Trying New Things

It's important for a writer to try new things. This means experiences--I never could have set my most recent work in Malta, for example, if I'd never been there (I hadn't known it existed before the trip!). But this also means writing new things, too.

I'll admit, for a girl in a creative profession, I've got a hard time coming out of my writing box. You know old people who talk about walking uphill (both ways) through the snow to get to the one-room school house and they actually seem to miss those good ol' days? Yeah, I'm like that. YA fantasy is the only genre worth my time. I shudder at the thought of writing in first person POV. I get physically sick thinking about extensive outlining. Don't even get me started on present tense. I write my third-person fantasies with the smallest amount of outlining in imperfect tense, thankyouverymuch.

But.

This novel I'm about to start, the one just makes my little spawns of mind juice just squee! with delight...yeah, it's not fantasy. It's sci fi. And it's going to be told not only from a first person POV...but from two alternating first person POVs. And it's going to be a murder mystery set in space with a twist out of this world (get it? get it?), and I've begun chapter by chapter outlining. With much detail.

And that rut I hit somewhere about the last third of my last work, that dragging feeling I'd slowly started to develop for the past few months in writing...it's lifting. I'm getting all tingly and excited thinking about this new book...and all those writing styles I've never tried before are adding goosebumps to my goosebumps.

But I'm not touching present tense. Let's not get too wild here :)

Getting through writer's block

I've been struggling for awhile now as to where to take my story. I had the beginning done (about 80 pages), and I knew the ending, but I had no idea what went in the middle...I had no idea how to get my characters from the beginning to the end.


I tried outlining, but that doesn't work for me. I brainstormed a bit, and came up with a rough guide for the next three or so chapters. Here's a sample:

Chapter 10

-Adventures with wands! --Note: only elements

-Flower storm from cherry trees

-Belle changes self, room, etc. at home

-Discuss with others

That's the extent of my outline for that chapter. As you can see, not very detailed, but the best I could do. Then I just sat down and stared at the screen.

The result? I realized that some of the mythology linked with my world matched mythology and images I'd learned about during my college trip to Malta. OK, then, I took my characters to Malta. By doing that, I discovered more links, more ways to connect the real world and the world I'd invented. It didn't work perfectly. I had to do a lot of image and map searching to make sure my memory matched real life. And I had to change that outline, skimpy as it is, as I went--I had to change the order of things, add in clues about the ending, etc., that made one line of my outline into a whole chapter by itself, or merged two chapter outlines into one chapter. In the end, I've got nearly 10 pages written, and a clear idea of what else I'm going to write. That old inspiration is back; a Maltese carving at Hagar Qim led me to a three page description and connection to my characters that I thought of while driving home from my mother's birthday party.

Lesson learned: when writing gets tough, just keep going. Do whatever it takes. If you've got to make short-hand outline sketches and then ignore them, do it. Whatever it takes, as long as you've got your butt in the chair and your hands in the writing!

Making the Hero's Journey Work for You! (and by you, I mean me)

You'd think that, considering I'm an English teacher who has taught her students about the Hero's Journey and how it applies to Gilgamesh and Theseus for, oh, 8 semesters and roughly 700 students, I'd have thought about how it applies to my own novel.

But noooooo.

Thanks again to PJ Hoover for putting her version on the web. I've been stuck around page 80 in my current WIP for awhile now, so I've decided that I need to do some sort out outlining or something in order to get it going! I've invested too much time, thought, and energy to abandon these characters (and I'm dying to find out what happens to them!).

So I'm trying out the Hero's Journey outline.

I realized that I've gotten all the way through Act I, with a tentative doorway of no return.

ACT ONE:

• Introduce the Hero's World: Check. Regular teenage world with a magical twist.
• Call to adventure: Check. Regular teenage girl wants in on that magic thing.
• Hero may ignore call...but she won't.
• Hero crosses threshold into a dark world: Check. Girl realizes that magic has a price.
  

DOORWAY OF NO RETURN: Lead is thrust into main conflict in a way that keeps him there.

• Maybe. Kinda. My girl becomes determined to participate in magic in order to help someone else, and she's not going to give up and forget about this goal. So, yeah, I've got a doorway. Sorta.
  

So onto the real work.

I've got some vague ideas for Act II, the second doorway, and Act III. But they are very vague. I'm having the most trouble, I think, with Act II--various encounters with forces of darkness. I kinda-sorta know that the girls is going to be gradually exposed to darker and darker magic, but how I'll show that...that's where I'm lost.

Even if this hasn't completely solved my writer's block, it has at least helped me identify what I need to focus on. I've got my heroine a good third of the way through the journey--I've just got to figure out how to torture her and raise the stakes a bit more :)

Revising and Outlining

Seems like everyone's doing it now. All of my critique group is in the midst of it, and many of the writers on the blogs I read are doing it, too.

After eating gallons of chicken noodle soup and finally starting to feel better, I've turned my thoughts to revising as well. For my finished ms., The Red Thread, it's just a matter of work. But in my current WIP, I'm stuck at about page 80.

After reading about outlining from hipwritermama, and seeing PJ Hoover's Hero's Journey outline that she used, I decided that the only way for me to become unstuck was to try out an outline.

I've not done an outline since my second ms. I used to outline everything...but then I found out that the thing I like about writing is discovering what happens to my characters...and if I outline, I figure it out without writing it...so then I don't write it.

But I'm hoping that a looser strategy than point A leads to point B leads to point C will enable me to think through this writer's block without making me bored with my own story.

Here's hoping!