Two Times the Madness?

So, I’m finally winding down work on the 1950s novel I have posting about here for eons. I have one more round of revisions to make, and then my plan is to send it to my agent before I leave for a writers’ retreat in August (by the way, someone remind me to blog about that retreat, will you?). And after that, of course, there will be at least one more round of revisions based on my agent’s always-helpful notes on the draft. So, “winding down” might be kind of a strong term; “no longer panicking desperately over the first few rounds of scribbled drafts” is probably more accurate.

But in any case, I recently sent out the draft of the 1950s book to some beta readers, and decided to work on my next project, aka the Shiny New Idea, while I waited for their feedback. So I spent a week outlining the SNI, and then last week, I settled down to start writing the draft.

I did not think this would be a big deal. After all, “real” writers seem to have multiple projects going at once all the time.

But I think real writers must have more space in their brains than I do, or something. Because I constantly feel like mine is about to explode now.

Everything is doubled. Ideas that float into my head when I’m trying to fall asleep, demanding that I get out my phone and email them to myself before they float away for good? Yes, yes, I’m used to that, but now it’s happening twice as often. Constant nagging worry that I’m not working hard enough, that I shouldn’t be reading that book or watching that show or looking at those pics of Kate and Wills? Yes, only twice with the constancy. Oh, and you know what else is doubled, is that pain in my wrist that all writers know so well. Fun times.

Not to mention that I now have two very different books to keep straight in my head. One of which I’ve been writing for many months and know very well, and one of which I’m still getting to know. Also, one book has a main character named Linda and the other has a main character named Lily, and so obviously I’m always typing the wrong name into the wrong document.

But aside from that, the two books are very, very different, which is probably contributing to my insanity. One is contemporary, the other historical. One is paranormal, the other realistic. The main characters of both are LGBT, but in one book that’s just another fact of their lives, and in the other, it’s catastrophic. One book is very wholesome, with plot points revolving around singing hymns and begging to be allowed to wear lipstick. The other is, I can safely say, the first YA I have ever written that includes the use of a certain descriptive term for female anatomy that I am not going to use here lest my Google traffic take an abrupt left turn.

And, since I’ll still have at least one more round of revisions left on the 1950s book after this one, my two-timingness isn’t going to go away anytime soon. So I guess my options are to either embrace the insanity and spend my days writing Linda/Lily fanfiction, or figure out how to work on two projects at once without losing it completely.

So, any tips, from those who have traveled the two-or-more-projects-at-once road before me?

A Virtual Tour of Teen Life in the 1950s

So, my current work in progress is a young adult novel set in Virginia in 1959. To bone up on historical details of the era, I went to a Virginia library this weekend to look at period high school yearbooks. Which was AWESOME. There were so many fascinating photos (not to mention witty descriptions written by yearbook staff) that I had to share some of my favorites with you guys.

I took these photos by holding my iPhone above the pages, so there will be places where the pages were curved or where you can see my finger holding the page down. Which only proves that these are AUTHENTIC.

Enjoy!

One of the only color photos in the whole yearbook, and my favorite representation of 1950s teen gender roles ever.

More under the cut…

In Which I Mercifully Skip the Whining in Favor of Sharing Awesome Linkspam

Things I am not going to blog about today:

• The fact that people are STILL stumbling across my blog via Googling “Harry/Pippa fanfic” after I made ONE joke about that on Twitter the night Osama Bin Laden died. (Look, Obama took his sweet time stepping up to the mic and I had to do something to keep myself entertained.)
• The fact that my WIP simply will not refrain from kicking my ass, no matter how many times I tell it to, and insists on being reoutlined so many times I may just give up and become a pantser after all.
• My sudden irrational fear that my as-of-last-week favorite character will die in some horrific fashion on tomorrow night’s Glee prom episode (they wouldn’t do that to us, they wouldn’t, dang it!).

And so, because I am not going to blog about those things, I will instead point you to some fun stuff on the interwebs:

• “Nobody is simply the sum of the aspects of their identities,” says Everett Maroon in this post for Gay YA, which is the best post I’ve seen (in that I agree with it the most, ha) about (among other things) the importance of ensuring that your LGBTQ characters are, above all, sufficiently layered.
• I’ve had this post by Susan Beth Pfeffer, my favorite author blogger, open in one of my Chrome tabs for weeks now because it sums up everything I want to keep in mind as I revise my WIP.
• This collection of ancient British Baby-Sitters Club covers, courtesy of What Claudia Wore, is now what I look at whenever I feel the need to lighten up [via].
• And finally, because I recently saw Tangled for the first time and can’t stop thinking about this song, I will go so far as to embed it here. The relationship between Rapunzel and her “mother” in that movie is, to me, emblematic of the very best YA writing, and I only wish I had thought of it myself. The romance plot in the movie left me going “Eh,” but this was pure gold:

Life in Revision Land

So, at the moment, I am deep in revision land. And when I say “at the moment” I mean “for the foreseeable future, possibly up to and including the next three presidential elections, if not the birth of my first grandchild.”

