Breathing Room

I'm nearing completion of the WIP MS, and as I do, I find myself longing for some breathing room. I feel like I've been holed up in my room forever, turning down social engagements and trying to crank out pages. My head is so filled with this book, it's all I can do to write a damn grocery list, let alone even consider any other project. All I can see is this story and the characters in it, what they're doing to each other and what the heck is gonna happen when everything collides together at the end.

Part of my timeline for getting this novel produced is letting the manuscript rest for a few weeks between completion of the first draft and the first editing run-through. I plan to use those weeks to work on some short stories, sort of as a mental palate-cleanser. I've been in my fictional town of Bulton for nine months now, almost ten, and it's time to see new things and new places in my mind's eye.

Getting the first draft of this huge project off my desk is going to be a relief, and I don't want to start something that long again for at least a few months. I know, too, that I'm only nearing the end of the first step; there's going to be a thorough revision process, and I need to get my head wrapped around that concept before I start another lengthy piece of work, and figure out how everthing fits into a new timeline.

Now that I've worked writing into my everyday(ish) schedule, I don't want to stop. I used to take long breaks between spells of writing - sometimes months would pass before I would pick up something and tinker with it - but I can't even begin to imagine living that way now. I'm delighted at the idea of using the time my MS needs to take a few shorts for a spin. Imagine, a tiny little piece of writing, with hardly any commitment at all! A perfect study of the abbreviated scene, the focus on action, the striking images needed to ensnare a reader in 6,000 words. And something I can add to my portfolio to boot! Man, that sounds like fun!

When you finish a long project, what do you do to give yourself some breathing room? Do you jump right into the next long project, or switch it up a little for variety?

Color Your Prose

Ever think about how color can affect the theme and mood of your story?

The movie Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg, was almost completely shot in black and white... except for the little girl in the red coat. We see her through Schindler's eyes, standing out in the crowd of Jews waiting to be processed... then later, heaped onto a wagon of corpses, still wearing her little red coat. A lot of people have speculated about what the color red means - perhaps the red symbolizes a lost innocence, or the blood of the Jewish people spilled by the Nazis. But Spielberg himself had this to say:

"America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn’t assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone’s radar, but no one did anything about it. And that’s why I wanted to bring the color red in."

Or take into account the movie The Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. He also used the color red repeatedly throughout his film, to symbolize when the spirit world and the real world were brushing up against each other. When Cole sees the ghost in his room, he's hiding in a red tent. At the boy's birthday party where the bullies lock Cole in the attic, he's following a red birthday balloon to the top of the stairs, and he's wearing a red sweater. There are many other examples of this symbolism used throughout the movie.

Is this something we can incorporate into our prose? The repetitive use of color is a subtle trick we can use to help set the theme and mood of our writing. Perhaps a character who's in an abusive relationship always has an example of the color purple around them, to symbolize the color of bruises. Or a theme you're touching on - poverty in Middle America, maybe - can be used to highlight people and places who are affected by this theme. Like, everyone who's using government benefits wears or carries something yellow. Or the government offices could be in a yellow building.

I think this is something that could be applied as you craft your WIP or added in as you make the second pass through your manuscript for editing. After all, theme is something we don't necessarily incorporate into every line of prose as we compose our MS, but we can go back after it's complete and inject a little here and there to really beef up the story.

What do you think? Would you consider using color to enhance the theme and mood of your prose? Have you used tricks like this in the past, or have other ways of expressing symbolism you're particularly fond of?

Finders Keepers

In my writing hero Stephen King's memoir/manual On Writing, he discusses his belief that stories are found, not made. He compares a story to a fossil in the ground, and as writers we are the archaeologists responsible for digging them up. We have our writer's toolbox to help us accomplish the project: big chunky jackhammers of plot and theme to break the bones out of the ground, and tiny brushes and picks of detail and diction, which you can use to uncover the delicate parts of whatever the fossil used to be.

I love this concept. It appeals to the part of my imagination which loves secrets and mystery. It also explains a large part of the Zone which so entrances me when I fall into it. I'm not composing, I'm finding, I'm digging something up for everyone to see. The story's already there, it's just my job to remove as much of the crud and crap caked around it as I can, so I can show it off to who might be interested. The Universe (or God, or whatever you prefer) sends us these objects, because it knows we as artists will listen and take care of them. It's our job in the grand scheme of things.

In the same vein, I also believe that if you don't take advantage of a story you've found, someone else will. Stories are in limited access, and they all need to be told. If you're not willing to write your story, someone else will. Do you think there's only one person who's thought of a love triangle between a teenage girl, a vampire, and a werewolf? Of course not... but Stephanie Meyer was the person who plucked it out of the ether and transcribed it to the best of her ability, so well that she captured the hearts and imaginations of squealing tween girls all over the world.

