Remembering my Process

Laura Highcove

I started this weekend with the knowledge that it was as good as the end of the month. The first week of summer camps start at the barn on Monday and I will be back to working full time to help you. I knew if I was going to finish my rough draft of The Huntsman before June like I planned, I was going to have to get most of it done this weekend.

I got a lot done on Saturday. Almost 3k words and some revision. On Sunday I wrote a different version of a scene which I thought created more conflict but no longer worked with some of the character tie-ins I had gotten out of the first version of the scene. And that sent me into a spiral of self-doubt where I questioned everything to the point where I was ready to change something fundamental about the world in an attempt to fix it.

My husband noticed my distress and tried to help me outline the story, but that ended up to be too daunting a task for a Sunday afternoon. Instead I gave him the first 45k words (which are in a ‘readable’ state, as opposed to the rest of the book which is a complete mess) to read. While he was reading I went back to look at what I had given him to see how much of a mess it actually was.

While there, I ended up reorganizing it into draft 4 and after reading the beginning, I reminded myself that I am actually a good writer and that working on the second half of the book is just my biggest weakness. This ‘omg, nothing will ever work’ is what happened with Shifting Winds (and why I gave up on it) and then happened again with The Storyteller. However, I plowed through that draft anyway and eventually wrote the second half over to get a book I absolutely love.

With that reminder, I was able to write several scenes with which I was completely happy. (They came out of nowhere too. I love being a discovery writer.) I just need to remember that whenever I hit that impassable wall in my story, I need to step back to read/revise the beginning and remind myself that I am good at writing before I dive back in. It’s funny because this book has been so different in the writing from The Storyteller that I didn’t think any of my process would be the same, but it is.

Do you have any situations where you struggle doing something only to finally remember to take a step back so you can go at it the right way?

king arthur the legend of the sword

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 and King Arthur The Legend of the Sword

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

A week after it came out, my husband and I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. I enjoyed the first GotG and I’ve seen most movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and enjoyed all of them. Two days later we went to see King Arthur because I’ve been a fan of the Arthur myth since BBC’s Merlin and, truth be told, the trailers looked awesome.

As I have had the fortune of watching a myriad of movies in my lifetime, I have learned the lesson to judge something based on what it’s supposed to be. In reference to movies, that means you don’t go into an Adam Sandler movie expecting Oscar bait. With that in mind, I didn’t think GotGv2 was a good movie and I think King Arthur was.

Don’t get me wrong, I was entertained by GotGv2 and I loved the scenery porn. (You can always get me with scenery porn.) And according to what I’ve seen, GotGv2 is being hailed as a pretty good movie, but when I compare it to what I’ve come to expect from Marvel …/shakes head.

When I watch a Marvel movie, I have come to expect good writing with strong themes and a solid plot. Also a nice tough of humor and style. The thing that let me down with GotGv2 is that the Guardians are supposed to be an amazing team/family (you can’t argue that family is not a theme of this movie) and yet they spend a majority of the movie unapologetically ribbing and the rest of the time being cringeworthily (I’m not sure that’s a word, but go with it.) mean to each other. Now I’m a fan of groups and relationships that have a healthy dose of insults thrown back and forth, but the problem I saw in this movie is that the team then did no real getting along and working together as a team.

There was a moment when Quill and Rocket were being idiots, switching drivers back and forth through the super awesome looking asteroid field. Groot fell on Quill for some reason and Quill picked Groot up, and tossed him over his shoulder (without looking or saying anything) to Drax, who caught and secured him. That is the type of teamwork of which this team is capable. That sense of knowing what needs to be done in a tense situation, and just doing it without need for communication. And that was the only example of it in the entire movie. Heck, the team wasn’t even all together at any point after Ego showed up until after the climax. (That’s not really a spoiler.)

No one acted like a family in any way in this movie, and they barely acted like a team. Yes, there was pretty scenery. Yes there were laughs. Yes there were cool awesome moments. But the theme, that family are the ones who are there for you, fell on it’s face and skidded off a cliff. As such, it was not a good movie in my opinion.

I walked into King Arthur knowing it was doing horribly in the box office, it had 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, and most reviews I’d read call it a ‘mess’, and I walked out having seen a good movie. King Arthur pulled me through the believable arc of Arthur and his uncle, with the other characters playing the roles they were supposed to. It had quick cuts and lots of spectacle, all seasoned with acceptable anachronisms. If this movie lacked, it was because Guy Ritchie wanted this to be a six movie series, and it shows in that some detail was just left out.