Part of the challenge of writing my current work in progress has been accepting the fact that it isn’t exactly the same process I used on my last book. Which basically consisted of metaphorically skipping through a metaphorical field of daisies, writing words and characters that just popped into my brain without my having to do much of anything, until the next thing I knew, I had a first draft. Then I revised said draft via a series of revelations that popped into my head with equal straightforwardness. “I should move her nervous breakdown to chapter 14!” “Ooh, I should add a new scene where they almost come to blows with a sales associate at Target!” “A new fade-to-black sex scene in the backseat of an SUV would totally dial up the emotional intensity of act 2!” Etc. Then I line-edited it over a weeked to cut the “reallys” and “justs” down by 90% or so. And then boom. Book, done. Agent, acquired. (Book deal, not so much. But details, details.)

My new book is not like that. I have a completed first draft now, yet I’m still a long way from knowing whether I want to move the nervous breakdown to chapter 14. In fact, I am debating whether to include a nervous breakdown in the first place, because maybe my protagonist is more the panic-attack type. (Not that there actually are any nervous breakdowns or panic attacks in this book. Or in the last book for that matter. But, you get what I’m saying.)

With my last book, I was doing minor surgery. Fix a gall bladder here. Take out the tonsils, get rid of that mole, maybe throw in a little liposuction. Whereas my new book needs its heart ripped open before I can even start thinking about the cosmetic stuff.

And that’s OK. It will be a better book in the end. But first I have to figure out how to perform open-heart surgery. Which is hard. I didn’t pay much attention in Bio. I was busy drawing hearts around torn-out magazine photos of Alicia Silverstone. (Whatever, don’t judge, it was the 90s.)

And I need to accept that some books will take longer to write than others. I wrote the first draft of this one in three months, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a first draft. Of course, that doesn’t count the two months before that I spent researching and outlining. Or the weeks since then I’ve spent playing with other ideas and staring at the first draft in bewilderment over how to fix it. This revision might take six weeks, or it might take six months. It will take as long as it takes for the book to get good. Or at least good enough.

But the problem is, now that I’m finally getting used to this being-a-writer thing, now that I have an agent, now that I have writer friends who seem to churn out drafts and revisions at the same rate I churn out theories about Brittany and Santana (I have now officially moved into the Santana-is-a-lesbian camp, in case you’re keeping track), I feel like I should be writing faster than I used to. Like it should come more easily. Like my first drafts shouldn’t need their hearts ripped out to function.

And it’s hard to remind myself that every book needs what it needs. That I’m writing something different than anything I’ve written before. That, unlike with my last book, I haven’t already spent three years getting to know these characters before I sat down to write about them (that’s a story for another post). That with this book, I’m writing about a world I’ve never lived in, one I have to fight my way through nostalgic clichés to understand, one where people have thoughts and expectations that are totally beyond my own personal experience, and that all that is going to add up to a book that is harder to write than what I’ve tried before. I took on a really ambitious project, and I can’t expect to just glide through it like Mercedes doing an Aretha number.

So that’s where I am these days. Staring at my computer screen, mumbling to myself. Composing long entries in my writing journal analyzing the motivations of various characters and puzzling out how it all fits together. Then trying to figure out how to take those insights and apply them to the words I already typed. Some of which sort of come close to what I want to say but aren’t really there yet, and some of which say things that are absolutely not what I want to say at all, and that have to go far away into the pit of my hard drive, where there’s a nice farm with lots of space to run around in and other words to play with.

And now I think I’ve exhausted the total number of bad metaphors one can use in a blog post about the writing process, which means my procrastination for tonight is sadly over. If you need me, I’ll be staring at my computer screen, mumbling.

The Smartest Fortune Cookie Ever

I got this in a fortune cookie last year. It has been taped to a prominent shelf in my writing space ever since.

These days, as I make my way through the agony of revision-land, I need this fortune cookie wisdom more than ever.

Shiny New Ideas

I finished the first draft of my WIP on Sunday. This was cause for much celebration and making of chocolate-chip muffins.

