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Morning Pages–Or Just Journaling

20 Wednesday Jun 2012

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Julia Cameron is probably most well remembered among creative people for her introduction of Morning Pages.  This is a daily exercise in journaling–or brain dumping, really.  I’ve done Morning Pages on and off for the last several years, and it’s something I highly recommend to other creative people of any sort–wordsmithing and far beyond.

So what do you write in morning pages?  Anything.  Lists, rambling, rants, whatever is going through your mind.  The goal is to get out the junk and get your creative juices going in about 3 handwritten pages (or, in the online incarnation, 750 words).  In recent months, my practice of writing morning pages got me through a lot of jumbled thoughts regarding my day job, whether or not I wanted to move, and how I wanted to prioritize my life.  I also used it to get out my story bits that were running through my head, until I ran out for a particular story (and then I knew whether or not I had full stories going around my head, or just bits).

The hardest part about morning pages for me was being candid and honest to myself and not worrying about whether or not anyone else was going to read the blandest, ugliest, or most confused of my thoughts.  This in itself is a good practice, because in writing we can’t hit our readers the hardest if we can’t be honest with ourselves about the story.  (And, of course, the importance of being honest with ourselves–many of us lie to ourselves more than anyone else.)

Most days, my morning pages took about 15 minutes.  Sometimes more, rarely less.   I believe all of us have time for this, or should make time for it.  That said, (speaking of honesty) I fall off of doing mine for large chunks of time.  It’s not about the 15 minutes… well, really, I don’t know why I’m not doing it.  I think because of the concept of them being morning pages, I get busy in the morning and then forget until the evening.  And they are morning pages, right?

Still, if it’s a little thing that’s getting me hung up, then maybe I should just call it journaling, and say that I try to journal regularly.  Whatever it is you do, I recommend spending some time with your daily thoughts and recording them–brilliant or bland–in a private forum for which you are the only audience.  Many people blog publicly to do this, but I don’t feel it’s the same–blogging is a public forum with an audience that is not you.  Try going back to private diaries for a while–online or offline; morning or night–and see what happens.

Do you journal?  Do you feel it’s critical to your creativity?

On Daily Word Counts

06 Wednesday Jun 2012

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When I wrote my first completed novel, I had a goal of 10 long-hand pages a day. When I wrote my second novel (my first NaNoWriMo), I had a goal of 1667 words a day. Continuing on through several other novels, I had daily word count goals, and most days I met or exceeded them. I participated in word-count challenges with fellow writers and I had fun.

But then I stopped making my word count goals. I tried again, on and off, but it didn’t stick.

What happened? I’ve been thinking about this for years, trying to find the answer, and I think that I’ve finally found it–the fuel ran out.

Daily word counts are a tool–and whether a good or bad one depends on the writer. They are a measuring stick designed to get us to make progress. We like quantifying and numbers and charts. We see them all the time, and in something like writing a story, it’s nice to be able to quantify it, isn’t it?

It is, but at the same time, I think setting word count goals need to be combined with other motivations. In my past prolific novelist life, when I could write nearly as long as you’d let me, it gave me a stopping mark. A place to say, “Okay, I’ve done it. Time to fold the laundry.” However, without the fuel of passion, word counts became a grind. During past NaNoWriMos, I’d heard people telling others that if they got stuck on their words to (literally) throw non-sequitor ninjas into the story or an explosion. And if that works, that’s fabulous. But it also impressed on me that when you’re doing that, you might just be writing for the numbers, not the story. In that case, I think it’s more valuable to not worry about your word count and spend some time figuring out what happens next, or why you’ve hit the stumbling block you have.

Storytelling is an art, and art can be difficult to formulate into numbers because numbers are far easier to grasp and understand than your imagination. Word counts are made with good intentions–a goal post to make deadlines–a sign of progress–but they aren’t the end all of storytelling.

So if you aren’t writing to word count, what is the alternatives?
1) Writing until you feel done (or you run out of time).
2) Writing to the end of the scene.
3) Writing until the end of the chapter.
4) Writing until you reach the end of the event in the story (which may or may not fall under 2 or 3).
5) Timed writing.

Options 2-5 still have a feeling of “word count” goal writing, and while Option 1 is my preference, I recognize that it’s vague. Yet I still think of the days when I set 1,000-word goals, and regularly got 2,000-3,000 words in a sitting–on those days, I simply wrote until I was done, and I was satisfied–and satisfied with what I got. Nothing felt forced or invented just to keep the words coming.