There is a montage at the beginning of the movie showing Arthur growing up. It it literally that, a series of quick cuts showing Arthur getting beaten up on the streets, learning to be smart, and growing stronger, that lasts only a few minutes so we can start the movie proper with him all grown up. I remember watching it and thinking: ‘Well this is ridiculously elegant, and most people won’t be able to follow it.’ and I feel like that’s what happened for the entire movie.

Let’s face it, I like this type of movie. The heavily stylized, very quirky, outside of the standard type of, movie. That doesn’t mean I think they’ve all been done well. The first 2/3 of Man from U.N.C.L.E. was beautiful, then that whole car chase ruined it and Jupiter Ascending needed another two hours at least (and a better lead actress …). But Speed Racer is my favorite movie of all time, I adore the recent Three Musketeers movie, and I am still pissed that they canceled Pushing Daises (not a movie, but same thing) Yet I know that most people don’t like this kind of movie. They continue to do poorly in the box office and get lousy reviews. And at the same time, I know I like it and that won’t ever change.

This article is not here to try and convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong about what kind of movies are good, (I gave up on that after Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) but it is here so I can express my opinion. And frankly these types of things do keep popping up, so there are other people out there who like this style of media. Let me know if you happen to be one of those people. I’d love to hear your opinion on Kind Arthur or any other movie you think didn’t get the love it deserved.

Developing Awareness

Laura Highcove

In my past post, I walked about what feel is, and that to develop it, it helps to be more aware. If you missed that post, you can go back and read it here.

At the end of 2015 I decided I needed to be more aware of my depressive episodes. I knew they followed my period in some fashion but for the most part I would be miserable for several days until I realized my period was coming, and then I would be able to actively manage my depression. That was no longer working for me, so I made the choice to do something about it by developing awareness.

You may remember from my last post, the way my riding coach asked me “Did you feel that?” over and over until awareness had become a habit. So what I wanted to do was create an exercise where I could remind myself to be aware. I call my exercise: “Laura’s Morning Routine”. You don’t have to call it that, but you can if you like.

What I Did

Every morning for a year, I sat down and did two things:

1) I closed my eyes and I took stock of how I was feeling in that moment.

The whole exercise takes no more than five minutes. It was simply a set time for me to stop what I was doing and focus on myself for a few minutes. Since this was not something I had done before, I had no experience with what I felt like, and thus had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling.

As time went on, I began to notice when things were off my baseline. By taking stock at the same time in the same place each morning, I cut down on other variables. I got used to how I normally felt, and began to notice when things were different.

2) I rated the previous day on a scale of 1 to 5 in the categories: mind, body, and spirit.

I am a computer science major. I like beautiful, organized databases and so rating myself on a number scale worked for me. I chose body, mind, and spirit because I thought it would be interesting, then I defined each one thusly:

Body: Rated based on how much pain I was in that day. ONE was pain that got in the way of my day, THREE was how I feel normally (no pain), and FIVE was amazing. Over the course of the year I only had a few ONEs and no FIVEs. This measurement ended up being the least useful to me, but I didn’t know that when I started.

Mind: Rated based on how much chatter or negative self talk my mind was generating that day. ONE was a near constant racket, THREE was normal (not none, but manageable), FIVE were days when I was very positive, either extremely grateful and/or having lots of great story ideas.

Spirit: Rated on how much social anxiety I was dealing with. ONE were days I was withdrawn and did everything to avoid attention. THREE was normal (chatting with people when they were around). FOUR were days when I sought out interaction with people, FIVE were days when I would sing out loud with my music.

I would also make note of important events going on that I thought might influence my emotional state. This included my period.

Making your Own Exercise

I showed you what my own exercise looked like as an example and a guideline, but don’t feel the need to stick with doing everything exactly like I did it. The important points are to:

1) Set aside a time to do the exercise and try and make it happen in the same place and at the same time as often as possible. The whole idea is to get used to being more aware, so if you do it once a week it may be harder to build a habit of being aware, and if you change the time and location constantly it will be harder to build a baseline for how you feel.

2) Define your rating system so you know what it means. You can rate yourself however you want. You can have a scale from 1 to 100. You can rate yourself in .5 increments. You can rate yourself using fruits. The important thing is that you know what it means.

Please Note

Developing feel is not something you will see an immediate result from. (I did this exercise regularly for then entirety of 2016. Not saying I never missed a day, but I didn’t let myself miss many.) It is a lifelong pursuit, but then so is growing as a writer, so these things go hand in hand. I’m not telling you this to discourage you, but to encourage you. I don’t want you to try these techniques for a week or two and then think something is wrong when you’re not magically aware. It takes a bit of dedication, but the results will be worth it.

