Doing The (Head) Hop; or, Whose Line Is It, Anyway?

(Sigh. This is actually last week's entry. This week's entry is still to come.)

Yesterday, I got out one of my older works-in-progress, a Regency romance that I started way back when years started with "19" instead of "20". It's so old that the original filename had only 8 characters, because that's all DOS would let you have. Yeah, that old.

Now, this story has some problems. Problem #1 is the length. The original version came out to be about 230,000 words. That's about 130K-150K more words than any Regency publisher -- or even any romance publisher -- will even look at.

I went through and gave it a pretty stringent edit pass, but it's still at about 188K.

In a sci-fi/fantasy story, the solution would be simple: Split it into two books. There's even a spot where it might make sense to do that. However, Regency readers are not usually well-disposed toward series. They want the tale told in one story, from the once upon a time to the happily ever after, and that's that. In rare cases, you can come back and revisit a world, maybe focusing on different characters the second time through, but the main characters from your first story should be peripheral characters in the new work, at best.

So that won't work.

I'm still trying to trim the story down. I think there are places where I ramble (who, me?), and places where scenes start too early or go on too long. I'm hopeful that I can make more edits.

But Problem #2 is even more insidious.

One thing that going back to read older works does for me is to show me ways in which I have grown as a writer. Like most writers, I developed some bad habits early on. One of my "bad habits" is to write in first person. I really do feel more comfortable in that POV; it just comes naturally to me. And with first person, you only have one POV to worry about. If it didn't happen where the POV saw it, or could learn about it some other way, then you can't show it. Your MC doesn't know what other people are thinking. He/she has to discern it from their speech and actions.

The Regency story was one of my first attempts to write in third person. I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't very good at it when I started out, though I think I've improved some since. (Practice, practice, practice!) And one of the most egregious sins I committed, back in this earlier work, is Head Hopping.

I've since learned that, while a story can be written in an omniscient POV, meaning that there isn't really a main POV character, and the story is told from a narrator's perspective, this is not what I had done. A story can also be written with a shifting POV, meaning that in one scene, the reader is seeing the story from one character's perspective, while in the next, they may be seeing it from another's.

I had done neither of these Instead, in almost every scene, I moved from one character's head to another, showing what he/she was feeling at the moment. In other words, Head Hopping. Thanks to my on-line critique group, I'm much better at recognizing it when I do it (they won't let me get away with even the tiniest little hop!), but back when I wrote this story, I obviously didn't have a clue. It's made even more complicated by the fact that the female MC (Annalise) spends the first third of the story dressed as a boy (I know, I know, but I did it anyway). So in one line, I have her employer/love interest (the Earl) referring to her as "lad", and then the next line will start with something like, "She thought..." Very confusing.

Here's an example, where I move from one character's head to another, to another, to another, in the space of about five paragraphs:

There was no telling how long the two of them would have sat there, gazing into each other’s eyes, had Latham not chanced to spy a pair of riders approaching them. [LATHAM's POV] Blast the man, he thought to himself. Did he to be so damnably prompt? Before he could think of a way to explain the Earl’s presence to Miss Mannerly, the two riders were upon them.

The two men exchanged greetings. Then the Earl noticed Miss Mannerly’s presence for the first time [THE EARL's POV] and tipped his hat to her. “Miss ... I apologize, I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Latham jumped in. “Miss Mannerly, please allow me to present William Waverley, Earl of Farlsborough. Farlsborough, this is Miss Sarah Mannerly.”

Sarah felt a cloud of doom settle over her. [SARAH's POV] An Earl. She would never be able to complete the day’s ride without making a spectacular fool of herself. Preoccupied, she missed the Earl’s cursory introduction of his new tiger.

Annalise, meanwhile, had recognized Jasmine from afar, and quickly identified her cousin Sarah as the mare’s rider. [ANNALISE's POV] She pulled her cap down over her eyes as far as it could go and tried to shrink down into her saddle. Fortunately, a tiger was expected to follow along well behind the other riders, and Sarah’s attention seemed to be absorbed by the two gentlemen riding on either side of her. Annalise could only hope that she would escape detection after all.

Yup. Almost every paragraph starts with a new POV character.

It can be fixed, of course. What I'll probably do, in the case of the scene above, is take the preceding material up to "the two were upon them" and put it in Latham's perspective, and then put in a scene break and recast the rest from Annalise's POV.

Doing this will probably help with the word count problem, too. Instead of having a paragraph on how Sarah feels a sense of impending doom, I can have a single line where Annalise sees her cousin fidgeting nervously, and let the reader draw her own conclusions. It'll be stronger writing, too, because I'll be showing you what Sarah feels, instead of telling you.

