Drafting: A New Step Forward

Laura Highcove

So things are getting back underway. I have a new plan (outline) that my husband helped me hash out. In addition to that I had a realization from the most recent writing book I have picked up Story Engineering, where the author said there is little difference between plotters and pantsers, just that plotters do all their planning by perfecting their outline and such before they start to write, and pantsers do all their planning in multiple edits while they’re writing.

In the past when I wrote, I started in on the story and wrote until I had this GREATNEWIDEA that I had to add into the story, so I started over. And I would do that over and over again. That in itself only got me so far because I didn’t understand story structure and I didn’t discipline myself to get to the second half of the book very often.

It did, however, make me realize that I probably will need to go through a few edits like I used to do, so I am starting over from the beginning of the story to add in all of the planning and world building I have developed since January.

Once I get to my halfway point again, I am going to push through to the end, using my new outline. I figure I may not need any more edits than that because I spent so long after my first draft just planning world, characters, and story, but I won’t know until I get there.

My deadline is June 5th, because starting June 6th, I am going to play Xenoblade Chronicles as my reward to myself for getting through the story.

As such, I have three weeks to get through what I already have planned out pretty well (which I think is actually past the halfway point, and to the Dark Night of the Soul (The absolute low point of the story.) <—Look at me embedding parenthesis.) And then four weeks to hammer out the rest of the story. So my specific measurable result is three sections a week. (It's 19k words.) I need to get through, probably two of them this weekend in order for that to work.

Depression

Laura Highcove

In the spring of 2003 I started taking medicine for depression. It wasn’t a huge deal at first, I would have a day or two a month where I would feel overwhelmed and cry on and off all day. I called this “crashing”.

The medicine worked well, helped to even out my moods. I would only have problems when I neglected getting refills, desperately hoping that this time I wouldn’t need it anymore. That this time I would be okay and that I was no longer dependent on some drug to make me able to live my life. Then I would crash again.

I remember hitting my low point, where I was at work, staring at the computer screen, trying to figure out how many more hours I had to work until I had another sick day accrued.

I wondered what the hell was wrong with me, that I had a wonderful husband, perfect job (with great pay, coworkers, doing work I loved to do), financial stability, and I was still depressed. I was so depressed that I quit my job and my husband and I moved back to Blacksburg, Virginia.

When I think back on those times, it just feels so different from how it is now. I was blessed by God’s grace to stumble on Advantage Ranch, just a few miles from my home, and that the people there (and horses!) helped me learn to better control my mind, and the suffering I was causing myself. Three years ago I realized that this time, I no longer needed the medication.

This change was brought into stark relief as I mentioned in last week’s post, I fell back into that depression. For three weeks I struggled against the helpless feeling that brought me to tears in seconds and made me despair that I had broken and that I was going to have to go back on depression medicine.

But even from the depths of that hell I knew I had people that I could trust with anything and so I put my pain out there. I was able to put it out there because there was no judgment, because these women have made it their life’s work to make the barn a safe environment and because they could still see the beautiful person I am, even trapped as I was.

They helped me realize that I was caught in an immense trap made from the guilt I feel over my cat’s coming surgery. A feeling that my mind had buried to where I couldn’t see it, but it could torture me. And as soon as I knew where the pain was coming from, I cried for maybe a minute, and then I was fine.

I went from wanting to bury myself in a dark corner to being back to normal in minutes. Now, I admit, it took me years of work prior to this, to get to the point where I knew myself well enough and I trusted the people enough for the change to come that easily. Even in this case it took me two weeks to realize something was actually *wrong*.

But it was a reminder of what my life had been like, and how different it is now. For a while I actually doubted that what I had gone through was depression. I never struggled with suicidal thoughts, I only had certain days that I was depressed enough to crash, and even the fact that I was eventually able to come off the depression medicine made me think perhaps I had never been that bad.

I was wrong. I was depressed. There was no ‘faking happy’ in that place. There was only my mind turning me against everything that was good in my life. My mind, but not my soul.

I’m left wishing there was some way for me to let everyone who suffers from depression know that you’re not broken. You haven’t failed. And yes, there are people out there who can function without medication; and there are people who can’t. That is a statement of fact and nothing more.

I was able to better control my mind, and thus my depression, with a combination of the Landmark Curriculum for Living, Ashtanga Yoga, and coaching from the facilitators of Advantage Ranch (who I am lucky enough to call friends) over a period of three years. It is not a quick fix, and the study is ongoing, but I am convinced it is worth it and that anyone can do it.

Sorry for this interlude, I am back to writing. There will be an update next week.