It also launched me into that weird in-between stage of writing, when I’m actually not supposed to be working on, or even thinking about, the book that is currently my focus. This is because I have put that completed first draft away for a two-week period to let it fade ever so slightly from my mind so that I can dive back into it and read it through with semi-fresh eyes before launching my revision. (Not all writers do this cooling-off period, but I always try to.)

And right now, I am quite enjoying this in-between stage. Because it means I get to play with my Shiny New Idea, with which I am currently in mad passionate love.

My Shiny New Idea is a concept for what my next novel could be. Maybe. Theoretically. If I can get the character arc to work. If I can come up with a voice I like. If I can wrap my brain around the tricky parts of the plot and genre, the ones that usually throw me off.

Now, Shiny New Ideas for me are a dime a dozen. Past experience has shown that I tend to go through about six of them before I pick one to actually write an entire book on. And that’s only for the ideas I seriously explore. I have an Ideas File on Google Docs that has literally hundreds of ideas and pieces of ideas that have crossed my mind at some point and seemed worth at least jotting down.

But this particular Shiny New Idea is somehow… I don’t know… shinier than usual.

I’m trying to remember now if they all feel this way at first. Maybe they do. And then the shiny wears off when I realize I have to use words to represent the pretty pictures in my brain, and then I write a chapter’s worth of words and I think, “Oh… Wait… I have no idea what she’s supposed to do after this… And I kind of don’t care… Hmm.” And then another Shiny New Idea shows up and I run off chasing that one and all that research I just did on, like, the most popular names for Christian day camps in South Carolina (yes, I really did research that for a Shiny New Idea once upon a time) was for naught.

And if all this particularly shiny Shiny New Idea turns out to have been good for was providing a fun way to spend my two weeks between drafts of my real book, then so be it. Glee’s on hiatus. How else am I supposed to use up my creative energy?

But … I kind of think this Shiny New Idea might be The One. You know how it is. Sometimes, you lock eyes across a crowded room, and something just clicks. But nevertheless, I’m trying to be mature about this. I’m trying to take it slow. Not rush into things. I’ve been burned in the past. I’ll reassess after I see how the first date goes.

And with that, I’m off to brainstorm character backstories and research Ouija board best practices. (Which, obviously, everyone should know in any case. You never know when it will come in handy!)

The Worst Blogger in the World

Yes, all right, that would be me.

In my defense, I have been writing like a madwoman these days, trying to finish the first draft of my WIP. Yesterday I spent seven hours in a coffee shop listening to bad 80s music, only taking my hands off the keyboard to up to the counter to buy more $5 chocolate croissants. (I think I might’ve internalized Sara Zarr’s SCBWI speech about writers choosing to live our lives like crazy people a little too much. At least when it comes to snack foods.)

And yes, part of my eagerness to finish my first draft is the awareness that when I do, I will put it aside for a little while to let it marinate, and during that marination time, I will get to play with my Shiny New Idea.

Now, past experience has shown that my Shiny New Ideas tend to fall off into the Significantly-Less-Shiny Pit of Old Unworkable Ideas after a chapter or so, and thus I don’t want to get too attached to it now. But as it stands, I am very psyched about my SNI.

And once I do finish playing with it and dive back into my current WIP, there will be a LOT of revision needed. Lots of juicing things up, adding more detail, adding more stuff not directly related to the plot-plot-plot, which is always my tendency in first drafts because I live in permanent fear of TOO MUCH WORD COUNT OMG THE WORD COUNT POLICE WILL COME GET ME. So I am kind of … looking forward to it? I guess? Weird.

I am a happy writer this week. I had almost forgotten what that feels like.

I should try this more often.

The Character Graveyard

For every book I’ve written, I’ve had a “cut” file. That’s where I stash everything I excise from a draft, whatever the reason. Prose that didn’t sound good and needed a complete rewrite. Plot points I decided to change. Entire chapters that, upon rereading, just didn’t need to be there.

I keep the cut file around in case I change my mind later and decide to re-insert the section I took out. It makes me feel safer. Like I’m not making a rash decision to remove this chunk; I can, if need be, always retrace my steps and put the deleted stuff back in.

And three books into my career, I have retrieved something from my cut file exactly zero times. Not once have I ever changed my mind about something I deleted. As soon as it’s gone, I mourn it for a little, and then I go back and write over the missing spot, and very quickly I forget the excised section was ever there.

Which is why it makes me sad that this week, I moved an entire character out of my WIP and into my cut file.