So has anyone else committed the sin of Head Hopping? How did you go about fixing it?

Hoppy Easter!

And They Will Come Home, A-Wagging Their Tails; or, Stating The Obvious

When I was a kid, my brothers and I had a record player with which we were allowed to play. It would only play 45 rpms--and it played them at about 42 1/2 rpms.

For the most part it didn't matter. We didn't have very many records we could play, anyway. Mom and Dad had more, but they were the good records, and we weren't allowed to play with them. The ones we had were mostly novelty records.

One of the records was titled, "It's In The Book," by a fellow named Johnny Standley. Side A of the record (yes, this was still when you had to turn records over to hear the other side. By hand.) was a line by line examination of "Little Bo Peep."

Thanks to the magic of the internets, you can listen to it here:

	Johnny Standley - It's In The Book .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

(You might have to enter a code to hear it.)

Feel free to stop listening when the singing starts. Unless you want to hear the B side, which is a somewhat amusing ditty called "Grandma's Lye Soap." I thought it was hysterical when I was six.

But the part I wanted to discuss today was the dissection of "Little Bo Peep."

Sometimes, when I'm writing, I get carried away with the rhythm of the words, with how they sound in my mind. I'll write long passages full of repetition and extra verbiage, when I didn't really need to. And sometimes, that's nice. It helps define my voice, and keeps what I've written from turning into a bare recitation of facts.

But sometimes, it just makes me look silly. Kind of like:

The man said she lost her sheep, turns right around and boldly states, "she doesn't know where to find them", and then has the stupid audacity to say, "Leave them alone."

Now...now, now, think for a moment, think! If the sheep were lost, and you couldn't find them, you'd have to leave them alone, wouldn't you?

So for me, at least, the challenge lies in finding just the right balance between enough description to be interesting and not so much that it bogs down the story.

It's something I'm still working on.

How do other people approach the problem?

Blog As Writing Tool; or Making My LiveJournal Earn Its Keep

Anybody besides me out there still using LiveJournal? Blogger's cool and all, and Facebook and Twitter have their uses, but I still love LJ. Because it lets me do things none of these other tools can do.

Confession time again: I've been using my LJ to keep track of my story ideas for a couple of years now.

It started one day when I was at work, and a really cool story idea popped into my head. It was in the B.N. days (Before Netbook), so I couldn't just whip out my netbook (which does come with me to work most days) and add it to my existing ideas file. (Everyone has an ideas file, right? Someplace to keep notes about all of the cool ideas you haven't had a chance to write into stories yet? If you don't, you should start one.)

Now, I had choices. I could have e-mailed it to myself, or saved it in a Word document and put it on my data stick, or even just written it down on a sticky note. But all of those things required that I follow up later and take the idea from wherever I've left it and put it into my ideas file.

Instead, I jotted a quick sticky-note to myself, and then on my lunch hour, I went out to my LiveJournal and posted it as a private entry. So I can see it, but nobody else.

This also has the advantage that I can add a tag ("Story Ideas") so that I can later sort by that tag in order to see all of my ideas. And it means that as long as I'm in range of a computer, or have a few data hits left on my phone for the month, I can save my story ideas before they wander off.

Private entries are good for other things as well. I've written entire story chunks as blog entries, as well as story outlines, when I couldn't get to my netbook for some reason. Handy stuff.

Another LJ feature that I've used a couple of times in the past is polls. It's fairly easy to create an LJ poll and use it to poll your friends list to get input for a story. In the past, prior to NaNoWriMo, I've put up polls of story ideas and asked which should be my NaNo project for that year. And for those who missed it, there was the whole saga of "Naming Nicholas Fletcher," where one of my characters expressed dissatisfaction with the name I'd given him. I used LJ to garner suggestions, and then ran a poll to see what the final name should be.

Nicholas still shows up once in a while to kvetch about how I'm writing him. And the dialogues we've had have been an excellent way for me to get to know his character better. So that makes another handy way to use LJ as a writing tool.

Finally, I also participate in an on-line critique group where all of our work is done via LJ. LJ works really well for this sort of thing; you can create a community, and then post entries that are only visible to the community. That keeps our work private, and allows us to avoid the whole question of whether or not first publishing rights have been violated. And then, we leave our critiques for each piece in the comments.

So I guess, aside from word processing programs, LJ is my favorite writing tool.

Do other folks have favorite software/utilities/applications that weren't designed as writing tools, but that you find handy anyway?

(p.s. This entry? Written ahead of time and stored on LJ until it came time to post it here...)