Not all parts of storytelling are activities we look forward to–revising seems to cause a common procrastination malady and needing to set goals to gain progress (which I also found hard–if I do 10 pages a day and those 10 pages are clean, does that mean I get the day off?). At the same time, many of us are telling stories simply because we want to tell stories. I want to believe that if we are truly excited enough about this story that’s in our minds, we won’t need number goals to get us through the story. Idealistic? Yes. I’m not saying that word count goals are, in themselves, terrible, but they can be a crutch to be aware of. In recent years, a hard goal of X words a day hasn’t worked, and neither has something vague like “write when I want to.”

Yet, I remember those days–those days when I had word counts, but they weren’t the point. Telling the story was. I haven’t found the path back there yet, but maybe when the right idea steals me away again….

Is It Too Soon to Think About NaNoWriMo?

29 Tuesday May 2012

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Last week, Mike talked about NaNoWriMo and getting started now in your planning. Since every writer has a different process, I thought I’d throw in my thoughts, too.

I started doing NaNoWriMo in 2002, and continued on steadily until about 2007, “winning” each year and setting new challenges. Over the next couple of years following, I tried it and stalled out, and then eventually decided that NaNoWriMo wasn’t a good practice for me anymore and I haven’t even attempted for the last three years.

Being a chronic overachiever, I wanted to do more than just 50,000 words; I wanted to write a whole novel–usually in the 80-100k range for me. In my second winning year I achieved 50,000 words in about 10 days, and finished the novel at 100k words in 22 days. It was a rush, and a lot of fun and I’m glad I did it, because it taught me what I could do when I put my mind to it. (Even if I never touched it again.)

During Novembers, I always went in with a plan–some kind of outline. Unlike Mike, I didn’t start thinking too hard about it several months ahead (I was working on other novels the rest of the year). I like to write while the fire is hot–if I’m feeling passionate enough about a story that I can write 50k in a month, then if I start planning it in May, it’s going to be written long before November rolls around. I’m fickle and when I’m invested in a story, I turn out the first draft quickly. Any story I started planning now, well, honestly, I would probably be bored of by the time November rolled around, and I’d start on a new idea instead.

That said, the years I faltered, I didn’t have much of a plan, and I’m certain that’s one of the reasons I didn’t complete. (Another reason was burn-out, and that’s what fed into lack of planning.)

So, I agree with Mike in that a plan is going to make your trip through November easier. I usually started digging into my planning and research in September or October, and inevitably during November, I would make changes to my outline as I ran into issues or had new ideas. But I had something going in, and that’s important. My outlines ran anywhere from 2 pages to 20 pages, and some stories worked well that way and others didn’t.

As we get nearer, I’ll talk about varying story-survival techniques that have (and haven’t) worked for me, and maybe you’ll find something that sparks an idea for you.

***

So the question, of course, is do I plan on doing NaNoWrimo this year? Truthfully, I haven’t decided. I don’t have any burning stories that scream “write me in November” at the moment. If I do between now and then, I may dive in. If I don’t then I’ll cheer on Mike and the rest of you from the sidelines.

The Star of the Show

15 Tuesday May 2012

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This last weekend, I was an at excellent live action roleplaying game. The theme was a pulp adventure, so there were lots of high stakes and drama, but one thing that occurred to me as we ran through the adventure is that there were approximately 25 main characters in this story. They were all unique characters with their own motivations and depth, and watching us all funneled through a storyline was quite the interesting experience.

LARPs are an art form all their own and nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of it, but it got me to thinking about story media in which there are singular–or at least smaller sets–of stars in the show, and how we define them.

One of my particular weaknesses in building characters is that I like to make plain Janes who have interesting people they support around them. I think this tends to be because I, personally, prefer to be in the role of a supporting cast and crew (which I’ll talk more about next week). That’s all fine and good in life, but when you’re building a star for a particular story, you’re looking at a different spectrum of qualities.

For example, one of my first LARP character ideas for this game was a young woman who had basically been raised on an salvage/mercenary airship, who had an eccentric godfather as the captain and lead of this crew. She was a sometimes adventurer, and otherwise jill-of-all-trades support. I mulled over this idea for a few weeks, but knew it was missing a spark. Ultimately, I realized she was a support member for a cast of more interesting NPCs who would not appear in the game.

Now, in her own story, she could emerge as the star of the show, or perhaps I could take a deeper look at the cast and have someone else emerge as the star of the show and let her remain as support, but none of this would have worked well in a LARP, in which there are 25 stars of the show–each with their own wildly divergent personal storylines. So I’ve kept the idea for a later story.

