Stretch goals versus the history of success

There’s an email from Holly Lisle – something from her ‘Holly’s Tips’ newsletter, that’s been sitting in my Gmail inbox for just over a month, and bugging me the whole time. In it, Holly tells a story from her past as a newbie writer, and how she set an incredible goal for her writing output in a fit of super-motivation. That didn’t really work out so well for herself, she wasn’t producing her best work and wasn’t loving it, and on some advice from an agent she lowered her goals. The lesson learned, she tells me, is to set your goals to what you already know you can achieve and thus create ‘A History of Success.’

Now, I’ve learned many lessons about goal setting myself, and I can understand where Holly’s coming from. Setting truly Herculean targets for yourself and failing to come near then could crush anybody’s spirit, and for some people, setting achievable targets, and then, as she says, “writing extra for the sheer joy of doing it” might be the best way to self-motivate. If your motivation is completely proportional to the level of success you feel, then why not?

Myself, I’m not always like that. For one thing, I don’t always blow past my limits just because I feel the joy. Sometimes I might, and sometimes I might be lazy and say “Okay, I’m done for the month now.” More importantly, I don’t always feel discouraged because I’ve set a big goal and don’t quite reach it. It isn’t too hard to turn that around and say “So – I didn’t finish a Holly Lisle lesson in April, or clean as much of my apartment as I hoped. And I didn’t quite finish reading my fiction slushpile that I wanted to have done by now. But I got my summer workshop situation sorted out, I won Script Frenzy, and I rocked the A to Z challenge!”

That’s the beauty of the stretch goal. It gives me all the motivation of setting really high targets for myself, but I don’t have to get down on myself for not going all the way when time’s up, because I was stretching myself. Sometimes I’m stretchier than I thought, and sometimes I’m stiffer than I’d like to be. (Especially my knee – ouch. ) And I may not be creating a history of success the Holly Lisle way, but I’m looking forward to finding out what I’ll achieve in May!

How about you. Would you rather build up a history of success with goals you know that you can reach, or try a stretcher with me? I’d love to hear from you whichever answer you have. And a big shout out to Elizabeth Twist, whose post on ‘Permission to Fail’ and the Story-a-day-in-May challenge nudged me into finally writing this. Good luck, Elizabeth!

Not blogfesting today – again.

I’d hoped to join into the I’m hearing voices blogfest late with a flash fiction, but it was a long day at work and I just don’t think I’m up for a flash fiction now, sigh. (So much for the promise that we’d get to go home early on Friday, sigh.)

But I’ve been thinking about emotion in short stories lately, mostly because of my still-untitled story in progress. (Maybe I’ll call it ‘Mirror of Storms’ for the time being.) Happiness, unhappiness and grief are all definitely driving engines of this idea – one character, Sarina the witch’s granddaughter, has used a magic mirror that was supposed to rid her of unhappiness, but at a cost. Whenever she has gets angry or sad, the mirror sucks the bad mood out of her, turns it into a storm, and releases the storm over her house. Unfortunately, she lives by the sea, and when one of these storms went out on the water, my MC’s big brother got washed overboard.

Oh – and there’s a curse on the mirror too, of course. If it’s broken or taken out of Sarina’s vicinity, then the storms will stop, but she’ll be unhappy for the rest of her life. When she’s truly happy, though, that will stop the storms too, and the mirror will crumble to dust.

What do you think so far?

IWSG Follow-up: Why my First-person Narrative has to be deleted.

Okay, well, since so many people asked about it, I’m going to do as Elizabeth suggested and devote a short blog post to talking about first-person narrative in “Won’t somebody think of the Children” and why I’m leaning towards rewriting the entire book in third person point of view.

I’m a big fan of first person point of view. On the other hand, I’m starting to realize that at times my reliance on that writing style doesn’t really serve the story that I’m telling, and that’s the basic decision that I’ve come to with Tom Sandinez serving as narrator of his book. It’s a call that’s more intuitive than deductive at this point, but the most obvious reasons have to do with the next point I made last post, that I need to do more showing as opposed to telling.