Now you may be thinking: “Okay, you’re having me gather all this data. What am I supposed to do with it. I should analyze it somehow. What if I get a ton of banana days and almost no limes. What does that mean!?” For right now I encourage you to give this a try for two weeks. Write down your data and don’t analyze it. Or at least do your best not to. Humans like to look for patterns in things and they like to know why. In my next post I’m going to talk about what you can do with the data you collect and how you can shift this exercise to help you become more aware in any facet of your life, and yes, that includes your writing.

This post is #2 of a series of three:
Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

The Wildroses are in Bloom

Laura Highcove

It’s that time of year when the wildroses around the farm come into bloom and the gentle smell permeates the air. And they always make me think of my Wildrose.

Wildrose © Laura Highcove

Like Tabitha I had a commission of Wildrose done as well. He is a wizard who was raised by gryffins, and he is part of the most effective Storyteller team the Guild has.


Wildrose © Laura Highcove

If you want to know more about Wildrose, you can click here
to get the first chapter of The Storyteller and meet him for yourself.

If you want more information on the artist, you can find it here.

Work while on Vacation

Laura Highcove

So I was able to smooth out a lot of The Huntsman in the week of May 3rd. Had to rejigger some things, but that’s just part of the process. I’m actually fairly happy with how things are turning out.

Had a little more trouble working on Tabitha’s character arc, as I spent the latter part of last week depressed and decided I needed to take care of myself rather than try and power through it. I was still able to create an outline of what I want Tabitha’s scenes to be, so now I simply need to write them, and I have to get that done before Emelia can step into place.

But I am on vacation this week so I’m only spending a bit of my morning actually working. This is a short update for that very reason, and though I’m behind, I’m not yet worried about not finishing on time. It’s a rough draft, so the important thing is just getting it all out.

The Skill of Feel

Laura Highcove

I have learned a lot of writing techniques over the years that have made me a better writer. But there is a skill I have learned that is arguably more important than all the techniques. That is the skill of feel. The interesting thing about feel is that it was under my radar for a long time, and when I did learn about it, it wasn’t in regards to writing at all. I want to shed some light on this not-often talked about skill that has helped my writing so much.

The Skill of Feel

During my first horseback riding lesson as an adult, my riding coach told me that I would learn a lot of riding techniques. I would learn how to ask the horse to go forward, to stop, to steer right and left, and the list went on from there. “Technique,” she said, “is easy to teach and easy to learn. It is also far less important than developing feel. Feel,” my coach stated,” is impossible to teach and very difficult to learn.”

So What is Feel?

In the simplest definition I can manage, feel is the knowing that comes from experience, and thus cannot be shared or taught.

Feel is knowing how much pressure to put into leg, seat, and hand aids when riding a horse to get the desired result.
Feel is knowing how to stay balanced when you ride a bike.
Feel is knowing a friend or family member is under the weather before they say something.
Feel is knowing where to put scene and chapter breaks for the best pacing in a story.

These are all things that a person just knows, but they cannot adequately explain how or why. Feel is what some people call a gut feeling or intuition. It’s the knowing that comes from experience. You already have feel in most aspects of your life and yet you are probably completely unaware of it.

You Can’t Teach Feel

When my riding coach told me that learning feel was difficult, I didn’t believe her. I was a good student and I was convinced I would learn easily. During my riding lessons, my coach taught me technique and I practiced those techniques. And while I was riding, my coach would often call out: “He’s dropping his shoulder, did you feel that?” To which I would reply, “No.” And later, “He was moving so rhythmically there, did you feel that?” “Maybe?” And it continued, over and over: “Did you feel that?” And for a long time, I really had no idea what she was talking about. Until one day she asked that question and I realized I did feel something different from what I had been feeling. It was the first time I was able to answer that question with: “Yes.”

What I Was Actually Learning

It was years before it occurred to me how I learned feel without being directly taught. Each time my coach queried: “Did you feel that?” she was actually reminding me, and thus teaching me, to be aware of myself and my horse while riding. The repetition of that question turned that awareness into a habit, and the more aware I was, the more I was able to feel.

How this Applies to Writing

I learned to increase my awareness while riding my horse, but I also took the same awareness and applied it to my writing. I began to notice when my good writing times were and where I was the most productive. I learned to distinguish between something being off in the story or something being off with me. And with that awareness I was able to integrate the writing techniques that worked for me and ignore the ones that didn’t far more quickly because I knew how things felt when they were working and when they weren’t. I could also more accurately pinpoint problems in my story, even if I wasn’t sure how to fix them quite yet.

So Now What?