In an archaeological fantasy novel I was plotting some time ago, the main character was a concubine who had a secret an archaeologist very much needed. I puttered on this story for a while as well, and eventually when talking to a friend, she succinctly said, “So your main character is basically just a plot device?” and I realized I needed to take a deeper look. In that case, I decided she would make better support cast to the archaeologist, who had more at stake in this story.

Even in an ensemble cast, such as the trio from the Harry Potter books, there is a primary character, even if the supporting characters are just half a step away. Harry, in those books, has the most going on, and he has the highest personal stakes among the trio. In the Lord of the Rings, there is a huge cast, but eventually they are broken into smaller groups with their own emerging leaders. I’d say Samwise Gamgee and Aragorn emerge as the stars of the show when all is said and done. (And I suspect others have convincing arguments for other characters in the lead.)

It’s possible to have multiple stars of the show, but I believe one is likely to be slightly brighter than the others, and the star is not always the Point of View character. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are classic examples of this: Watson is the point of view because he is someone the readers can identify with, whereas Sherlock is not.

All that said, how do you find the star of your show?

Consider:
1. Which protagonist has the most stakes or personal investment in the story?
2. Could story/end result happen without that protagonist?
3. Are there specific, important things that character does in the story that can’t easily be replaced by or delegated to someone else?

These might not be the only litmus tests to define your star of the show, but they should help you get on your way. Do none of your characters “pass” the test? Or one specific one you want to be your star? Consider the star qualities, and rework that character so he or she can shine.

What’s Your Motivation?

08 Tuesday May 2012

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Why do you tell stories? Why are you telling this story?

  • Is it because you want to see your name in print (or the screen)?
  • Is it because you want to be a New York Times Bestseller and retire early?
  • Is it because you have a story that won’t let you be alone until you write it down?
  • Is it because you love telling yourself the stories you can’t seem to find already written?
  • Is it because you enjoy seeing your story come to realization from a seed in your mind?
  • Is it because you enjoy hearing from the readers and sharing your experience?
  • A combination of these reasons?

There are infinite motivations to go to the trouble of telling a story–for yourself; readers; or even in the case of more interactive storytelling, the shared experience. None of them are right or wrong or better than one another, but I think knowing your motivation as a storyteller, and of your story, is a key component, not only to reaching that goal, but to maintaining your passion while doing it.

If you are telling your story because you can’t get it out of your head otherwise and it’s been churning in your brain for years, you might be writing for your own peace of mind. It might not even require you to write the whole story from beginning to end (although telling part of a story, for me, usually creates the next part of the mind worm); it might not even require you to revise the story or show it to anyone else. Another motivation might be secondary, or even non-existent.

If you’re writing in hopes of widespread (or even self-) publication, then there are other steps involved–editing, revision, market research, submission, etc. If you’re writing to become the next NYT Best Seller, then you’ll need to do a lot of market research and work at getting your story interesting to a broad audience.

***

Each of these motivations could (and probably will) comprise a whole host of columns on their own, but I feel a key to enjoying and thriving as a passionate storyteller is to know your motivation. Just as motivation drives your characters, it drives you as a storyteller. If you know why you want to tell stories (or that particular story), then you can make sure that the stories you tell fit both your motivation and your process. If your passion for storytelling is flagging, and you don’t feel, well, motivated, maybe it’s time to look into yourself as much as your story and see what drives you.

Does It Count?

01 Tuesday May 2012

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Several years ago, a friend asked me what I’d been reading lately. What I had been reading at that time was another friend’s novel manuscript for critique. When I explained this, he said, “That’s not a real book.” I said, “I think reading 200k words of story constitutes as a ‘real book,’ whether or not it’s published.”

“Oh,” he said, and dropped the subject.

With the growth of the Internet, we see serials and other web-stories on the rise, and we read them and enjoy them. With social sites like Goodreads, blog networks, and Twitter, we now have public challenges, like “read 52 books in a year.” These are well-intended challenges, trying to get us reading more and widely.

I’ve tried these challenges, had the little counter images, but then found myself trying to figure out what “counted” What is a “real book?”

  • Does it count if I’ve read it already?
  • Does it count if it’s a manga or graphic novel?
  • Does it count if I listened as an audiobook instead of print?
  • Does it count if it’s not yet a collection, or I read it while it was being serialized?
  • Does it count if my friend’s unpublished novel or fanfic?

I’m not sure why these things plagued me, but I wasn’t the only one asking themselves, or others, “does it count?”

