Friday Morning Thoughts

I posted a few days ago on Facebook about how first drafts are like falling in love. They are. It's exciting and new. Every time you sit down, you get to discover your characters. The main character especially- I just discovered that the main character in my NaNo WriMo story is a badass with a knife. 

So yes, first drafts are a lot of fun. Like falling in love, when you're obsessed with each other and spend way too much of your free time (and not-so-free time) thinking about the other person. (I'm just assuming this is a generalization. If not, I swear I'm not creepy.) 

But then you finish that first draft and it's not new anymore. You know your characters. You know what happens. You know the parts that aren't so exciting.

In relationships, this tends to come out at the end of the so-called 'honeymoon' phase.

As a writer you have two choices. One, you can move on to a new story and go through the new exciting phase again. Two, you can buckle down and go into revision.

To be fair, it took me eight years of writing to actually manage option two. Before that, I was firmly in the moving on to another new thing category.

It might be a little depressing to liken staying in a relationship to revising a book. Especially if you are at all familiar with how much I bitch about revising.

Here's my big secret: I love revising. GASP!

Not because every part of it is fun and believe me, it has its moments, but I get to explore my characters even more, get to fix things that I was too lazy to worry about the first time around. I get to make it better.

This to me (in my admittedly limited experience) is a lot like being in a relationship that survives the honeymoon phase. You get to the point where you annoy each other and you've told all your stories. But now you're done falling. Now you're just in love. 

Contrary to popular movies and books, it's not glamorous and full of rose petals and champagne. But when you think about it, wouldn't you rather eat a whole loaf of garlic bread together and watch really bad movies and laugh when one of you (me) magically falls off an ottoman?

I'd rather have a really good story, one that's been revised and cared for, than a hundred first drafts. Because it is fun to write that first draft but it is so much more rewarding to work on a story long enough it looks more like a book than a first draft.

Note to You Know Who You Are: Notice how I did not mention anything embarrassing about you? Yeah. Remember that.

JUST KISS! (Thoughts on Shipping)

How many of you are familiar with the term 'shipping'? It refers to wishing two characters (be they in movies, TV, or books) would get together. Frequently, they stubbornly refuse to do so. 

*there will be spoilers beyond this point. Just so you know. I haven't decided what they are yet but you can't say I didn't warn you*

Also, too frequently, one or both of them end up dying right before they can get together or even worse, right after.

As an avid reader and movie/TV watcher, I am familiar with the pains of loving two characters and wanting them to get together. I am familiar with the irritating trope of 'Will they or won't they?' that I so despise but also enjoy so very, very much.

Maybe another topic will be how my story addiction has messed with my emotional stability.

Anyway, I know how much people love their 'shipping'. And I understood the hate and anger when writers killed one or both of the characters (as long as the characters are breathing, the ship will never die, even if they both end up married to other people. Sorry.) 

Veronica Roth is particularly evil in this respect because she killed Tris. JK Rowling killed Tonks and Lupin. And don't even get me started on Snape. That's a whole other issue. Bones played with our emotions in horrible ways for years. Pick a fandom and you can be sure there is at least one couple that was horribly ripped apart by what many fans believe was a horrible act of God.

In reality, it was just a writer deciding one character really needed to die.

As much as I hate when writers pull shit like that, I am more a writer now than I am a reader or viewer.

And the idea of tearing a couple apart or refusing to let them get together makes me giddy. Let's not talk about how sick that might be.

My defense is this: plot runs on tension. Since I love to write character driven stories, the plot is dependent on tension within those characters and between them as well. If a couple gets together, there has to be some kind of tension to replace the uncertainty of how they feel. If they don't get together, that tension is still there. 

Also, there is nothing I love more than writing dialogue that could lead to two characters confessing their feelings but then doesn't. MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!! 

That was my evil laugh, in case you were wondering. Because I am a twisted, heartless, soulless person who loves to break the hearts of the few people who have read my stories.

Seriously. Ask my best friend Shelby. She'll tell you. In fact, I'm a little worried what she'll do if I kill one of her favorite characters (again).

But before you write me off as a hopeless writer who thrives on the pain of her readers, let me tell you something. I do enjoy the tension of all the 'will they or won't they' tropes. I do. But there nothing, nothing, that breaks my heart like having to kill one of my characters. Because once I do, they aren't in my head anymore. It doesn't matter that I have revision to do, they're just gone.

And if you think you miss your favorite book/movie/TV character when they die, just know that it is ten thousand times worse when you are the one who killed them and no matter how much you cry, you can't bring them back. 

Okay, so this ending wasn't very funny, so here's a picture of some puppies.

http://alaskanmalamute.org/malamutes/finding-a-malamute

On Writing Certain Scenes

Let's talk about sex.

Well, okay, not just sex. Sex in books and then of course the stuff before sex like kissing. 

I started writing when I was 10 years old. I could not even say the word sex without blushing. So it was not something I really considered until I got to high school and found myself faced with two characters having sex.

