Tag: diy mfa

New Stage of Revision

Laura Highcove

My writing process involves a lot of: ‘oh I’ll add that foreshadowing later’ or ‘I guess I’ll need to stick in an extra scene sometime’ or even ‘well I’ll get around to explaining that.’ in it. Now, for the first time, I have reached a stage where I actually have everything I wanted to do in the story. It’s not all perfect and beautiful and flowing, to be sure. But it’s all there.

And since it’s out with beta readers, I sort of hit a spot where I have no desire to work on it. It feels like a little switch in my head got flicked to ‘done’, and I have to keep reminding myself that it is not, in fact, done.

So I am using this blogging time to both blog, as well as plan what the next few steps will be, still holding to the DIYMFA revision pyramid, which for it’s simplicity, is so powerful. I have the bottom of the pyramid done. I know my pov. I have my character development done. My plot and story structure is all there.

That leaves making a list!

World building:

  • Make sure I have enough artifacts floating around that the world feels like it has artifacts.
  • Make sure all my magic is logical (As well as Tabitha’s progression through learning it.)
  • Hashing out the syntax of commands used for the Storybook.
  • Figuring out syntax for using remnants.

Description/Dialogue:

  • Mark all the places where description needs a boost. (Most of the fights fall in here.)
  • Make sure every person’s voice sounds right in their dialogue.

Theme:

  • Choice vs Fate
  • Everyone needs friends

Line Editing:

  • Print out the story on paper and see what typos pop out.

Now, the world building is still something I can do while the story is out with the beta readers, because if any of the feedback involves “well, I dunno about this world having magic” then I have other problems. The rest of it should wait until I know what scenes I may be adding or subtracting or moving around. Line editing won’t happen until I’m ready to submit to an agent. (I’ve only line edited one story before. It was annoying, and that story was only 12k words.)

I think the biggest thing I got from this week is remembering the benefits of sitting down and making a plan. Even though I never cleave 100% to the plan I make, it just helps to organize everything in my head and makes everything seem attainable as well. And it’s always important to give myself a little ego boost from time to time.

Embracing Your Zero Moment

Laura Highcove 1 Comment

I wrote this blog post in response to a prompt from DIYMFA.com. I’m a bit behind the curve in terms of timing, but I wanted to write this post anyway, so it gave me an excuse.

Embrace Your Zero Moment
The hardest step in your creative development is the “zero moment,” the point where you go from doing nothing to doing something. The distance between the zero moment and being a newbie is far greater than the distance between newbie and pro, yet rarely does anyone celebrate this pivotal, important step. Today, we want you to celebrate. Think back to your zero moment and do something to celebrate that incredible leap of faith.

The zero moment I remember the best is for my current story, probably because it’s most recent. I have always wanted to do a story based in or around fairy tales, due largely in part to The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey but for a long time I didn’t have a way to make it work or any real inspiration.

Then, in March of 2014 I was skimming through the “fairy books” by Andrew Lang which were published online. I was reading through different fairy tales until I stumbled on one called ‘The Little Wildrose’. As with all of my ‘research’, I don’t so much take what is, as use what I read to come up with a spark of my own. As soon as I got to the point about the Wildrose being raised by eagles, my mind immediately went to gryffins. (Because I love gryffins, but that will be a future post.)

And as basic and uncomplicated as this tale is, this was the spark that I needed to throw me into the whirlwind of creating a new story. I forget why I decided to make Wildrose a guy instead of a girl. I think it may have started as an idea to have all the roles in the fairy tales gender swapped, as an early version of this story had Wildrose attempting to stop a female Bluebeard from collecting and killing husbands. As I wrote my early drafts I kept coming on the issue of needing another character for Wildrose to play off of.

Eventually Tabitha popped out and took over as the main character of the story. I wrote a chapter or so and then the story sat there until October of that same year when I decided I was going to do this story for NaNoWriMo, only one month wasn’t enough, so I gave myself a goal of 40k words for October, and then did the 50k words in November as well, leaving me with over 90k words by the end of November.

During December I organized what I had written (I don’t always write in order, and I tend to go off on a lot of tangents while writing a rough draft) as well as had a mentor call with Gabriela that helped me to make a plan for tackling the revision. This story is actually what started me on my ‘post a week‘ habit as I wanted to keep track of what I did.

Now everything did not go nearly as beautifully as my plan would suggest, but I certainly did a lot of editing and character development and world building in the next five months. I ‘completed’ my revision only to realize the story was only 55k words.

After a break to let the story rest I came back and did more development work until I threw myself at NaNoWriMo again in order to hammer out the second half of the book. (Which I had really struggled with.) Then I stopped and reassessed.

I had my husband alpha read the story at the beginning of this year, and then I just started hammering out problems over and over, until we get to the present, where the story is out for its first beta read. It really is encouraging to be able to look back at the zero moment to see exactly how far I have come. Two years is a long time, but I’ve also gotten a lot of work done, as well as improved myself as a writer. Even with all the ridiculous doubts along the way, it really is all about not giving up.