Depending on the challenge, maybe it doesn’t count. And it shouldn’t matter, but we like these widgets and memes, and being part of a community doing something together.

Since I took up knitting and spinning, my reading time plummeted as I found myself having to choose to do one or the other. Sometimes I watched television shows and movies instead because I missed stories, and eventually I rediscovered audiobooks, which I’d always been uncertain of before.

I started listening to them while I worked, while I knitted, while I did chores, and I grew to love them. But then I got worried–was I less of a reader because I listened to books instead of reading them in print?

Truth is, I don’t think so. Print versus electronic versus audio–they’re all the same story, all the same words. Whether I’m reading them in print or on a screen, I still hear the story in my head. When I’m listening to an audiobook, it’s still the same words coming into my head–it’s just through my ears instead of my eyes.

Stories are stories. Enjoy stories, and when you worry about whether or not they “count,” ask yourself whether your goal is to enjoy more stories or “read” 52 books this year of a particular kind.” There’s no right or wrong answer here, it’s just a matter of your anxiety about it. If you’re like me and worry about whether or not things “count,” maybe you, too, need a new “counting” system.

Did I enjoy that story? Did I learn something from it? Then it counts.

Seeding Your Story

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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Last week, Mike linked me to this article about 8 tips on writing from Kurt Vonnegut. For the most part, I agreed with these tips.

On the other hand, I didn’t fully agree with this one:

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This information can be interpreted many ways: does he mean go crazy with the info dumps? Be blatant with your plot points? Indeed, if there are so many pieces of information that I can see the ending coming without finishing the story, then why would I read it? Isn’t that in direct violation of tip #1?

Some stories–particularly horror–just don’t function with this advice at all. I mean, if we saw what was coming in a Lovecraftian piece, would it be nearly as interesting? Would it even be Lovecraftian?

So what does he mean here? Well, I can’t speak for Mr. Vonnegut, but my take on it would be the following:

Seed your plots with enough information so that when your readers get to the end of the story they can see the progression, and the conclusion makes sense. Conversely, if they could not finish reading the story, they could, with some consideration, create an ending for themselves (whether or not it was your own).

(This still doesn’t work with some specific niche story types, but it does fit on a broader level.)

What are your thoughts on the matter? Should you give it all away at the beginning, sprinkle throughout, or wait until the big reveal at the end?

Start Again?

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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We as storytellers often get very attached to our words and ideas. We write something, and even if we’re willing to revise it, we still won’t change it that much. If we’ve written words, we want to fix those words. If we have written a character or a plot point, we try to shape those over and over again, to get the right image.

What if you started over completely?

Author Jodi Meadows mentioned recently that she had wholesale “deleted” the first draft of the third book in her series. Why? She had made so many changes to the first and second books after they were edited and revised for publication that the third book would require an intense amount of revision just to fit with the other two books. Instead, she decided to start over.

Are words sacred? Sometimes it feels like it, especially when we’re carving out time to tell our stories and just starting. Every hundred and thousand words feel like they were written in blood. But the truth is, they weren’t. Storytellers are creative people, and although it might not always feel like it, our creativity is endless. However, that creativity can be stifled, and it can be stifled by our own stories when we stubbornly hold on to a story that isn’t quite right.

A while back I realized many of my stories had the themes or plots or other elements in common. The stories themselves probably wouldn’t be recognizable as “same” to someone else (unless they were really analyzing them), but I saw those similarities. I realized–no, not that I had a limited amount of stories in my head and I was completely unoriginal–but that there are themes, plots, and other elements that I will hammer out over and over. Why? Near as I can tell, it’s because there is this formless, unspeakable idea in my mind, and I keep writing it over and over again in different ways until I finally hit upon it in a way that will satisfy my subconscious and my muse. Then I will theoretically move on to something else.

(It might also be that you’re attracted to a certain theme or story type. The advice still holds true.)

Are you stuck on a story that just doesn’t seem quite “right?” Try approaching it in a completely different manner. Change characters, settings, or story arcs, and see what happens. (If you’re feeling really brave, you could even change your medium.) You aren’t wasting words. You’re exploring ideas. You might not keep one or the other, or you might keep both. What you discover in your multiple versions might help another, or they might be completely distinct to one another. You might even find yourself able to take a story, such as Jodi did, and restart it from the beginning–same world, same characters–and turn it into something new.

Be brave. Every time you challenge yourself, you improve yourself as a storyteller and you are not wasting your words.