(Oh God... I did it... I used a Twilight reference in my blog. Grudgingly, but yes, it's still there. OK, someone can come to SC to put me out of my misery now.)

So. Back to the entry, right? *shakes it off* Once you conceive of a story, once it's pulled out of the ether and been formed (at least partially) in your mind, you're responsible for it. You're the caretaker. You're the midwife, charged with birthing it into the world. If you don't... someone else will. But it's our charge as artists and writers to DO it. Even if we only create it for ourselves. We have to. It's what we're born for.

So... about that story, set in the South, about a desperate man who needs to talk to his dead wife? And how he goes to talk to the local "witchy woman" to see if she can help him get in touch with the other side? And how the witch isn't really a witch, but is being influenced by powers darker than she'd ever imagined? Not to mention the man's latently telepathic brother-in-law, and how he's struggling with trying not to fall in love with his dead sister's best friend? Uh, yeah, that's mine. I found it. I claim it.

Finders keepers.

Auditory Detail

I'm participating in Arlee Bird's monthly blog project called the A to Z Blog Challenge. Here's my first entry in what I hope is going to be a fun endeavor.

I'm a very descriptive writer. I think it comes from being a storyteller for a live-action roleplaying group for several years. When you're weaving a tale aloud, immersing your participants in your story, the best way to suck them in is give them lots of little details which help them imagine what's going on. I like to focus on the senses of my characters. Every writer understands you must describe what your characters are seeing (after all, they're the lens you hold up to the world and invite your reader to look through), but do you concentrate on every sense your character has? I find myself leaning towards a lot of auditory description in my WIP.

Here's an example from a recent chapter:

"A long silence played out between them, filled with the soft summer song of birds twittering their good-nights and the long, low rush of cars passing by on the street beyond. The twilight deepened, thickening around them like gathered folds of velvet. Shouts of children echoed over the neatly manicured lawns in Jack’s neighborhood. Two yards down, the click-click-click-fisssssss of an automated lawn sprinkler whispered over and over in a mechanical monotone. At the end of Jack’s driveway, the streetlight’s transformer hummed as it began to power up for the evening."

When I wrote this, I wasn't thinking about what I was focusing on, or the fact that every sentence except for one in that paragraph is describing what the characters are hearing. I just wrote it. I was in the Zone, and you know how that is. You dump everything on the page and then come back later to see what you got. (Kind of like panning for gold.) But when I took these pages to writers' meeting, both Gail Gray and Brian K. Ladd mentioned how much they liked the different details I'd offered and it brought them even deeper into the story.

I love focusing on every sense the character has - the color of fistfuls of leaves on trees, the smell of baking grass in the hot summer air, the sensation of a prankish breeze playing cool fingers across prickly hot skin, the sound of insects singing in the reeds by a chuckling river, the taste of metal on your tongue as you drink cold water from the hose. Each sense we decide to focus on as writers gives the reader another map-marker which leads them deeper into the illusion we're creating.

What are some details you decide to focus on to bring your reader closer to your vision? What sort of extras do you weave into your prose?

Music Therapy

By now you've probably noticed a theme for Mondays on my blog. Over the month of March I've used the first day of the week as a day to showcase something about music and how it relates to me and my writing. At the beginning of the month I talked about Shooter Jennings and Hierophant's collaboration with Stephen King. The next week I told you guys about my trip to Indiana to see Murder By Death. And last week we had a great discussion about writing playlists. This has been a lot of fun and I plan to keep doing this or something similar in the weeks to come. I think music is an integral part of the writing process for many authors, including myself, and I'm fascinated by the countless ways the two forms of art entwine together.

On that note, let's get on to this week's musical entry...

Did you know there's such a thing as music therapy? The American Music Therapy Association says on their website, "The idea of music as a healing influence which could affect health and behavior is as least as old as the writings of Aristotle and Plato. The 20th century discipline began after World War I and World War II when community musicians of all types, both amateur and professional, went to Veterans hospitals around the country to play for the thousands of veterans suffering both physical and emotional trauma from the wars. The patients' notable physical and emotional responses to music led the doctors and nurses to request the hiring of musicians by the hospitals."

I love this idea, and would like to write a story about it sometime. The concept fires up the furnaces of my imagination - a musician, using his or her art to heal the sick. Now I know there are thousands of qualified music therapists out there who've worked hard to get where they are using their dedication and talent. But my brain naturally turns to a tale of the weird when I think about this subject. What if it was a supernatural sort of ability, something which doctors couldn't detect - except when viewing the rapid healing of their gravely injured patients? What if this person, this "music therapist", had been different all through growing up and finally found what they were meant to do in a VA hospital during the second world war? A period piece with supernatural undertones. So much fun to think about!