Mentoring Session

Laura Highcove

This past Wednesday, I was delighted to have another mentoring session with Gabriela Pereira, the instigator of DIYMFA.com. I came into this session, having hit what felt like a wall in my revision. I was trying to iron out a late scene and things were just not coming together.

So we took a step back and Gabriela asked where I was, what my goals were, and then turned my idea of how I was trying to revise my story on its head.

I had been going through the revision pyramid, but she straight up told me to not even bother with the top part of the pyramid before sending it to my first set of beta readers. In fact, she shoved me back down on the pyramid, reminding me of the basics that I had sort of glazed over. She also told me I did not need to polish nearly as much as I thought I should, before sending my story to beta readers.

Somewhere in my mind I assumed I wanted the book to be nearly publishable before I had any beta readers read it, but she made me realize that I needed to get outside input before I worked so hard on the stuff I had that might change. Again, I knew this… but I was thinking about wrong.

So suddenly I had a new direction, and I was feeling light again, and it took me a few days to realize why I was feeling so good.

Gabriela reminded me that the story did not have to be perfect.

So all at once, I stopped beating myself up about the fact that I couldn’t make everything work. I could just stop and focus on the things that I could do. I am going to continue learning my whole life. I am never going to be that idealized “perfect” that sits in that corner of my brain to taunt me. It is good, sometimes, to be reminded that I am perfect exactly where I am.

Talk of Superpowers

Laura Highcove

Talk of Superpowers:
There was talk recently in the DIY MFA sphere, about superpowers, that aspect of every writer’s personality that helps them to write their story.

I waffled on this a little bit because I was thinking of it from a place of “What am I good at?”. Instead I realized that what Gabriela actually meant is closer to what my yoga instructor refers to as a dharma. Now if you google dharma, you won’t get this definition, but I use it to mean a person’s true self. If you set aside your family and friends, your job, your hobbies, your passions, and pursuits, then who are you?

I am authentic:
There was one call for DIY MFA where I remember Gabriela asking, “How did you tell the people in your life that you are a writer?”

And I remember thinking on that while other people gave their answers, and then she asked me that question and I said: “I never had to tell people I was a writer, I just always have written, and the people around me know that I write.”

I later realized that that sums up who I am. I am authentic. Everything that I am is open and out there and everything that I’m not doesn’t exist.

How this shows up in my writing:
My characters end up authentic, truthful, reasonable, and willing to see another person’s point of view. It makes it difficult for me to write truly evil villains and only recently have I been able to write characters having verbal arguments without one or both of them apologizing and coming to see the other person’s point of view by the end.

This means I don’t have conflict created by misunderstandings. When my characters fight or disagree, it’s because they have (at least mostly) reasonable views on life, that just happen to conflict.

I want my readers to be able to understand where a character is coming from, even if they don’t agree with where they’re going. (Oh, that sounds tweet-able, too bad I don’t twitter.)

Now for other things:
I wanted to write this post because I wanted to put up something about myself that wasn’t just a laundry list of the things I’ve been doing in my writing. I’m not sure if people are enjoying that or not, since I don’t really get feedback, but I feel like it might get old after a while.

For those of you who might like my laundry list: I’m still working on the Arthur tale. It is rough and I don’t feel like I have a focus right now. The story is just kind of happening, which means I just need to keep powering through until something comes out that feels right. One more week and then I start on fights.

Guest Posting!?

Laura Highcove

So this week I decided I would take the plunge and actually attempt to write a guest blog post for DIYMFA at the encouragement of my mentor. It is something that I haven’t thought about very seriously before this because I have very little skill writing blog articles. Despite the fact that I post something here every week, I have rarely made any attempts to make these posts follow a typical “blog format”. I found the best way to keep myself able to write one of these posts every week is to just allow myself to write what I want, how I want it. It helps to keep me accountable when I’m actively working toward a goal, and it helps me to evaluate and record my process. What is the point of spending hours struggling with a “real” blog post when I could be using that time to be doing literally anything else.

So it took me several days to come up with possible blog topics. Then a day to write the email pitching them to the web editor. I had to convince myself that my mentor would know if I didn’t send an email. I don’t know if she would or not, but I used it as a way to force myself to send the email.

Then I was nervous as I waited for a reply. Then when I got the reply it took me a day to work up the nerve to read it. Then when I read it and saw the topic the web editor had picked, I realized I was going to have to actually write the article. And I did, and it was horrible. So I let it sit and cleaned it up, and sent it to my hubby, and then edited it, and sent it to him again, and now I think I actually have something that will at least not embarrass me.

So what am I trying to say with this post? I am celebrating the fact that I was nervous and scared and outside my comfort zone and I did it anyway! Even if I send this post to the web editor and she says it needs to be rewritten. Even if it goes up and no one comments. I will still have done it, and that experience is very important. It has also taught me that when I am not writing fiction, I can’t keep a consistent tense to save my life. That is also important to know.