Tag: drafting

There is a Way this Makes Sense

Laura Highcove

It’s funny, even though I know the only way I’m going to get past this stuck spot in the Huntsman is to keep writing, and even though this persistence has always worked in the past, I still find myself dreading the idea of working on my story. Being human is such a funny thing. It’s so easy to get bogged down in the present and somehow think things have always been terrible, and always will be terrible, but then if it’s going well we worry about how that will change for the worse.

It’s all a matter of perceptive. I’m really no more stuck with this book than I have been in the past. And truthfully, I’m farther along than I ever have been. I’m starting to figure out some things, but IDEAS! are easy, and bringing them together to make sense for the end of a book is hard. I always get stuck at this point of the book, and have for a number of trunk novels that never got finished. The Law of the Prince Charming, while not the first book I managed to power through, is one of very few. And it took six months of agony before I basically just popped out the second half of the book.

It’s been longer for this one, and I figure the reason is I just haven’t found that thing, that bit that ties it all together. It’s out there somewhere. I know it is. A thing I try to tell myself in times like this is: “There is a way that all of this (my story) makes sense.” That doesn’t mean things won’t have to change or shift around, but there is a second half of this book that is beautiful and wonderful and makes sense. I just have to tap into it …by continuing to write until I get past this stuck spot. Blargh. I mean: I know I can do it!

Leaving NaNoWriMo Behind

Laura Highcove

I ended up with none of my round 2 beta reads back at the beginning of Dec, which turned out okay since I also finally got Final Fantasy 15, which I spent this entire past weekend playing. (I’ll probably put out a post with my response to that later, after I’ve finished.)

Not wanting to put my entire writing everything on hold for this video game I decided to take a lesson learned from NaNo, and give myself a goal of 2k words a day (except for Fridays). That’s about two hours at my current word production rate. This still gives me time to mess with podcasts and other ‘writing improvement’ stuffs, as well as work on some revision as I go. Then once my work day is over, I still have time to play some ffXV.

I’m still not positive where I’m going in the Huntsman, but it’s been fun playing with these characters in a new story. Even though this book is really just a series of disjointed scenes that I’ve written completely out of order, the shape of it is starting to fill in, in my head, allowing me to move forward. It’s rather a weird experience, but whatever gets the job done. I need to focus on cleaning up how and when my two pov characters get to Copperwinds, the kingdom where the main tale for this book is going to happen. Once that’s done I can write more scenes where they interact in said kingdom, which is what is lacking right now.

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

Last year I realized that NaNoWriMo was too easy for me. I have participated every year since 2008, and have won every year but two. This year I decided to give myself a new challenge, 90,000 words. Not quite double the original goal, but actual novel length. I went into NaNoWriMo with the first anticipation I’d had in years. I failed to reach my goal. But it’s not about the failure, but about analyzing the why and learning what I can from it.

Why did I fail?

1) I started out with a goal of 3,000 words a day. Then I reached my first Friday and had no time for writing (due to my normal schedule, I just didn’t take it into account.) I caught up Saturday by writing 6,000 words, which is more than I’ve ever written in a single day, and that burned me out. I changed my daily goal to 3,500 with no writing needed on Fridays. I couldn’t keep this up either.

2) This story came out in a way I was not used to. That being: I wrote scenes out of order, and multiple times before I wrote something that moved the story forward. I don’t know if this was caused by my sudden need for such a large amount of words, the fact that this was a sequel, that I’ve learned so much craft in the two years since I wrote The Storyteller, or something else entirely. Either way, the result is that my forward momentum kept coming to a screeching halt, and while I could produce words, I wasn’t actually moving the story.

3) Politics. I’m actually not kidding. Despite your opinion about who should’ve won or why, the amount of anger and hate that existed on the Internet in the days following the election wrecked me emotionally. I had to abandon Facebook completely.

What did I learn?

1) While 1667 words a day is pretty easy, 3,500 is not. I believe it might be because writing this much didn’t give me enough time in between to think about my story and live my life. I felt very dry, creatively. In the third week I backed off the schedule I had set for myself for a few days and after a few days the ideas started flowing again. So what I learned is I should try something closer to 2,000 words a day for a while.

2) I am a multi-drafter. For those who haven’t read my blog previously, I know that one part of my process is that I write, go back and rewrite from the beginning and go a little further into the story, then go back and repeat. While somehow I managed to plow right through the Storyteller two years ago, that did not work this time. So I also learned that I need to let myself stop an reassess when I need to, otherwise I end up just spinning my wheels.

3) I also learned I should’ve removed myself from the toxic environment online more quickly. As much as I wanted to support the people who were scared, my emotional well being is more important.

Getting Back Up to Speed

Laura Highcove

Yep, Nano has kicked my butt this year. I got into a spiral of self-doubt and since my schedule was all screwed up because of the holiday I really didn’t get anything done besides grouping the multiple versions of scenes into separate files.

As soon as I got home and was able to organize my space (I swear, I must be the most organized discovery writer in existence.) all the ideas started flowing again. I’ve been able to make some good progress on some scenes I wrote a few versions of already, but now I’m getting it to the way I want it to be.

My plan right now is to continue organizing and rewriting what I have this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be ready to go forward a bit more. I’d like to get to 70k words by the end of NaNo (Just to say I did.) though I’ve likely written more words than my ending word count will suggest. It’s hard to count words on rewrites because I take chunks of previously written words along with completely new writing.

I’m disappointed that I’m not going to reach the goal I gave myself, but then I knew it was a rather lofty goal. I’m going to finish out the month strong, and there’ll be a post coming next weekend on reflections of the month and what I’ve learned.

