Miles vs. Words

P1050533I love to complete half marathons and I love to write books. I don’t love the day to day training I have to do to complete half marathons and I don’t always love the day to day typing I have to do write books. To get myself to do the training for half marathons I print out running schedules and try to run as far as the chart says to on a certain day. However, I never use charts from writing books that tell what to write on a certain day. Why not? Why does one chart excite me and the other annoy me?

I think it has to do with the type of chart I like. I don’t like running charts that give me extreme detail about not just how far to run but how to run. I know I would be faster if I did more hill repeats or fartleks but since I am a run/walker and live at almost sea level those charts are hard for me to follow. I like the charts that say do X number of miles on a certain day. I enjoy getting out and doing my own thing for as long as the chart says I should. And that is why I don’t follow writing charts. They have too much detail.

Most of the books I have read that have writing charts tell you to work on setting one day and character on another. Since I am a diehard discovery writer (despite trying to change) I may not want to work on setting or character on that day. Instead I would like a chart that says “write X number of words on this day.” Each day of the week would have a variety of word counts, some longer and some shorter. I could write whatever I wanted to but I’d write as much as I was told to do.

“The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.”  ― John Bingham, No Need for Speed: A Beginner’s Guide to the Joy of Running    

Now, it could be said that I might write more if I didn’t have the chart telling me when I should stop. While that is true, if I don’t write at all because I’m not following a chart then I was better off following the chart. I see now that the solution is easy. Turn my running chart into a writing chart. The easiest way would be to make each mile equal one thousand words. Tomorrow it says I should run three miles so I will write three thousand words. I can do that in about one hour so that works for me. My longest runs are on the weekend and that would be my longest word count. Ten thousand words might be too much but I could adjust as needed. It might be more fun to see if I could do it. I like a good challenge. Now it looks like I have one not just for running, but for writing, too.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”  ― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen    

Write Anything (But Ship Also)

IMG_0775One of my goals is to write 500 words a day, every day in 2014. So far I have written everyday and only missed 500 words on two days. Most days I write 800 or more. In January I averaged 891 words a day. This may sound difficult to do but I gave myself only one rule. Write 500 words a day. It doesn’t matter what the 500 words are. Sometimes I type a post for my various websites. Sometimes I work on new projects. And sometimes I type whatever comes into my head.

I have a document called 500 words. Every other day or so I put the date on the page and start writing. This is discovery writing. It has no purpose except to be at least 500 words. I have one series going about a woman who is losing weight and discovering a new life through running. It’s not publishable but it is fun to explore her life. Usually I start something entirely new, with new characters in a new place with a new plot. I find it extremely easy to write these shorts. They have no beginning and no end. They are simply a spark.

Sometimes I feel guilty for writing shorts that are never going to go anywhere. I know I should be working on projects that are shippable. (If you haven’t heard of shipping it is the idea of taking your product and getting it in front of the public. You don’t really have a product until you ship it.) However, I try to remind myself that each of these character and plot shorts could be used someday in a story and what I write today could be invaluable tomorrow.

I am curious if other writers do this…I don’t know what to call it, perhaps, free writing. There are a lot of books and websites out there that have writing prompts. Do these prompts produce free writing? I never use the prompts because I have too many ideas in my own head and don’t need any more. I have often thought of writing a book called “Beginnings.” It would contain nothing but 500ish word story beginnings. Any writer could then take these beginnings and turn them into their own story. I still think this could be fun. I wonder how many beginnings I would need to make a book. I think at least 100. Perhaps my free writing could eventually be shippable, too.

The hardest part of writing for me is shipping it out. It is much easier to keep it in my computer where no one can tell me how bad it is. But I never regret it when I do ship something so I should do it more often. With self-publishing and Amazon it costs me nothing but time and perhaps an editor to publish a book. But just once I’d like to get something published by the big guys (meaning New York publishers). Perhaps not my “Beginnings” book, but something. So I need to ship to the big guys. A lot.

Writing 500 words a day has been a good goal for me. So far I have stuck with it more than any of my other 2014 goals. Maybe I should add a shipping goal to my list. I will ship something to a major publisher once a month. It would be a good start. And just maybe I’ll get less nervous the more I do it.

“The only purpose of starting is to finish, and while the projects we do are never really finished, they must ship.” – Seth Godin

 

Nose to the Grindstone – Completing a Project

answer coverI have gone back and forth on what to do about one of my projects. This novel was completed several years back but I never found an agent for it. I think it is good but so much time has passed that it needed to be overhauled and updated. When I started it twelve years ago cell phones were not common and many other things have changed. I have set my story in a real town and that town has also changed so it was no longer ready to be submitted.

I felt a little overwhelmed because I had worked a long time on this novel and I had a love/hate relationship with it. Did I really want to do more work on it? I didn’t know. But two things happened that made up my mind. One was that I found a new publishing company to send it to and I’d be thrilled if they accepted it. Also I found a beta reader who is also a writer of mysteries. I decided I was done waiting. This week I am fixing my novel. I need to do a lot of research and a little rewriting but I am motivated. If I work on 5 chapters a day I’ll have it done in seven days. I decided to keep a journal of how each day went and what my challenges were.

Chapters 1 – 5

The biggest challenge of my book was rewriting the intro. The first page was extremely boring, even to me. I fretted about how to change it and finally I just deleted it. That was the answer. Sometime things don’t need to be rewritten, they just need to be removed.

I had to double check a lot of facts that I had checked over ten years ago. It is amazing how much has changed. My story is now living in 2014 instead of 1999.