Now, I went through a phase where I wrote only love stories that made the first kiss the be all end all of the story. I wrote the most dramatic first kisses ever and it took me a few years to look back and realize how unrealistic they all were. But oh so much fun to imagine a really dramatic kiss. 

I know one of the reasons I was so obsessed with love stories and first kiss stories. I was a young teenage girl and I wanted more than anything to be in love. I was also incredibly naive about the whole concept but we'll come back to that. As a result of this, most of my love stories (all of them were bad and will never see the light of day) ended with the first kiss. I never had to deal with what came after the kiss.

Then I grew up a little bit and my senior year of high school, I wrote a love story that was about more than the first kiss. It was about how two people in love would react knowing one of them was going to die in less than a year. So as a writer I was forced to explore the realities of a relationship after the first kiss (Disclaimer: I did not at the time, nor had I ever before, had a boyfriend.) 

This inevitably led to a sex scene. I had never written one and so I fell back on a cliche: I wrote everything up to the first piece of clothing being removed and skipped to afterward.

When I was revising, Black & Gold, I had another sex scene to write. This time, I was not going to take the easy way out and skip it. These were two people in love and I could not skip it.

Have you ever read a really hot and heavy sex scene in a book? Did it make you uncomfortable even though you knew no one else knew what you were reading? Or maybe you've been watching a movie with your parents and suddenly there's a sex scene and you're really, really embarrassed? No, just me? Cool.

Writing that sex scene, which was less than 500 words long, was the most excruciating thing I have ever written. AP essays, midterms, timed writes included. It took me close to forty five minutes because I would sit down to type and have to get up because I was so uncomfortable. Physically uncomfortable, like my skin didn't fit right. Then I'd manage one sentence and start hyperventilating.

Sitting in my Human Sexuality class (it's an actual psychology class, I swear), I started thinking about how uncomfortable a topic sex is. I started to think that if sex wasn't such a taboo topic, I would not have struggled as much as I did. Would that have made it better? I don't know. I do know the people who have read Black & Gold told me it was pretty well done. So I guess that's good.

I haven't had to write another sex scene since then but I know I will. Hopefully it will be easier this time but I seriously doubt it.

I mean, it's not like I can just type "He yanked off her pants and they started going at it like circus monkeys." That, while kind of entertaining, is not good writing. 

Although I did manage to write it without any panic or anxiety so maybe there is hope for me. That or listening to my professor talk about blow jobs has raised my threshold for feeling uncomfortable.

Banned Books

This is not going to be funny. 

I sometimes visit Veronica Roth's tumblr ( http://theartofnotwriting.tumblr.com/ ) and this morning, she had posted a response to an article about how a parent in Charleston lobbied for a book, Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers, to be removed as an option from a summer reading list for her freshman daughter. Here's the link to the original article: After parent outcry....

The mother's complaint regarding the book was that the way it presented issues of bullying, drugs, and sex was 'destructive' to kids. She wanted to read the book with her daughter and made it to page 74 before she decided it was inappropriate. While I applaud her for wanting to read the same book as her daughter, I am also disappointed.

There was a time when I would have been furious. Earlier this year, parents in Meridian, Idaho lobbied for Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to be removed from an additional reading list. I believe the reason was that the book talked about masturbation. This school district is not the first in the nation to ban Alexie's book but Meridian is close to home for me. And I was furious with those parents, just like I was furious when my mom told me one of my friends wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter because it had wizards and this somehow offended God. 

The unbelievable arrogance of people who think that they know best about what is appropriate in books is staggering to me. Now I am not saying that parents don't have the right to tell their kids if they aren't old enough to read something. There are certainly kids out there who might pick up books they aren't emotionally ready to read. But the key word is their kids. Just because a parent believes a book is inappropriate does not give them the right say it is inappropriate for every single kid in a school district. And given that both of these books were choices and not required reading, their reaction seems even more ridiculous and makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs.

Do they think by banning a book with bullying in it will mean their kid never witnesses bullying, never bullies? Do they think by banning a book that mentions oral sex their kid will never hear it at school, on the Internet or on TV? Do they think by banning a book that talks about masturbation their kid won't do it? Don't they realize that the best writers, the ones who write books English teachers choose, write things that are true about the world? Don't they understand that no matter what they believe, banning a book is by definition forcing those beliefs onto someone else's kid, a kid who is trying to figure out who they are and what they believe? Don't they see the damage of taking away those choices?

Yes, there was a time when it would have made me furious.

But now when I see that parents have banned a book from being read in school, I cannot help but smile after I let my initial anger wash away. This country does not support censorship  and so even if a book is banned in every school district, it will still be available in book stores and in libraries. If a kid wants to read it, they will find a way to read it. 