Drafting: Trying the Outline Once Again

Laura Highcove

I have been having a lot of trouble with my writing in recent weeks. I fell back into depression in a way I haven’t in two or three years. I struggled with this ‘failure’ for two weeks before it seemed to fade back into the background. I can still feel it there, but there’s nothing I can do about it except keep moving forward. I did not make my specific measurable result for last week.

This, of course, didn’t make my writing any easier. You may have noticed my posts have been short. I’m just embarrassed about not making any headway. I spent a week looking again into story structure, having a call with my mentor and then spending two hours of a six hour car ride talking through my story with my husband on the way to my sister-in-law’s wedding.

The first half of the book is actually good, according to structure, I just need to add in some foreshadowing, character development, and detail/description.

Then I went through what I had outlined for the second half of the book, and my husband shot down the scenes that didn’t matter, condense others into shorter scenes, and then plan out the final fight. All-in-all my ideas weren’t bad, I just needed someone who wasn’t myself to tell me when I was putting in unnecessary stuff.

Right now, however, I have very little confidence in my ability to actually write out the second half of the book. I’m drained right now from my second weekend in a row without a chance to unwind and I have a horse show this coming weekend. I’m not going to expect anything of myself this week. I need to get back to being okay with who I am again, because I haven’t been for weeks.

Revision Update: Maybe Not So “Revision” Anymore

Laura Highcove

So the horse show this weekend was put on by the barn where I work. While I didn’t get sick this time, I got home at 5:30 (the show ended early because there were so few people there due to the unseasonably cold weather), took a shower, ate pizza while finishing the last hour of the Pride and Prejudice mini-series, and then went to sleep until 7 the next morning.

I woke up still exhausted and after shopping for Wrestlemania (which is tonight for you non-wrestling people), I tried another nap that got me up to a functional level. So I didn’t get any writing done the past two days, which is why there was no post yesterday.

However! Before that I had a good week. I went back to the Cinderella storyline to add a piece there which took off beautifully, and I’m very happy with it. Added to a little bit of character back-story I then realized that I didn’t need the second Cinderella scene at all.

I’m not sure whether I’m happy about that or not. On one hand, it wasn’t working all that well to begin with, so this may be a blessing, on the other hand, I now have even less of an idea what I’m doing with the second half of the book.

I continue to be stressed about my apparent inability to create a full story. I even considered giving up on writing this book entirely for a while, but then I realized I couldn’t stop being a writer. It’s too ingrained in who I am for that, so the only course of action is to figure out what my malfunction is and fix it. Luckily I have another coaching call with Gabriela coming up, so maybe she will be able to shed some light on it.

Specific measurable result for the coming week: 750 words a day barring a complete change of plans that may or may not come about from the coaching call.

Revision Update: Rewriting

Laura Highcove

Last week was rough for me and as such I gave myself permission to not have to strive for any goals. I jotted down some notes, but there’s not a ton to report on.

Just yesterday I began to get my creative juices back, thanks in part to the DIYMFA podcasts. Sometimes when I just don’t feel like writing, reading about (or listening to, in this case) people discuss writing can spark things.

Like I said last week, I did reach that measurable result, and the week before last went really well. However, this week I am planning on going back and rewriting some random scenes that new ideas want to change. There are two of those, one is in the Cinderella storyline, which will help to drive a particularly slow moving (though necessary) scene forward, and the second is during the revisit to the Cinderella storyline. If I get finished with those, I will probably clean up all the scenes in the Cinderella folder a bit. However, I have events for the next three weekends that include two horse shows, a wedding, and a Wrestlemania party, so I’m not going to kill myself trying to do too much.

Revision Update: Being Human

Laura Highcove

I know myself pretty well all things considered. When I’m upset, I can figure out why. I don’t know if that is any consolation. Part of being aware of myself makes me more critical. If I were to wander along blithely, upset for some unknown reason, then I’m just upset. When I’m upset and I know why, then I bash myself even more for knowing why I’m upset and being unwilling to improve the situation.

Isn’t it funny how we, as humans, cause ourselves so much suffering? You’re having a fight with someone and you’re just too proud or scared to go and talk to them. You’re feeling disappointed that something didn’t go your way and instead of accepting it, or taking action to make sure it doesn’t happen again you sit there and stew over how the world is unfair or so-and-so just doesn’t care about your feelings.

I’m just so human. The part of me that wants to stay in the shadows and suffer in silence to keep from inconveniencing anyone else. The part of me who wants everything to go on my set schedule because I planned it that way goshdarnit.

