Tag: writing

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.

Out to Beta Readers

Laura Highcove

So this week I finished up my rough draft of The Storyteller. I then went through and did a quick read of the entire book, fixed up a few things, held myself back from fixing other things, and then compiled and sent it out to my beta readers. There’s not much more to my week than that, except in that reading the story in its completion, I got the sense that maybe the bad parts aren’t quite as bad as I thought they were. It needs work, sure, but it might actually all be there. Now I just have to wait for my beta readers to get back to me. Hopefully they’ll have some helpful advice that will help me improve the story even more.

Resistance to Finishing

Laura Highcove

So I ran into some major resistance this week with my story. And I kind of knew I was having resistance, and I let myself resist. I’m still not entirely sure if the resistance comes from the fact that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make this fight scene satisfying, or because I know that once this scene is done, the story is ready for beta readers. It might be a little bit of both.

Truth be told, it might also come from the fact that I don’t know how to finish. This will be the first time that I am going to be able to say to myself that my rough draft is actually done enough that I am letting other people read it and asking them for real, actually feedback. There is no more “oh I’ll add that later”. It needs to all be in there.

Now that’s not to say things won’t change after this. But this will be a first. A first I’m resisting. It’s always funny when people talk about the ‘fear of success’, but it really is a thing.

My mind is even trying to push me on to other stories, having great ideas for things not related to this story, in a wild attempt to distract me from finishing. Even as I’m writing this blog post. This was the time I was supposed to sit down and use for writing but I’m writing this blog post instead. It’s good to get my concerns out, but at a certain point it’s just procrastination. Back to work.

Taking Stock

Laura Highcove

So this week I spent going through the story and taking stock of the progression of all of my main characters and their relationships toward each other while ignoring everything else. It actually gave me some good insights into Tabitha and Wildrose’s relationship toward the end of the book.

And it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. Is everything perfect? Nope, but it is good enough for now. Then I decided to go through and look at all the comments I have and pull out the things that really need to be fixed. And I found myself able to pass over some things that weren’t all that important, that last week I would’ve stressed out over. The list that I have isn’t even that bad. I am feeling confidant about my ability to get this story out to beta readers before too long.

Tomorrow I plan on giving it a quick read through to find any problems I might not have marked with comments. Shouldn’t take too long as I know which scenes are lovely and beautiful and which are not. And that one pesky scene I am convinced I need but have still not been able to write. I’m going to have to nail that down this week for sure.

Also, in case you didn’t notice, I have a sign up for my new Newsletter over on the right hand side. If you sign up then you can get the current version of Chapter One of The Storyteller. Please sign up and let me know what you think.

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.

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.

Miniatures to Play Out a Fight Scene

Laura Highcove

So I wanted to do this post last week, and then life got in the way, so here I am getting it done now.

Last week I worked on the final fight in the Cinderella tale, which has a lot of moving parts. I decided the best way to keep track of everything was to pull out a play-mat and some miniatures and play out the positioning and movement of everyone in the fight. I took the pictures with my camera phone, so some of them are blurry, but I labeled them so you can see where everyone is.

You can see the terrain drawn onto the map if you look closely.

Yep, that says ‘large hellbeast’.

Wildrose is kiting.

omg, what is the Prince of Goldfield doing?

Everyone in a pile.

And it ended up helping me more than I thought it would to have it all laid out here. Mostly because it showed who would be able to see what better than me just picturing it in my head.

I also fell behind on my writing because of life happening last weekend, so I’ve been working hard to catch back up. Not sure if I’ll be done by May like I planned. Then I only have a month to smooth everything out for my beta readers in June. I suppose if I have to push it back a few weeks or a month it won’t be the end of the world, but I’m going to try and keep that from happening.

Time for Fights

Laura Highcove

So as I established the week before last, I am horrible at conflict, and so it directly follows that I am horrible at writing conflict, which leads me to be horrible at writing fights scenes (verbal as well as physical). But, at the same time, I write fantasy, a genre in which people are much more likely to be competent in a fighting style, and use said fighting style against an opponent, than in non-fantasy.

I have fifteen fight scenes in this book, though the final fight is three “notecards” because it’s in three parts. Luckily, my husband is *very* good at writing fight scenes. Yesterday I went over the first three fights with him for motivations and rough choreograph and today I cleaned up two of them and wrote one from scratch. However, I am actually pretty happy with how they’re shaping up so far.

So I have twelve more to write, (Then of course I have to clean them up) and three weeks to write them. That means four a week with a whole week to work on the final fight. Considering I usually give myself a week for a whole chapter, that seems like it will be about right.

I do need to work on being more disciplined with my writing though. I do well when I have only a little time, but if I give myself a large block, I really end up distracted. It’s not horrible for now, but if I ever make the jump to writing full time, or even more than I’m doing now, I think I’ll run into trouble.

No Good Title

Laura Highcove

I completed the revision pass on time, though as you can see, I am posting this a bit late, because I didn’t write it till late, because I was pounding away at my revision through Saturday. Sunday was our Wrestlemania party, for which we cook.

So here I am to tell you that it is indeed done, and I am on to step one of writing my fight scenes better, which includes looking over the 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons character sheets that my husband made for all of the main characters. I’ll probably write a more in depth analysis about why I decided to do this and how it’s helped, but for now I’m getting all my ducks in a row and hammering out exactly what remnants and artifacts everyone has so I know what they can do.

Total guess on the timeline: I want to have the character sheets finalized by Friday. Then it will be time to work with my husband on choreography. There are approximately 15 fights, a few of which are mere scuffles and three of which are just different phases of the same fight.

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.