If I let Tom tell the story in first person, that’s exactly what he does a lot of the time. He tells the reader what happened yesterday or last week, and he skips over some of the best parts. Now, if I really wanted to, I could probably show a lot of what I need to show and still stick with Tom as the first-person narrator. But I’m still not convinced that that would be the best way to write this story, and I’d be fighting Tom’s inclination to gossip and summarize the whole time. So, I want to try switching things up – telling most of the story from close to his head, (and maybe jumping away to some of the other major characters for a scene when I need to,) but not letting his voice take over.

So, that seems to cover it. I hope that what I typed makes sense, and feel free to post more questions in the comments if you’re so inclined.

And Alex – killing off a favorite character with no warning because you’re not sure how else to end a book is indeed cruel. It also fits in with a great and glorious Nanowrimo tradition.

Magic Manuscript – the first draft begins!

I need to come up with a better title – even a better temporary placeholder title – for this project than ‘Magic Manuscript.’ Oh well. It should occur to me soon.

I started writing my first-draft opening scene yesterday, with Will getting delivered the scroll in the loading docks of the Royal Ontario Museum in the dead of night – and Mandy dropping in by surprise to wish him luck. I think that it’s going about as well as I can expect a first draft to ever go.

And I was working on character discovery snippets on Friday and Saturday – little 500-word scenes from the past of Will, and the third main character Emelia, to try to get a sense of their voice as characters. I put a lot of Greek references into Emelia’s discovery scene, and then, while working on her character sheet for the snowflake, ended up making her Irish instead of Greek, because it just didn’t seem to add up to have a Greek girl with curly blonde hair and freckles. Ah well, I don’t really need to rewrite it as it’s just discovery.

Have you started a new writing project, or a new stage in an existing writing project, with the new year?

The story of my dream.

I had a dream last night that was really like a passage out of a pretty cool fantasy novel. I’m not sure if I can work out the rest – if you’d like to use this notion, that’s okay, but please let me know, alright?

So, I don’t know what the overall sides were, but let’s say in the dream I was on the Rebel alliance working against an Empire led by a crazy evil wizard, okay?

We’d managed to find a magical talisman that was part of the Evil Wizard’s big ritual for destroying the Alliance. I remember that the talisman was a green sphere, about the size of a tennis ball or an apple. But it was so powerful that it couldn’t be destroyed safely just by squashing it with a rock or anything like that, and if we tried to hide it away forever, the Wizard would eventually be able to track it down.

The only safe way to dispose of the talisman was to invoke it early, without the rest of the ritual. It was voice-controlled, with a key word of ‘invoke’, that had to be spoken within a range of about 100 yards – but voice-locked to the Wizard’s assistant Magician. So, we had to find some way to trick the Magician into saying the word ‘invoke’, somewhere that we could hide the talisman within range.

I was researching this for a lot of the dream, and came up with a plan. The Magician was getting married soon, and there was a spell that was sometimes cast by the bride and groom at weddings, to temporarily summon up the presence of dead family members to witness the exchange of vows. And the spell started with the words ‘I invoke…’

So, all we needed to do was find some way to talk to the Magician’s fiancee without getting caught, and convince her to include this spell in the plan for her wedding ceremony.

That’s all I remember from the dream, but I think that it’s pretty cool. Have you ever had story ideas in your dreams?

Revising with Holly Lisle update, Lesson One

So, the first read-through of “Children” is going pretty well. I’m up to page 78 out of 123, and hoping to finish the Despair worksheet tomorrow night at Starbucks Runnymede in Toronto!

This is the biggest part of the first lesson, mostly because it involves the full manuscript read-through. The idea is that you look for five different things as you read:

1. Ideas that didn’t work well or fell apart as you were writing them.
2. Characters that work for the book, or don’t.
3. Elements of the setting that work well, or poorly.
4. Places where you find yourself skimming as you read.
5. Places where the story is working and you enjoy it as you read.

So for each of those spots, I write down a little code in hot pink pen in the margin of the page, and make a note in my excel spreadsheet. The code indicates that it’s worksheet 1B, with another letter a through e for each of those five cases, and a numeric suffix to indicate the spreadsheet line.

My new voyage of learning to revise…

Now that November is over, I’m going to start concentrating on revising somewhat – not revising the writing I was just doing for Nano, though. At the moment, what I’m excited about rewriting “Won’t somebody think of the Children.”

And so – I put my money where my fingers are and registered for the Holly Lisle How to Revise your Novel course this evening. It sounds like there’ll be a lot of hard work going through the Holly Lisle plan, but I’ve heard good things about it too. I’ll be sure to tell you what I think about the course as I make my way through it over the coming months.