Because there is power in reading and I think these parents know it. They know how powerful books can be and it scares them. But to be afraid of books, of reading, is so sad. The best books are the ones that crack open your heart and examine the pieces of your soul that spill out. They are the books we hid flashlights in our rooms for, so that we could stay up late on a school night reading. They are the books that let us cry for characters when we can't cry for ourselves. They are the books that let us know that it's going to be okay, because someone else has been where we are and they made it out.

I have come to think of getting a book banned as a badge of honor. Because if someone somewhere was scared enough by what was written in that book, it must mean that it is true. 

And at the end of the day, people are scared by the uncomfortable truths that come from being human. 

Rules for Writing

Write every day. Outline the entire book before you start writing it. Stick to a writing routine. Never revise until you've finished the first draft.

Okay, so I am going to assume not everyone spends as much time thinking/reading about writing but those are a few of the writing rules that seem to crop up a lot. I've seen them a lot on Pinterest which makes them seem less than credible but I've also heard some of them from published, very successful authors. So clearly they know what they're talking about.

But I disagree with all the rules I just listed.

Why? Well, I have specific issues with every one. First, most people have jobs and lives outside of writing so writing every day is a rule that is just waiting to get broken. Sooner or later, you won't get to write because you have to work late or finish homework or take care of the screaming kids. But beyond that, it's been my experience that there are some days when the words won't come. So I don't write that day. I go on Netflix, I read, I clean my apartment. Then I try again the next day. Honestly, maybe some people need to write every day and that's what some people like. That is totally fine. But don't assume that because it works for you it makes it a 'rule' for how to write. It's not.

Outlining is a little different because I've written books that I outlined in meticulous detail. For Crown & Claw, I wrote an outline. But for Black & Gold, I didn't. The latter didn't need the outline-the former did. So I decide whether to follow this based on the story in front of me.

Writing routines are another iffy matter. Most of the time I see this advocated in the context of writing at the same time every day for the same amount of time. Which frankly makes writing seem like a job (I know it's technically a job but be quiet, what other job can you do without pants on?) and that does not work for me. Sometimes I write for an hour in the morning, sometimes at night. Sometimes I write in little 15 minute bursts throughout the day. Yeah, routines are great if they work for you but, like writing every day, that does not make a it a rule.

The last one is about revising before you've finished the first draft. Honestly, this could have a whole post all to itself and maybe it will. For now I will say that the finishing the first draft is in many ways the greatest obstacle to writers simply because it requires so much time and commitment to one idea, to one set of characters. I've been writing and then I've realized something about a character that drastically changes their story line and I have to go back and fix it before I can go on. This is fine. Stories unfold in unexpected ways and making it fit together is just as important as finishing it. When you revise to make this happen is entirely up to you.

Here are my personal rules for writing.
1. The only thing you have to do to be a writer is write.
2. If you had to do two things, the second one would be read.
3. Give yourself a break when you need. Better to write a slightly better first draft than have to write three extra drafts.
4. Don't write when you're hot and miserable.
5. Don't write when you're too tired and start telling instead of showing.
6. Write down ideas you get when you're trying to fall asleep. No, you won't remember them in the morning.
7. There are some scenes you have to write at night. There just are.
8. Don't waste rainy days by not writing.
9. Save the document frequently.

But really, they're more like guidelines. Except for number 9.

Real Female Characters

I am sure you are familiar with the 'strong female character'. I know I wrote a post about this a while ago but I'm returning to the topic because, frankly, I think it needs to be revisited. 

In my mind, the strong female character stereotype (at least in YA) is a girl who is not the most beautiful in the room. She might be more attractive than she thinks she is but she will remain ignorant of this fact until the main love interest tells her otherwise. She might gain her 'strength' from being smarter than all the boys or simply by being surrounded by male characters who are physically weak. She almost always is the one who challenges the main male character if she herself is not the main character. She does not need to be saved.

On the surface, a strong female character is something fantastic, especially given the dominance of the damsel in distress archetype in literature and pop culture. I am not arguing against that, at all. I am saying that the goal of a writer should not be to write a strong female character- it should be to write a real female character.

I am going to begin with physical appearance because I think it is the least important trait about a character most of the time. A writer who sets out to write a female character should be aware of how her physical appearance affects how she thinks/interacts with other people. Anyone who claims that this is unrealistic is full of shit. Teenagers especially are very aware of their appearance and a real character would be affected by their appearance to some degree. Even if the female character is not particularly ugly, she would know that she was not entirely bad looking and there would probably be a few things about herself that she really liked. Regardless-and this is the important part- try not to link the female character's self-image to what a male character thinks. Male characters can comment on it but their opinion of the female character's beauty should not be the main place she gets her ideas about her appearance. I am basing this on my experience as a teenage girl and being friends with teenage girls.

Now let's talk about the 'strength' part of female characters. Women/girls can be considered strong because they are smart and they can be considered strong because they are physically strong. But giving a female character one of these traits DOES NOT BY ITSELF MAKE HER REAL. 

Real characters don't always have the answer. They don't always make the right decision and they do not have it together every second of every day. