Writing Yourself into a Corner

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Arizela

Over the last few years of struggling to get a coherent plot out of Hunters as someone who doesn’t do anything even remotely resembling plotting ahead or planning, I have painted myself into a number of story corners. From what I’ve seen, there are basically three options when this happens.

These suggestions are in reverse order, for a good reason. A lot of times, writers seem to think that the easiest solution is the best one, and I’ve found that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the most difficult solution is the one that really packs a story punch for your readers. Whatever you decide to do to get out of your story corner, remember that the point is to build a great story.

  1. Before you start scrambling to get out of the corner, make sure you’re in one – are you really stuck here? Really, really? If having a supporting character show up or a mysterious telephone call or some other distraction technique or Jedi mind trick will solve the jam, it’s not really a corner and you can play with the options and move on, no problemo.
  2. Give up – as painful as this might sound, it’s actually the easiest of the options once you’ve decided you really are stuck. How many novels or short stories do you have sitting around on your hard drive unfinished? My personal count is up in the double digits. Sometimes, this is also a valid option. If a story just isn’t holding water, finding a way to patch all the leaks might not be worth the trouble. I try to let my passion for the story guide me here. If the story has captured my heart and imagination, it’s worth fighting for.
  3. Redesign the room – you are the author. No matter what corner you find yourself in, there’s always the option of tearing down the walls. Backtracking by deleting words or subplots or even characters is a valid method of fixing a rough spot in the story. I’d advise caution here, though, because unless you’ve exhausted the other options, this one can lead to years spent reconstructing that same corner with different details. Even for those folks who cringe at throwing out a word and whose delete and backspace keys have a layer of perma-dust, this method is often easier and quicker than #4.
  4. Look for a mouse hole – No, really, I mean it. When I find myself in a story corner, the first thing I try to do is find an unlikely exit. Even the tiniest crack in the plaster can give your protagonist room to wiggle – a way of leveling the playing field just enough to get out of the trap. Think outside the confines of a normal room.  What untapped talents do your protagonist characters have? What props are available in the scene that they can use to get a (momentary) advantage? What mistakes has the villain made that the clever hero can exploit to his own advantage?

One very important caveat though, whatever solution you come up with, keep the goal in mind – you want your protagonist characters to be active, to think their own way out of jams. Having the villain pull a too-stupid-to-live moment or having the rescue come from a god or the Justice League, from outside the structure of the protagonist “team” of characters, will leave most readers feeling cheated.

A situation that appears hopeless will have readers on the edge of their seats as they race through the passage, trying to figure out how the protagonist will get out of this one. Thinking outside the box will give them something worth the excitement.

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My Google-rific Day

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Arizela

So today I got the progress meter working (*waves to progress charts link above post*) and I spent some time reading about the plagerism of blog articles.  In particular, the hell hath no fury like the internet out for blood response to Cooks Source editor Judith Griggs, who stole, edited, and reprinted without permission the words of blogger Monica Gaudio. If you haven’t seen it yet, the Smart Bitches website sums it up pretty well.

This really strikes a note for me. I first got turned onto the issue by my friend from Forward Motion, Suelder because she knew I had faced a similar issue some months back. A website named Mahalo.com ripped a piece from my Muse Medicine blog about rib injuries – information intended to help writers of fiction get things right from a medical perspective – and posted it as treatment and diagnostic advice for their readers.

This isn’t the first time that something like this happened. My Muse Medicine articles on breastfeeding and the plague have been swiped before as well. I found out because having been alerted to one plagerism, I started to Google strings of text from pages that get a lot of traffic on my site once or twice a year. It is not vanity, but self-preservation that prompts me to do this. Both my blog and my Muse Medicine site offer clear, concise copyright notices, and further, my Muse Medicine site specifically states that information on the site is not to be used as treatment or diagnosis advice. This is important, as I’m not a physician and am not qualified or licensed to provide treatment advice to real people.

Despite what “editors” like Judith Griggs and sites like Mahalo.com think, the internet is not a wordage free-for-all, where anyone can steal the words of others and make a profit from them. My cease and desist letters have never been responded to in such spectacular fashion, but they have proven to be effective (so far). In Ms. Gaudio’s case, the internet struck back in her defense.

(I would just like to point out that Neil Gaiman didn’t retweet my experience with asshats who steal words from the internet *pout* 😉 )

On a related note, I did do my google-string search today and discovered that while my words are safe this time, my internet handle is apparently not. There were birth announcements for a couple of girls named “Arizela” up on the net this period. Prior to this period, the only thing google said I shared the name with was a particularly unattractive genus of moths. Wonder if the parents realize just what they’re naming their daughters after?

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Pulling Out of the Race

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Arizela

So, I withdrew from NaNoWriMo and the forums today. It was a personal decision based almost entirely on the reaction I had to their new stats page for author word count tracking. The stats page marks you as “unsuccessful” from 12:01am on Nov 1 until you get 1667 words or more on your updater. It assumes that you have already failed before the day even starts. The same thing happens the next day, even if you got 10,000 words on day 1. Day 2 is “unsuccessful” until you put in 1667 positive words on the updater.

Now, I can see how a lot of people wouldn’t so much care about that. And I can see how a lot of people find that sort of wording discouraging to say the least. For me, the more I thought about it, the madder I got. I ended up having actual vivid flashbacks of all those times as a kid growing up in a house with dirt floors, with an emotionally abusive mom and brother. The times when I was told over and over and over again, at the start of everything I did, that I was a failure, that I would never succeed, that I was “unsuccessful.” The times when my own internal voice started to mimic that abuse and I told myself, I was unworthy, stupid, slow, and incapable of success.

I haven’t had flashbacks like that in almost 15 years, but NaNoWriMo, a supposedly fun, care-free event meant to let people release the inner demons that keep them from writing managed to bring one on. I spent all my morning writing time literally in tears, trying to get myself back together.

I have worked very, very hard to believe that I am smart, capable, and worthy of encouragement, love, and support. I surround myself with people who love and respect me, who are encouraging even when I dream big. Who celebrate my successes without tallying up my failures and holding them against me. Most of all, those people believe in me. They tell me that I can accomplish my goals, that I can win, and that I am valuable and worthy and smart and good even when I don’t hit my targets.

I could try to prove the NaNo stats page wrong – I’ve been proving my mother wrong my whole life. But I won’t. I refuse to play that game for a stupid, supposedly fun, event. I deserve to be told I can succeed, not that I’ve already failed before I even have a chance to try.

And so do you.

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New Shiny vs. Old Friend

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Arizela

Nanowrimo starts tomorrow. The plan last month was to finish up the revision of Hunters in October, draft my new shiny project during NaNo, and do the final polish and sub package prep for Hunters in December.

Yeah…

That went over about as well as Amazon’s claim that Wise Man’s Fear would be released in April 2010. 😛

Every time I open Hunters these days, I feel like singing. This is the revision that nev-er ends, la la la. But that’s not really fair. Hunters took me two years to write, largely because I wasn’t a very good writer when I started and as I got better at it, I had to go back and make the stuff I’d already written better to match. Two years from sitting down and DONE. Then another six months in revisions of the whole thing (because revisions in process just don’t address the biggest issues anyway). Then another month putting together submissions packets individualized to each of the agents I’d decided to target (after a month of researching agents, querying, and submissions).

Fast-forward 5 months, most of which I spent wallowing in the misery and fatigue of my heart problem – I get a rejection from a full that an agent requested after reading my first three chapters and synopsis. The rejection had a few comments, most of them flattering: good writing, great idea, etc.. But it was still a rejection, and the why got me thinking about how I’d copped out on that final stage of revisions. How the beginning still wasn’t quite up to par, and how the overall structure of the story needed to change to really take advantage of the cues I’d layered so lovingly through the novel. Of how I was wasting two of my best characters in supporting roles and hinging my plot on the least likable of my protagonists.

After two months of thinking, I went back to the drawing board. Changed which character was the protagonist. Deleted two subplots that were hindering a truly satisfying ending. Really took an ax to those early scenes I’d written more than three years ago when I didn’t know much about tension or description or emotional connection with the characters. That took a month. Then I shoved it under the bed for a while and worked on something else – something that was not Hunters, by gods. It also wasn’t much of a story, but that didn’t matter. I was writing again. I’d begun to think I’d forgotten how.

Then I pulled my shiny new version of Hunters out from under the bed on October 1, because any time you make big edits you always edit in mistakes – typos, cut and paste problems, deleted words, misplaced articles… And I read it with the sinking sensation that I’d forgotten something. It took a binge of chocolate (ok, 1.5 servings of Dove) to get over it and get back to work. I’d forgotten that the ending I had originally written in 2009 wouldn’t in any way be satisfying if Jaim were the protagonist instead of Meulen, even though he took an active role in it. *facepalm*

So here I sit, on October 31, at the new mid-point of the book, the darkest hour of the main character’s experience (and darkest hour scenes are always hard for me, because when you write dark fiction, the darkest hour is fucking BLACK). I’ve got another 70k words or so to add to this novel before it’s DONE (again). And a shiny new project I’d rather be writing for Nanowrimo.

Ah, the joys of writing. Reminds me of being a parent. There comes a point in time when you’ve loved it and nurtured it and prettied it up and sent it off to find its way in the world… and then it moves back into your basement and blares the stereo at 3am.

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The GLBTA Character

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Arizela

I didn’t set out to write about a gay man.

My original concept for Hunters was about a woman who had a powerful magic, but who was forced by society to hide this power. Her brother was supposed to be a walk-on “red shirt” character – someone who would die tragically to motivate her character to change from accepting her lot to doing something about the brutal world she lived in.

It was my very talented group of alpha readers who realized early on (more than 2 years ago) that something was up with the brother. He’s a kick-ass assassin with a deep conscience he often can’t afford to indulge. He has a sense of loyalty to his sister that borders on pathological. He considers himself a monster, and there are times when he’s not mistaken about that despite his best intentions. He has eight children, and a big secret. He’s gay.

In Jaim’s world, sexual preference is just… preference. As much as someone might prefer blue-eyed blondes or gingers with freckles. And yet, for Jaim, his preference really does set him apart. His very unusual, militaristic family refuses to accept any change from the ideal, including sexual orientation, and they enforce this strict adherence to the normative by killing off anyone in the family who doesn’t meet the standard. In a society where gender identity and sexuality are completely without our present-day burdens, he is forced to hide his true nature, and the eventual discovery of his secret by his family lead to some pretty hideous consequences, both for him and for the people he loves.

Over the years and the revisions, my concept Hunters has changed significantly. The idea has matured, and so have the characters. Meulen is no longer a humble peasant woman (*snort*), and her brother is no longer a red shirt. Jaim become the focal point of both her story and his own. A lot of the reason for that is his sexual preference and how he responds to the pressures both within himself and from others, but he is not a token. He is not the stereotype of a gay man, nor a mascot for self-acceptance. He is tortured and repressed and generally speaking, a frigging mess. To me, at least, he is a whole person, and his sexuality is just one facet.

I’ve always believed that consenting adults deserve to be happy and to have someone who fulfills their needs, both emotionally and sexually, but I never set out to write about a gay man. The notion of tackling gender and sexuality issues never crossed my mind, until I stumbled over a character who just wouldn’t let go of my heart.

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