed my mind:

Brotherhood of the Phoenix (sounds like a Harry Potter book right? None of my characters are going to magic school though.)

The Guy with the Phoenix Tattoo (Is he dating the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? I don’t have any foreign detectives in my novel either.)

I’d like to think that my story is more original than the titles that keep coming to mind.  I think that’s one of the reasons I don’t have a name for my novel yet.  I just haven’t found the right one.

Maybe when I have a more polished version it will be easier for me to choose a name.  I guess for now I will just keep on calling it my book.