Airships and Boilers and Gears, Oh My; or Getting My Steampunk On

Beloved Husband and I are spending the weekend at a steampunk convention. It has been a good convention, if a bit less busy than most of the conventions we attend. But it has been very inspiring to see all of the energy and creativity people are putting into this. Nearly all of the attendees are in at least some attempt at a costume, and some of the costumes are incredible.

There have been some good panels, too, ranging from one on Weird West Tales to one on Bartitsu (an obscure but wicked-cool Victorian martial art).

I love coming to conventions like this, because after a while, when I've been toiling away on whatever writing project is at the forefront of my mind, I reach a point where I simply need some outside stimulation. I may not come up with any new story ideas directly, but I might find a new way of looking at the work I've done, or the characters I've created.

So while I haven't had any earth-shattering epiphanies this weekend, or had any conversations about my writing with anyone, I do feel as though my creative batteries are being recharged. I have some thoughts about changes I should make to the first Winterbourne story, and (after seeing the bartitsu demo) I want to re-vamp a fight scene from the second book, and write some notes about one for the as-yet-unwritten third volume of the series. I feel energized and ready to go on my current round of editing for Book 1.

Not to mention that I've been enjoying the almost-endless parade of gentlemen in top hats and well-cut tail coats and yummy waistcoats!

Where do other people go to recharge their batteries? Do you get more benefit out of an activity related to your writing, or something totally unrelated, like a spa day?

Dealing With Distractions; or, Of Course I Can Write With A Video Of Goats Singing 'The Blue Danube Waltz' Playing In The Background!

Sometimes, it's just hard to focus on writing.

Whether we like it or not, Real Life™ can raise its ugly head when we least expect it. And at least for those of us for whom writing is not our sole means of income, it's okay to set aside the writing for a time while we deal with the curves life throws us. The story will be there waiting for us when we come back to it. We might even find that we've discovered new insights into plot or character problems in the meantime.

But sometimes it isn't the big, life-shattering crises that keep us from channeling our best energies into our work. Sometimes it's the guy two tables over in the coffee shop, with the obnoxious ring-tone and the near-constant, over-loud cell phone conversations. Sometimes it's the television playing in the background while the dishwasher's running and the kids are either about to kill each other, or they just did. Or maybe it's just too quiet...so quiet you can hear the faucet in the downstairs bathroom going drip ... drip ... drip ...

I'm trying to learn to work through these kinds of distractions, but it isn't easy. It doesn't help that some days, I have the attention span of a gnat to begin with. Nor, sad to say, does it help that I share my office with my Beloved Husband. I love him dearly. Really, I do. But it's really hard to stay focused on a story amidst intermittent snorts of laughter as he pages through the day's LOL_Cats. Or watches the occasional goat video*. The fact that, when I'm trying to visualize a scene, I will either stare off into space (in hopes that the scene is written there), or close my eyes (because someone might have posted the key to my scene on the insides of my eyelids) only contributes to the problem. Because if I'm staring off into space, I'm obviously not writing. Right?

There are ways of dealing with distractions, of course.

• While my headphones are not the noise-canceling kind, with the "Pirates of the Caribbean" soundtrack blasting through them, I'm not certain it makes a lot of difference.
• At times in the past, I've designated a certain hat to be my "writing hat," a portable "do not disturb" sign that says, "Please don't bother me just now."
• It's also nice that our sleep cycles are not quite in synch. Bedtime for him is usually around 10:00 pm, while I'm more of a night-owl and usually can't get to sleep anytime before midnight. Those two hours? They're mine! {insert evil mad scientist laugh here}
• If I find that I keep stopping to check e-mail, Live Journal, Facebook, or Twitter, I'll either shut my browser, or give myself limits: Can't check Facebook until I finish this chapter, can't open e-mail until I've met my word count for the day.
• And sometimes...well, sometimes, I just let the distractions happen. As Beloved Husband points out, "You need some breaks. You can't just work straight through." (Though he also claims that he only distracts me "a little bit," a statistic that has yet to be proven!)

These methods aren't always successful, of course. But they're the best I've come up with so far.

What are other people's strategies for dealing with distractions?


* What? You thought I was kidding about the goats? I wasn't. I swear. There I was, trying to write, when Beloved Husband discovered this:



I couldn't make that up if I tried!

In The Home Stretch; or Are We There Yet?

(I know, I know. This is actually last Thursday's posting, running a little late again. I'll try to do tomorrow's on time...)

So here I am, closing in on the end of my current Work In Progress, the second volume of the now four-volume Winterbourne trilogy. (I know. Shut up.) And, as usually happens at this point in a story, I just really really want to be done with it. I love these characters, love spending time with them, love making their lives ever-so-interesting. But even loving them as I do, there comes a time when I just want their story out of my head and down on paper (or at least in electronic bits), and to say that it is finished.