NaNo Speedbump

Laura Highcove

I met and passed the 50k NaNoWriMo goal. The problem I’m finding myself in now, is that I had to stop and organize what I’d written. I had no idea what had happened because I was writing scenes multiple times (yay discovery writer). Organization takes time away from producing words. And with my brother’s wedding and the holiday coming up, it would be hard enough to write 3.5k words a day, much less spend an hour or two reorganizing as well.

So I took a step back to remind myself what I was trying to accomplish this month. I could put out the words, that’s not a problem. But my goal is to write the sequel to The Storyteller and the less organized my writing, the slower my forward progress. Right now I have two or three versions of most of the scenes with only a vague idea of which one is the one I’ll keep.

I realized I was wasting too much time rewriting scenes. I am learning so much from this month, but I can feel that I’m not being efficient by pounding out words, so I’m stopping, reassessing, and reorganizing. Hopefully in a day or two I’ll have a new plan for how many more words I need to get done, and then I can plow ahead.

Starting NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I am now several days into NaNo and it is kicking my butt. This feels more like I remember my first NaNos, when it was a struggle to come up with 1667 words in a day. This month I started off doing 3k a day to reach my goal of 90k for the month. I’m pretty sure that I will never get many words on Fridays, since I work 7:30-5:30 and Friday night is when the hubby and I go grocery shopping, so the whole day is pretty much gone. The plan was to make up Friday’s words on Saturday, like I have in the past. Writing 6k words in a day ruined me pretty hard. This morning (Sunday) it took me three hours to get 1700 words.

I had to shift my approach. I decided I won’t expect any words on Fridays and divied those words to the other days. So now my goal is 3500, six days a week. Am I pushing myself past what is comfortable? Heck yeah, but I can do it for a month, and I have a good reward waiting for myself.

The Huntsman is probably the one story I have the most ‘outline’ for before I started writing it. Mostly because as I was finishing The Storyteller, I filled my head with all the things that needed to happen in the next book(s). As such, my writing process has shifted to a ‘stitcher’, super hard on this book. I am writing scenes in completely random order, as the ideas come to me, because if I don’t write them down then I will forget them. The idea is after I write it all, I will go back to order and smooth it out. This is not entirely dissimilar to my normal writing style, there will just be far more stitching required.

I am having to constantly remind myself that the important thing right now is to get through the words. Get through the story. It’s all there, even if it’s not organized right now. It has been a real struggle.

Working up to NaNoWriMo

Laura Highcove

I did several prompts this past week, and then thought that maybe I should work on actually writing a large number of words a day. In the past I’ve been able to reliably bang out 1000-1500 words in an hour, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been in output mode and not revision mode.

So I decided to work on the short story I had a vague idea about involving Cobalt and Archer. It takes place only a few days after the end of the Storyteller and involves them going to and also going to fix . It ended up being a good thing I did a little practice before NaNoWriMo starts this Tuesday.

Firstly, I had trouble producing words so I had a few days of reminding myself how to push forward through the resistance, as well as remembering the feel of how I get to the place where words flow.

Secondly, it helped me organize some of the fallout from The Storyteller. While that won’t be in The Huntsman, it’s still helpful to have it written out. I’m one of those authors who doesn’t know what I think until I write it down. I can plan all day long, but when I write, I think about it a different way and all the details flow into my brain. Most of the time it kills whatever my plan is and it’s glorious.

I am actually nervous about NaNoWriMo for the first time in several years since I am challenging myself to write 90k words in the month instead of the usual 50k. 50k just became to easy for me and I’ve had no challenge the past few years. Not to say getting out 50k words wasn’t helpful, because it certainly was. It will just be interesting to see if it’s actually possible for me to pop out an entire rough draft in a month, as opposed to it taking two months.

Still no more responses from agents. It only occurs to me now that I don’t know what the procedure is around announcing agent representation. When I (hopefully) find that lucky agent who loves my book, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it public right away. It might be that that only pertains to getting picked up by an editor. Either way, I’ll be sure to post about it as soon as I can.

Next Step

Laura Highcove

I typed a blog post on Saturday saying that I had a plan to finish smoothing the rest of my novel by my deadline of Friday. I let the post sit until Sunday, as I usually do, before posting. In that time I finished smoothing the rest of the novel and sent it out to my beta readers. As such, my plan is finished before the post had time to enter the world. Yay to me.

Then I researched agents who will be at the James River Writer’s Conference that I’m going to this weekend. That didn’t take too much time. I also went to the bookstore to try and find some Arabian fairy tales, but that didn’t work. So now I’m a little lost. I don’t want to start on a new project right before NaNoWriMo. At the same time, I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t spend time on writing. I figure maybe I should just sit down and write and see what happens. I am a discovery writer after all.

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.

Now My Rough Draft is Really Done?

Laura Highcove

I finally completed the last fight of The Storyteller. However, it’s hard to give myself credit for it when I know how much more work there is to do. I know I should give myself credit for finishing, but when I say it’s done, I feel like it really should be done …you know?

At this point, all of the plot is there. According to my own ranking system, now the rough draft of my story is officially done, as all of the prose is there. No more unwritten scenes that need to be added. Well at least not that I’m aware. I’m confidant there is still a lot of work to do. My next step is to go through the story in reverse scene order. My hope is that it will help me greatly with foreshadowing because I’ll know the things I need to foreshadow before I get to the scene where they should be foreshadowed.

Technically this draft is supposed to be ready for beta readers by the end of the month. That’s still my goal. After this next week I should have more of a plan of how much actually needs to be done. I have a feeling my timeline may end up needing to shift. That’s okay, because it’s getting better.