This is one of the many ways I get ideas for stories... learning about something new and interesting, then imagining a character thrown into a situation which showcases that skill (or place, or time, or whatever). I'm pleased to have a new goal of learning more about music and how it could inspire or influence me to write pieces I might not usually consider. I hope you'll be as interested to read these "Music Monday" entries as I am to write them.

What are some ways music has inspired you as a writer? We've talked about playlists, live music, and so on... Do you find music and writing as cooperatively influential as I do?

Timelines

I think one of the most important things that's kept me motivated in writing my first novel is setting a timeline for the things I want to accomplish in this endeavor.

When I made the concrete decision to sit down and give this whole book-writing thing a serious try, I was dubious. I've mentioned before how I have trouble completing long-term projects (a hallmark of attention deficit disorder, I still need to contact someone about the royalties for all those posters I should be on). When I knew I was serious about giving this a try, I sat down and planned out a loose timeline for what I wanted to accomplish.

I decided to give myself nine months to complete the first draft. My writing hero, Stephen King, says in his book On Writing that he finishes a draft of 100,000 words in three months - that's cranking out about 2000 words a day, every day, with no breaks. Of course, Mr. King only has one job - making things up and writing 'em down. He doesn't have to deal with another full-time job like I do. Also, he has this whole book-writing thing down to a science. Since this is my first book, I decided to give myself more time than he recommended, mainly so I wouldn't kill myself with my own project.

After setting a date for first draft completion (the first of May), I looked at what else I wanted to do with the book. I want to give it four to six weeks to rest in the proverbial bottom drawer after it's complete, so I can go back to it and edit all its pages with a fresh eye. So that puts me in early to mid June before I can even look at it to begin the second draft (but it's all right, I have a few short stories rolling around in my head to keep me out of that bottom drawer for a few weeks). I'll give myself about a month to go back through and clean it up, add in the things I want to add (there are several bits of foreshadowing which need to be put in, to sort of spice up the story), change what needs to be changed.

So around July 15th, I'll get a few spiral-bound copies of my manuscript printed, and I'll be handing them out to a few dedicated First Readers. I've picked out a handful already, each of them with a different skill set for looking at the book. One of them, of course, is my writing compatriot and fellow Reedy River Rat Gail Gray, who has offered invaluable advice and direction during the process of creating the first draft. The other readers I have lined up are from varying backgrounds, education levels and mindsets. Each of them has been chosen to read for one reason or another - one person I want to focus on theme, one on setting, one on that terrible issue of romance I talked about yesterday... and they're all excited as hell to read my book.

I want to give them a month to read, then start gently prodding for returns (hopefully with lots of notes in the margins). So, mid-August will be the beginning of the third draft and subsequent revisions. I'll give myself another two to four weeks to get those done, and then start drafting query letters for agents and publishers. By September 15th or so (a couple of weeks before my birthday), I want to have a finished package ready to send out where it needs to go.

And then a month later, the South Carolina Writers' Conference will meet in Myrtle Beach, SC. There will be agents and publishing houses represented there, so I'm going down there to shake hands, network, and hopefully meet someone who can help me get my foot in the door to get my baby - now grown into a big, strapping, stand-on-its-own novel - looked at by a publisher. Gail and I are already planning our trip, and I'm excited about it!

When I saw all this laid out on a timeline back in August, the structure of the plan made me feel as if I had a real chance of finishing this project. It's something I return to on an almost daily basis to help remind myself of what I'm working towards. I need to get this done in a timely manner, so I can ultimately take it where it needs to go in October.

And so far, it's working.

Writing Playlists

I draw a huge amount of inspiration from the music I listen to in every stage of my writing process. I have thousands of songs loaded on my iPod, and I love to put the thing on shuffle and just let Jeff take to the wind. My mind will often drop into the zone of brainstorming without me even planning it, setting a scene to a particular song. The creative juices start flowing, and for the four-to-six minutes the song's playing, I'm locked deep in my imagination, the music playing as a soundtrack to the movie in my mind.

I also listen to music as I'm actually working on the novel. I don't do this all the time; sometimes listening to music as I write screws with my ADD, distracting me, and I end up looking for the "right song" to listen to as I compose a particular scene, wasting several valuable minutes in the process. But other times it's exactly what I need to transport me to my fictional town of Bulton, SC. I've composed a playlist over the last seven months as I've been writing the novel. The playlist has evolved, growing and changing as the novel does, but the core music remains the same.

I've populated my playlist with some good old rock n' roll, of course - the Eagles are a large part of the lineup. I've mentioned before how the song "Heartache Tonight" was a huge influence in a pivotal scene in the novel... and I swear, if this damn thing ever gets made into a movie, I'm pitching the song to the director... it's that concrete in my head. Other grit-yer-teeth rockers include Creedence Clearwater Revival and the newcomers Deer Tick. (I'd love to call all these bands Southern rock, and I know a good many people think of them as such. I just can't in good conscience do that, though, because CCR and the Eagles are from out West and Deer Tick is from RI.)

I've also got a good bit of Murder By Death on the playlist. Their epic rock-meets-country-meets-orchestra sound, coupled with beautiful dark lyrics and an underlying current of desperation, fit my little Southern ghost story very well. I chose some tracks from the Fleet Foxes, because their mellow, folk-y sound makes me think of the South in general and Appalachia in particular, most likely because of their song, "Blue Ridge Mountains".

Then there are a few single tracks from different artists and movie soundtracks, which feed my brain beautiful images and keep it running at high speed. I've had a lot of fun building this playlist, and I love to see the influence it's had over the tale I'm spinning. I'm continually finding songs and adding them to the mix, so by the end of this I'll have hours and hours of music that I can choose a really solid soundtrack out of, to burn to a CD for myself... sort of a behind-the-scenes extra, if you'll allow me that indulgence. You'd better, 'cause it'll just be for me anyway.

I love hearing what other writers were listening to as they composed their particular masterpieces, especially if they showcase lyrics from a song as a foreword, or mention it in their notes. One of my favorite horror authors, Joe Hill, recently published (on his blog) highlights from the playlist he listened to as he wrote his new novel Horns. You can check out that blog entry here - it's a really interesting read.

How about the rest of you guys? What have you been listening to lately, as you compose your masterpieces? Do you need a playlist to work, or would you rather have silence as company? I'm interested in how our creative processes differ.

Social Media

A few months ago I read that publishers and agents are much more likely to work with an author if they have an established web presence, including social media profiles. This makes a lot of sense to me, because I know the publishing industry is changing on a daily basis, and many publishers or agents just don't have the resources which used to be available to them for marketing and publicity. If a publisher sees a writer already has an established presence online (I learned later that this is called a "platform"), it makes working with that author more attractive, because it gives the publisher one less thing to worry about.

Reading that article is what made me get started with this blog. I already had a Facebook fan page, but I hadn't done a lot with it. When I learned that publishers are seeking authors who are willing to take over their own publicity, I added a Twitter feed and started keeping a regular web journal. I want to be able to show a publisher that I've established myself and keep up with posting, and also I want them to see that I already have an established fan base. This is most easily calculated through my Facebook fans. While 122 fans might not be as many as some people out there, I feel it's a good start.

Blogging has now become part of my job as a writer - it's a way to get my words out there, tell people how my work on different projects is going, and record my progress. I also love being able to talk about the different parts of the writing process that really interest me, as well as other topics like music and art. I've learned so much since I started blogging a couple of months ago, and made some great new friends.

I also love my Facebook fan page. I don't update it more than once a week or so, because I don't want to inundate people with my posts and turn them off. I try to post every couple of weeks about the blog, and once a week or so I change my status message. I'm trying to keep a balance of online-and-active but not annoying.

My Twitter feed is fun to play with, but I don't use it as much as I should. I have found a couple of new friends and followers through Twitter by using their search engine and striking up a conversation on related interests. My newest follower, Ryan from Iowa, is a Murder By Death fan, and that's how I found him - by searching for @murderbydeath in the Twitter search field, then tweeting to him about the concert this weekend and my blog post about it, complete with a photo of Sarah, the cellist. There are a lot of wonderful ways to utilize Twitter that I haven't played with yet, but I'm working on it.

The website will be up soon, and I hope I can integrate these blogs with the website. I've been told it shouldn't be that hard to do because it's a WordPress website, but I wonder if my blog followers will still be able to see my updates if I'm posting on the website instead of directly to blogspot? Has anyone else had any experience with this?

I'm having a lot of fun establishing my "writer's platform", and the more I work on it, the more I feel like a (flourish of trumpets, please) REAL WRITER. It helps me get my headspace into where it needs to be - that is, making things up and writing 'em down is my career, and punching in and out at my daily grind-job (a la Clark Kent) is only how I pay the bills. It's gratifying.

What are some other social media sites you would recommend (or NOT recommend)? Any and all suggestions are welcome.