I want to resist those parts of me, I want to hide them, I want them to not exist because I’m ashamed of them. And the thing I struggle with is accepting them as a part of myself. They are who I am just as much as the good bits.

I completed my specific measurable result for the past week, and today I’m being human.

Revision Update: Let’s Try Ditching the Outline

Laura Highcove

So I’m glad I gave myself the week ‘off’. I was able to finish my specific measurable result, in which I just wrote out the scenes in that folder. I’m not happy with it but I did it.

On the last DIYMFA 101 Q&A call I brought up this point to Gabriela and she says she has learned that she needs to write despite whether she feels good or bad about what comes out. It’s the first piece of advice she’s given that really hasn’t sat well with me.

I am certainly to the point in my writing career where I can just sit down and force myself to write because it’s time to write. Sometimes I don’t want to, sometimes it comes out pretty rough but most of the time I feel like I am able to push through the ‘ick’ to something that works. So the idea that I’m somehow supposed to write something, and dislike/hate it, but then have that be a part of my book is …well counterintuative at best.

I am beginning to feel like a broken record as things keep not working, but I am continuing to looking for new methods for working through this revision.

I spent part of this week thinking back to how things used to be with my writing. I remember just writing a story. Just writing it and not having any sort of plan. Now I feel like I’m so worried about the craft that I just get stuck.

The feeling between the beginning of this story (the one I’ve been writing the revision blog about in specific) and the end is just so …different. I really wish someone could just come down and tell me why I’m having such trouble. Is it my lack of structure? Is it my over-reliance on structure? Are the characters not developed enough? Is the world not developed enough? Does the story suck?

Part of me wants to be able to finish a novel length story just so I have the fact that I have done it to hang in front of myself. Right now I’m grasping at a future that I have to convince myself I can achieve with no actual proof.

Huh, I wrote that and then realized: Well that’s life isn’t it? Everything we do, we have no idea we’ll be able to do it until we do it. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel like that.

I love my neat little list of what to do with the dates and the plan of it all. I also don’t think it’s working.

I sit down to write and nothing works. I am stuck in my head about where the story is supposed to go, what my outline says I should do, and omg, I have to write a blog post on Friday …

So I’m going back to something that has worked for me in the past. And that is giving myself a word count goal. Something that I often tell myself when I’m stuck is that the answer (to my stuck spot) is out there somewhere. There is some series of events, some actions the characters can take, which make the story make sense. It exists, and all I have to do is find it.

And in order to find it I just have to write. I think better on ‘paper’. Obviously writing an outline is just not doing it for me. It helps me organize stuff I’ve already written just fine, but it seems to be seriously hindering me in my push forward. I get too caught up in where my outline says I should be going that I don’t let the story develop naturally.

My specific measurable result for this week is 750 words a day. So 5250 words through next Thursday. I’m not limiting myself on what I’m going to write. I am just going to get words on the page without thought to where I’m going or what I’m expecting myself to produce, and we’ll see what happens.

Revision Update: Main Character 3

Laura Highcove

I failed at my specific measurable result. I spent the entirety of the week on one scene, which I rewrote at minimum, five times.

But as I’ve said, failing is fine as long as I learn something from it.

Something 1) I am a hoarder of secrets. I am convinced that letting out my story’s secrets in anything earlier than the last possible second is just horrible. I must keep my secrets. Keep them all!
In this scene, I was trying to explain five secrets at once, and so it was a jumbled mess.
I had to step back and figure out if I could reveal some of these secrets earlier (blasphemy!) so that they were already in place by the time I got to the bigger reveal. Now I will be aware of this issue, so I can better parse out secrets.

Something 2) This blog is a great tripwire. Sometimes I can rewrite a scene several times and something good will pop out of it. It has happened. That did not happen this week, and so I know now that it’s time to change tactics.
So I will be finishing this scene, even if I’m not happy with the final product, and moving on. I will have to get critique on it and see what works and what doesn’t.

Something 3) I am really learning to go easier on myself. I’m not making great progress on my story. I don’t know how my speed rates against other writers, as I don’t have any data to compare, but I feel like I am stumbling a lot.
And yet I am moving more quickly to the place of ‘this is me learning my process, step back and try something else’ over ‘omgiamnevergoingtogetanythingpublishedandi’mtrash’ and I’m proud of myself for that.

That being said, I’m giving myself the weekend off. I am going to a wedding on Thursday (in Florida mwhahaha!), and while I will probably write some on the 13 hour car ride, I am not going to expect tons of writing when I’m losing my weekend, which is when I get most of my writing done.

(btw, I’m setting this post up to post on Saturday, but I didn’t want to do all kinds of funky talking in the past tense stuff about when I’m leaving. I wrote this Wednesday night.)

So my specific measurable result is to finish my current folder. I’ll have to move my timeline around a bit, but such is life. The journey is more important than the destination.

Revision Update: Main Character 2

Laura Highcove

My specific measurable goal for last week has been achieved. I even achieved it early, thanks to the help of good ol’ mother nature and the predicted high of 5 on Thursday. (It got up to 7, but who’s counting!?) My boss sent us home early to be warm so I had some extra writing time. On top of that my D&D session, which happens on Thursday nights, was canceled because people would rather not brave the cold to come to our house. Lots of extra time!

With that extra time, I was also able to work on the next folder. This folder is, as I said last week, the first section where I started having trouble with the story. I knew what I wanted to happen, and thus forced my characters into the neat little square holes I had planned. They refused to fit.

At some point two or three weeks ago, I rewrote, basically every scene in that folder, disregarding the plan that I had. I was fairly sure that what I had rewritten was also trash, but I left it while I tried to sort out my writing process. When I went through and reread it, I was actually quite happy with what was there, which is encouraging.

One thing that I have learned this week, is that the base of my revision pyramid seems to be both character and plot. Because I do so much rewriting moving from draft 0 to the rough draft, that I can’t focus on just character or plot, because I’m writing so many scenes from scratch.

Specific measurable result for this coming week is to finish Tabitha’s character arch in the next three folders.

Also, if you haven’t seen it, I have set up a “Page” on facebook, separate from my personal page. This is where I’m going to be focusing my writing life, separate from all of the normal personal life stuff. I would love it if you would pop by and ‘like’ it.

Revision Update: Main Character 1

Laura Highcove

So I woke up Sunday morning last week and sat for a good half an hour in front of my computer with my inner critic on a rampage. I was so unhappy with how my revision was going (or not going) that I was ready to give up on the entire story because it wasn’t good enough.

But you see, this story is my tripwire. I put my last story away because I got stuck in the exact same place, the muddle in the middle. Just like with that other story, all attempts to shove and muscle my way forward caused more and more angst.

So after I let myself wallow my my negative thoughts for that half-hour, I told myself ‘This is not working, it’s time to take a step back.’ This is a lesson that the universe likes to keep throwing at me, and I’m finally starting to learn it.

Then I did the only thing I could think of and went back to the revision slides from my DIYMFA 101 class and started from the beginning. The answer slapped me in the face six slides in.

You see, Gabriela, the instigator of DIYMFA, had helped me come up with a revision plan using her revision pyramid and she said that characters or plot can be the base of the pyramid, dependent on which you are stronger at. I was confidant in my character development, so I decided to put plot and story first on my revision schedule.

Well when I took that step back, I realized that I am great at character development …on all of the characters that I have been working on for years. However, the story I am revising right now has been in existence for less than five months, so of course the characters aren’t well-developed yet.

I spent the rest of Sunday filling out character questionnaire for all of the important characters. And then I spent the rest of my time this week poking at Tabitha in a few scenes again just to see what came out, and she seems much happier when I’m not trying to simply shove her after plot points.

So as for my specific measurable goal from last week, I failed to achieve my goal. I instead discovered that I had my revision plan in the wrong order. As such I am reordering it:

December 6 – 31 (3.5wks): Extract an Outline
January 1 – February 7 (5wks): Plot and Story
February 8 – March 5 (4wks): Main Character
March 6 – 26 (3wks): Secondary Character(s)
March 27 – April 2: (1wk) Plot and Story 2
April 3 – April 23 (3wks) World Building
April 24 – April 30 (1wk) Dialogue
May 1 – May 14 (2wks) Description
May 15 – May 28 (2wks): Theme
May 28 – June 3 (1wk): Line Editing

There is a yoga aphorism that is very common around the barn where I ride that goes like this:

Do the work,
Reflect on the work,
Release the results.

I am doing the work required for this revision (taking into account honoring my reality), and I am reflecting on the work, which has basically become the job of his blog, and while part of me wants to be upset about the fact that my timeline is pushed back, I just have to look at what has happened and release the result. Good or bad, the result cannot be changed so I take what I can learn from the process, and start it over again.

So now for my new specific measurable goal! This week I am going to write an outline for Tabitha’s character arch, and then go through my folders focusing only on the pieces of the story that deal with her character arch. My goal is to get through the first six folders, which shouldn’t be hard as she’s fairly well-established in them already. Folder 7 is where I started running into a wall.

And since this post is getting close to too long, see you next week!