He was a character I quite liked. And one of my protagonists quite liked him, too. The problem was, he was taking up too much space in what is already shaping up to be a way-too-long book. And, more importantly, his presence in the protagonist’s story was kind of confusing. He was getting in the way, distracting her from what she was really supposed to be doing. And distracting me from the real point of the story. Which had very little to do with him. So I moved him to the cut file, and devised a new bit of backstory to make up for what that character’s deletion had taken away from the protagonist.

At the same time, I moved another subplot to the cut file, too. This subplot had focused on a different character (although this character will remain in the story in a reduced role). That one was a harder decision, because I really liked that subplot, and I felt like it was getting across something important that will now be missing from the book. But what it wasn’t doing was advancing the real story of the book. Its only connection to the main plot was that it contained a key scene which reunited my previously separated protagonists, and I knew I could bring them back together in a different way. Hopefully a way that will use a lot fewer words, and connect much more directly to my protagonists’ concerns.

It all goes back to that tried-and-true advice for newbie writers: Love the book, not the scene. Or, in my case, love the plot, not the subplot. And love the story, not the secondary character.

It’s a difficult balance, all of this. Because I do need to show that my protagonists live in a complex world. That there’s a lot happening in that world that doesn’t directly involve them. And that all the people in their lives are complex characters who are the protagonists of their own stories. That latter point is proving a particular challenge for me in this book compared to my previous books, because I have a lot of unlikeable characters in this story. It’s inevitable, due to the nature of the world it’s set in (for example, I have a (very minor) character who is a racist child molester; fun times!). But I need to figure out what’s going on in the heads of the characters who appear most frequently, so I know why they’re acting the way they are. Yet I can’t spend too much actual screen time exploring the insides of those characters’ heads, because I can’t take away from what’s going on with my two protagonists, since they’re the ones who really matter. And, yes. It is a struggle to make all of this work. Writing books is hard, argh.

So. Now I’m off to go attempt to put what I just said up there into practice. Though it’s very tempting to just keep blogging about it. Talking about this stuff in theory is so much easier….

Review of 1950s YA Classic ‘The Cheerleader’ (Forerunner to ‘Forever’)

I cannot possibly say enough good things about The Cheerleader, by Ruth Doan MacDougall.

It’s a book I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago, when I was clicking around on Amazon looking for teen books from the 1950s. I almost passed it over, since this book was set in the 50s but published in 1973. I’m so, so glad I ordered it after all.

This will be a non-spoilery review, because I highly recommend that everyone, especially readers and writers of YA, read The Cheerleader for themselves, and the book is full of surprises.

So much of today’s YA, especially contemporary realistic YA, is trying to do what Ms. MacDougall does so astonishingly well here. I bought the book for the social history, since I’m writing a YA set in the 50s, but I feel like what I really got was a writing tutorial.

The Cheerleader wasn’t published as YA either in 1973 original release or in its 1998 rerelease, and although I suspect the frank sex scenes are the main reason for that, it does also violate one of today’s cardinal rules of YA: Although it’s told from the perspective of teenager characters, the tone is ever-so-slightly that of an older person looking back on her youth. For example:

“Well,” Snowy said, and she and Puddles strolled casually over to the bleachers, but they didn’t sit down because this would make them seem too obviously waiting for somebody to ask them to dance. They stood half-turned from the dance floor, as if they didn’t care, as if they were on the brink of dashing off to something far more exciting. There was, however, nothing in their world more exciting than this.

Nevertheless the book was clearly (and I’m basing this on the Amazon reviews) read by a lot of teenagers when it first came out. The Cheerleader predated Forever by two years, probably encountered less opposition than Forever since it wasn’t published as YA, and is, I suspect, how quite a lot of girls in the 70s secretly learned about sex.

(Btw ― yes, the protagonist of the book is nicknamed Snowy, and another main character is nicknamed Puddles, and both of these are treated as perfectly normal names by everyone around them. Ah, the 50s.)

One Obsessive-Compulsive Author’s Approach to Outlining

Now that my Thanksgiving turkey is reduced to a single plate of leftovers and most of the chocolate pie is gone, I’m spending the rest of this holiday weekend working on the outline for my historical novel (working title: Historical Novel).

Outlines for me are a serious business. I can’t write without one. And it has to be extremely detailed. Writing the outline is how I decide what’s going to happen, but it’s also how I keep track of my pacing, intertwine the subplots with the main plot, and ensure that my characters are growing at an appropriate pace and that said growth is demonstrated by their actions. It’s also how I keep myself motivated to write ― because every time I sit down with my computer, instead of despairing over the monumental task that is WRITING A BOOK OMG, I just look at my outline and it tells me what I’m supposed to write today.

So here’s how I do it.