Six Ways to Interact with Your Story that Aren’t Writing It

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

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Sometimes, you need a break from your story. Not a real break, but a break from the pounding of words on the narrative you’ve been plotting. Sometimes, you need to let your plot sit and bubble while you figure out what happens next. Sometimes, you need to dig deeper. Sometimes, you’re in the middle of a revision, and you know you want to improve something, but you just don’t know how.

During these times, instead of abandoning your story completely, consider these ideas on how to interact with your story without writing your story:

1) Visit a local (or, if you have the means and ability, far off) place that reminds you of a setting, character, or situation in your story (or the actual place, if it’s based on a real location). This could be a park, a city, a pub, or even a section of the museum. Even if your story is set in a fictional world, there are places you can go that might remind you of these places. A lot of my fictional cities tend to be hybrids of Seattle and San Francisco, which means I can visit them and be inspired. A science museum might give you some atmosphere of your science fiction setting, as could hiking in the mountains for your high fantasy. If you’ve got a Victorian setting, maybe there’s a tea room or museum you could go to draw in atmosphere.

2) Try doing something your characters are doing. Just reading about something isn’t the same as doing it. (Stay safe and legal, folks. Our characters are often doing dangerous and daring things, and while I think we all owe it to ourselves to be daring, I don’t want anyone breaking an arm on my advice.)

3) Create art related to your story. Whether you draw it or make a collage, even if you don’t think you have visual artistic skills, you can put together something that keeps your mind on the story or characters.

4) Write something related to the story. Vignettes about your characters, songs, poetry, setting descriptions, news articles, literature in your world, love letters, undirected freewriting–whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be part of the story at large. I think we often get hung up on the idea that everything we write on a story must appear in the story, and that’s just not true.

5) Create a soundtrack. Find music that fits your characters, story, mood, or themes and put together a playlist. At one time, I used to play my character’s theme songs (which I’d spend hours deciding on) right before I began to write a scene from their point of view, although nowadays I tend to listen to instrumental sets that fit the story’s mood.

6) Read books related to your story–but don’t default to this one in replacement of option 1 or 2 unless those one are completely undoable. I know it’s easier to look up information about the forests in Wikipedia, around the web, or a library book, but it wouldn’t be the same as going to your large city park or hiking trails and experiencing it for yourself.

These suggestions are the most obvious ones to me. Please feel free to share your ideas below.

Putting the “Pro” in Protagonist

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Last week, Mike talked about protagonists and antagonists, and pointed out that in many iconic stories, the protagonist is reactive and the antagonist is your proactive character. This week, I wanted to talk about reactive and proactive protagonists, and how they drive a story. Now, many characters are going to be a mixture of both–they might start reactive and then become proactive as the story progresses, or they might start proactive and then begin to react as their actions lead to fallout.

Many of us in our day-to-day lives are reactors. We sit comfortably in whatever we’re doing, whether that’s a desk job or acting as a lone gunman. The events that cause change–a lay-off, breaking up with a significant other, coping with a death in the family–are usually things that happen to us, rather than events we go out to seek. When it comes to storytelling, many characters are in the same situation, only that which they are reacting to often gets kicked up to the next notch or three in severity or drama. For example, instead of a fender-bender, the whole interstate crumbles below them. Instead of helping a friend move, they must move a Ring of Power across the known world. Given our experiences, we often default to make our characters reactive, because protagonist are capable of reacting to circumstances much greater than mere average Joes living average lives who do not get stories told about them.

So what about proactive characters? Proactive characters usually want something. They want something vitally important–whether for greed or love. It could be a person, an item, or an ideal. They want it so badly they’re pushing aside anything that gets in their way. Aren’t these qualities that we usually associate with antagonists? They certainly can be, but they work just fine for our protagonists, too. Your antagonists should have a level of proactiveness, of course, although they might start by reacting to a proactive protagonist. Chances are you have two willful people who want something that causes them to cross. That something could be money or world peace–it doesn’t matter. Your protagonist could be a treasure-hunter, and the antagonist another treasure-hunter competing for the same prize.

Ultimately, your character is likely to be a combination of reactive and proactive, but chances are that one is going to outweigh the other. Reactive characters often make us boggle at how strong they are–how one thing dumps on them after the other, yet they persevere. (Yet, most real-life people put into that situation will often tell you they would have preferred not to have to be so “strong.”) Proactive characters, I believe, are the people who wow us because they are who we secretly want to be–they aren’t afraid of change or to go after the things they really want–no matter what the setbacks are that happen along the way.