It took me five hours to fix five chapters. I am happy with that. I don’t have much rewriting to do but the amount of research I have to do will increase so I don’t expect the time needed to decrease. I split the time up into two sessions, which worked well.

Chapters 6 – 10

The research is going well. In fact I thought I was going to have to dump a great scene but I got to keep it thanks to the research I did. I know you are supposed to kill your darlings but it was a great character scene. Of course my future editor might kill it but we’ll deal with that later.

Most of the research I did reconfirmed what I had already written. I guess the world hasn’t changed that much. I have found it both liberating and frustrating that a lot of my queries have really shallow answers. For example I wanted to know the date of the county fair. I found it readily enough but I didn’t find any details about the fair itself. Since all I needed was the date I let it go, but it might have been interesting to know more. That would be for me and not the book though, and all that matters is the book.

This book is solid. It bothers me a little that it took thirteen years for this book to be this solid. I hope my next story solidifies a lot faster.

Chapters 11 – 14 and query letter

I only edited four chapters today and they were fairly straightforward, not much research and very little rewriting. I need to do a lot of research to make chapter 15 accurate so I decided to save it for when I am rested tomorrow.

I also worked on my query letter. To get a fresh mindset I sat at Starbucks and wrestled with it. The past is so important to the story that I needed a way to describe it in my query while still focusing on the present story. I think I have a good first draft and will look at it again once I’ve finished my final edit of the book. I still have to work on the synopsis, which scares me to death, but I think that will be the last step before I send this story off on Tuesday.

Chapter 15 – 20

I postponed chapter 15 because I thought it would have a lot of changes, but it turned out to need very little change. Mostly I just removed extraneous items. I’m deep in the story now and it is filled with talking to possible suspects. I hope I have added enough startling events to keep the action up. I am very happy with the book, but then I wrote it and I should like it. I hope in the end other people like it, too.

I found a timeline for the book that I thought was accurate. Turned out it was from a much earlier version of the story. I had to go through and update it. It was fascinating to see how much the story has changed. It is definitely better now. The calendar is extremely useful because my story takes place over a couple weeks and it would be really easy to forget what day of the week it was.

Chapters 21 – 25

There wasn’t much research to do today. I mostly had to make sure that if I said they were in the kitchen in one paragraph I hadn’t moved them to a different room in the second paragraph. That is very easy to do.

I did remove a subplot in one of the chapters. It was more like a sub-subplot. I wasn’t going to explain it or even conclude it in this book. Instead it would tie to a book far in the future. But I decided I didn’t need it and it brought confusion to the story so I ditched it. One of the things I love about Harry Potter is that she mentions things in passing in book 1 and they become extremely important in book 3. That is great foreshadowing. I’d like to do that but not in the way I first thought.

Chapter 26 – Epilogue

This was the easiest part. I had the ending fixed for years. I changed very little and was pleased to be done.

The epilogue was interesting because I wrote in both POVs in one chapter. That is the only time I did that in the whole book and I had to be careful to not mix them up.  Still, it allowed me to end the book the way I wanted to.

Synposis

I am really bad at writing a synopsis and I wish I didn’t have to. Since I have no choice I went looking for a template on the internet. I found something that helped but it still took me about eight hours to write 1700 words and get them right. I’ve never spent that long on a synopsis and it is by far the best one I’ve ever written. Of course the test is whether it gets my manuscript read.

So a week from when I started this project I double-checked all my documents and sent it off to Carina Press using their online submission program. I do not need an agent to publish with Carina Press and after being rejected by numerous agents over the years I was ready to go in a different direction.

I’ll know in a month whether this week of having my nose to the grindstone was worth it. If my book is rejected I will probably set it aside again and work on new books. Perhaps it is meant to be my practice book or maybe it is meant to be published. I’ll know soon enough.

“Persevere!” J. K. Rowling

 

 

 

The Lure of a New Idea

IMG_3998One of the reasons I love National Novel Writing Month is because I get to start with a blank slate. I love typing those first words on an empty page. I love the potential of a story. I love the thrill of discovery. But once those words are on the page they need to be edited and rewritten until they are polished and ready for the world.

I was glancing at my goal list for 2014 and I noticed that all of my current projects are in the editing stage right now. With the exception of my blogs I am not writing many words each day. I am enjoying the research and enduring the editing needed to polish my current projects but I miss the thrill of writing a new story. So it is time to start again.

I thought long and hard about what project to start and as usual it quickly grew into a series. I have a first draft mystery from the 2009 Nanowrimo (I wrote 100,000 words that November) but I have not looked at it since then. I was considering mystery niches to write in and two came to mind. While one person could fill these niches I wanted to explore them separately. I then thought back to what I call my “wandering mystery” and realized I had a connection. Instead of writing one mystery series I will write three.

Three series about three sisters. One has had great tragedy in her life and prefers to wander by herself. One is an overbearing busybody who wants to mother everyone, but especially her loner sister. If it wasn’t for her running habit she’d drive everyone insane. And the third sister will be a fossil preparer. (Dinosaurs!) She is a widow and content to let everyone be who they want to be. She minds her own business until she is forced to get involved.

I know a lot about the wandering sister, a little about the mothering sister, and nothing about the content sister. But now that they exist in my mind I think about them a lot. Book one is obviously in the editing stage but I am eager to write book two and see who these women are. This is not a short term idea and has to be balanced with my editing and short story projects but with luck it will be something I can send to the big boys (I mean NY agents.) I can’t wait to find out.

“Murder mysteries are puzzles that are fun to resolve.” Kathy Reichs (creator of Bones)