The first lesson appears to be about figuring out what sort of story you want your book to tell, which sounds like a good place to start. There are worksheets to fill out about what you were inspired by before you started writing, (I’m glad I found an archived Nanowrimo forums thread where Hamilton people were discussing “What I’m writing this year”,) and evaluating what your novel turned into as you wrote it and what you think it could become.

The lessons are sent out one per week, and I’m hoping that I can more or less stick to that schedule. Wish me luck.

If you did Nanowrimo – what are your plans for learning and revising over the next eleven months?

Tricky decisions and flawed stories

I’ve been looking over some of my stories, and reading critiques I’ve gotten for them, this week. And I’ve come to realize that at this point, I’ve got a fair few stories – three or four, I figure, where the following things are all true:

• There’s good things going on in the story, that some readers like considerably.
• There’s also plot or conceptual problems in the way that the story is written at this point.
• Try as I might, I can’t figure out a way to resolve the fundamental problem or flaw, without starting again and writing a truly different story that would share only some of the same elements of character and plot.

So, in general – what do I do with these pieces of my work? Is it worthwhile to clean up the more superficial issues that I do know what to do with, (which usually still exist,) and try sending the story out to potential publishers? Or would I be better off just filing the entire mess, including the critiques, away against some future time when I’ve grown as a writer and might actually be able to (and interested enough to) fix the core problem?

And, if applicable, how do I ‘saviore faire la difference’? That is, know how to make the decision on a case by case basis.

The fallacy of ‘If I only had time to write…’

I really should know better than to fall for this one.

But it’s so tempting – you see so much of your days taken up by going to work, routine chores – or conventions in distant places, whatever – and still you manage to get a little writing done. So the idea’s obviously going to occur to you at some point: “If I only had a few days with nothing to worry about but writing, how much could I get done?”

I’m off work this week without any impressive travel plans, and I’ve managed to get some things from my to-do list crossed off, including critiques, finishing up a revision, and catching up with the Campaign. I’ve even gotten a new chapter finished on a crossover fanfic that I’ve been wanting to tie up.

But I still feel like I’m going to fall short of the targets that I’d hoped for stay-cation productivity. And that’s mostly because of the obvious reason that time to write is not enough. You need to have mental energy to draw on, and inspiration, and focus. After this summer, I didn’t really realize how low my reserves were getting, and doing other things to recharge them is much better than pushing too hard.

Like Aesop’s tortoise, I’ll get there in the end – wherever it is that I’m heading.

And thank you very much to Brinda Berry for the Irresistibly Sweet Blog Award.

Novel revision: Structure and conflict

Well, I had my final class session for the Storywonk revision class this afternoon, and overall the class wasn’t really what I was expecting.

I learned quite a lot, but I guess I thought that the manuscripts that I had were ready to the point where they just needed some fairly small changes made to them and they’d be ready to get queried.

Now, I don’t think that anymore. Most of the class wasn’t about the small-changes stuff, though Lani did cover that in ‘The paper edit’, which was today’s topic, actually.

But everything up to this point has been on more fundamental stuff – the structure of the book, the conflict, the relationship between the protagonist and the antagonist, the role of the major supporting characters – and I’ve started to see that I have a lot of work to do here. I think I’m nearly finished rewriting the basic structure of “The way back home” to up the stakes of the conflict between Naveli and Merlik, but I’ll have a lot of rewriting to do to match things up to that structure.

Which in a way, should be exciting. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m terrified or just disappointed.

So, here’s the first part of my structure – what do you think, does it sound like a story that you’d want to read? Are the stakes high from the beginning? Do things keep on getting worse?

Opening scene: While having fun with her friends at the Royal Jubilee, Princess Naveli is taken prisoner by rebel agents, along with her pet ferret Ereyu, her friend and bodyguard Tuma – and her possibly-crush, the Lady Jenna.

Things get worse: At the rebel fortress, Naveli meets Merlik (change name?) the warlock who arranged for her capture. He scoffs at her references to ransom, and tortures Tuma and Jenna in front of her to try and break her spirit. Naveli tries to use magik to escape, but the rebels have taken precautions against the few elementary wind magik spells that she knows.