The good news is you’ve already developed a lot of feel. You gain feel from experience and you’ve been living for a while now. The thing is, you aren’t doing it consciously. When you exercise awareness of yourself and the things that you do, you can develop feel more quickly.

In next week’s post I am going to lay out an exercise I used to help consciously raise my own awareness, which helped me develop feel. This exercise will be possible for you to do on your own and, with practice, will help you develop your skill of feel, which you will apply to your writing.

This post is part of a series of three:
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness

May Writing Plan

Laura Highcove

In April I got very little writing done. It was a busy month with lots of fun things to do that managed to all fall on consecutive weekends. It means I got to do everything, but it also meant that preparing for the Horse Show and the Spotlight MasterTreat took up most of my free time.

Over this past weekend I was in Las Vegas for the MasterTreat, and in an attempt to stay on east coast time, I was up at 4 or 5 every morning. I managed to get a lot of ‘writing’ done during these free hours before the actual event started at 9. I actually did a lot of smoothing. (Which is what I call organizing/rewriting the results of writing scenes multiple times and in random order.)

When I got home and synked my files from Dropbox, I realized that all of the organization I had done had been reset. The changes in the files themselves were safe, but whatever file decides how the files are displayed in Scrivener must have got screwed up somehow. I had to go into my project folder, pull out all the files I had edited this weekend, and then try and put everything back in order.

I was rather annoyed about that and it took me longer to do than I would’ve liked. Instead of being able to continue the momentum I had over the weekend, I had to stumble around in the dark. I’ll push forward again knowing that some of the changes I think I made may not be there anymore.

That being said, it is still my goal to have the rough draft of The Huntsman done by the end of the month. So I have made a schedule in the form of a list, as I love to do:

  • May 3 – 7: I am going to finish smoothing (or resmooth if necessary) what I need to smooth.
  • May 8 – 14: I am going to focus on writing the scenes needed for Tabitha’s character arc, which involve Wildrose and Snowdrop.
  • May 15 – 21: I will be on vacation, but I always like working on my writing anyway. This week I’ll work on Emelia and do any smoothing as a result of the previous week.
  • May 22 – 28: I will work on finishing up the story which is mostly Gabir’s arc, which will give the book an ending.

I am looking forward to being able to put a done stamp on this rough draft since it has taken me so much longer than writing The Storyteller. I’ll be posting again in two weeks with another journal entry.

Acknowledgments

Laura Highcove

I have actually written a few various drafts for the back of The Storyteller. Though obviously it would need to be expanded when the book is actually published, I liked the practice of being grateful for the people who have helped me.

To Sue Cumming-Schultz who told me to quit crying and go find myself a mentor.

To Gabriela Pereira, who became that mentor.

To Deb Dyer, Morgan Stoevener, and Cassie Stoevener who help me see the world as it really is, something to be grateful for

To my beta readers: Blake Mutchler, Kelsey DeBorja, Morgan Stoevener, and Laura Young (now Laura Mutchler), who saw this book when it wasn’t as good and helped me make it better.

To other writers, who have created the books, movies, TV shows, and video games that have filled my life and influenced the stories in my heart.

And of course, to my husband Matthew, who gave me critique when I needed it, support when I needed it, and who is handsome.

An Author I Admire

Laura Highcove

If you’ve been reading through these posts then you know I’ve mentioned Brandon Sanderson several times. That is not without reason. He is, hands down, my favorite author right now. First off, he write books that I consistently enjoy. There was actually a time when I was afraid to read anything of his besides the Mistborn trilogy because I was scared it couldn’t ever be as good. I was right, but he’s still really impressed me with everything else he’s written.

He is also supportive of up-and-coming writers. He posts the college classes that he teaches online and also does Writing Excuses. He seems to be, by all accounts, a pretty cool guy. I like my celebrities to be awesome people in real life as well, and he’s just cool all around.

I actually first read Mistborn because I was looking for ‘caper’ books for my husband. I picked up Mistborn as well as the first Eli Monpress book by Rachel Aaron that day. My husband didn’t read either of the books, but I adored them and continue to follow both of those authors to this day. Talk about a happy coincidence. One day I hope to be able to meet Brandon and get him to sign one of my many books.

A Bookish Gift

Laura Highcove

If I’m going to ask for a bookish gift, then I generally just ask for books. That is the main reason I use goodreads, so when it’s time for my birthday or Christmas, I just pull out the list of books and add them to my wish list.

Though I did see cool posters that make pictures out of the words of popular novels. None of the books they have currently really interest me, but I would totally get one of those of Vin atop Kredik Shaw from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. Or maybe one day, one of my own book.