I want to spend a little time with some of my other stories and characters, and spend some time editing (because Inner Editor has been more-or-less on a leash since November, and she's getting REALLY cranky). So part of me is tempted to just get it done any old way, so I can set it aside for a while and use my few brain cells for other things for a few weeks.

But of course, the other part of me wants to get it right. I know it can (and will) be edited later, but I have to at least capture the essence of each scene, even if the details change. There are seeds I need to plant for later development, and I have to make sure I at least get them in there, even if I want to bury them a little deeper before the story sees the light of day. And one of the few remaining scenes I have to write is a confrontation between Celia Winterbourne and her father. There are reasons why the two sides are mutually incompatible, and no compromise can be reached. My challenge is to present it so that neither side appears to be totally unreasonable or overly emotional. Nor can either side appear to give in. (Yes, that "appear to" is very important.) At least not until the very final scene of the story.

So in some respects, I feel as though I still have a long way to go, while in others, I can almost reach out and touch the end of the long dark tunnel of this story. It makes me feel like a little kid in the back seat of my parents' station wagon again, asking every five minutes, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?!"

And Mom keeps answering, "Five more minutes."

I just wish I could tell, at this point, whether it'll be worth the trip. Because, yes, I have also reached the point where I'm certain the entire story sucks and no one would ever want to read it. It happens. I'm aware that it happens. That doesn't keep it from happening.

What sorts of challenges do other people face in completing a story? Are endings easy or hard? Are we there yet?




(Anyone care to take a guess as to what the final word count for this story will be? Hint: > 150,000 words and < 200,000. Yes, really.)

You're Out Of Order; or Writing The Ending First

I have another confession to make. (I seem to make them fairly frequently on this blog.)

I've already written the last scene of my current Work In Progress. Even though I have not yet finished all of the scenes that lead up to it. And in fact, I've just pasted two scenes into the story that I wrote a month ago, but hadn't added in because the story hadn't progressed that far yet.

This -- writing out of order -- is something I rarely do, and for a couple of reasons.

First, I usually find that when I know how a story is going to end, it's difficult to generate spontaneity in earlier sections. If I know I'm writing a character out at the end of Chapter 29, and I write her demise before I write everything else leading up to her demise, I'm likely to treat her differently than I would have otherwise. Perhaps I'll have her pull back from a relationship where she really should have moved ahead; or perhaps I'll make her take a foolish risk that she would never have taken in a million years.

And the second reason is that there is a risk that once you get to the section you wrote ahead of time, it just won't fit into the story anymore. Your characters may have grown in unexpected ways, or you might have found a way to fit the key parts of the scene into the story in another, better way. Though that also happened to me recently: Two of my characters had had a fight with each other, and I had a long, drawn-out, wordy reconciliation scene planned out for them, but at the end of the previous scene, it was just right for the two of them to say, "I'm sorry," and move on.

Of course, one school of thought says that you should outline the story you want to tell, and then just work on whatever section strikes your fancy on a given day. Unless you're a more thorough outliner than I am, though, this could be frustrating, as it might prove difficult to keep your characters consistent and to keep them moving along their arcs as they should. I did try this method once, back in my early writing days. It's probably worth noting that the story never did get finished, mostly because I never seemed to get around to writing "the boring bits": the scenes that filled in the background and provided transitions and held the story together. One might argue that if the missing parts really were that boring, perhaps they did not belong in the story at all; but it's just as likely that what they really needed was someone to write them who was better at incorporating necessary information into the story without getting all info-dumpy.

So if writing out of order is so problematic, why did I do it this time? Mostly, I'll confess, because I was otherwise stalled on one of the two main tracks of the story, and I hoped that if I pushed ahead on the other one, it would break things free on the first one. (And it did!)

But another reason was because there were certain character moments and certain turns of phrase that I wanted to make certain to capture while they were still in my mind. All too often, I think about a scene ahead of time, and work out just how the dialogue will go, until it's just perfect...only to have it completely disappear out of my head when it comes time to actually sit down and write that scene.

And the final reason, in this case, was the weather. I can see you wondering: What does the weather have to do with it? Well, we had some painfully cold weather here in January and early February (high temperatures that never got above 0 degrees F), and two of the scenes I wrote were set during cold weather. So I wanted to write them while my toes still ached from having been outside in that kind of weather. I wanted to capture the feeling of frigid air in my lungs while it was still fresh in my mind. I know that if I had waited until now to write those scenes (we've been having highs in the 50s and 60s F), it would have been more difficult to distill the essence of that kind of cold down to a few paragraphs.

So do other people always begin at the beginning of the story and write straight through to the end, or do you skip around, depending on how you feel on a given day?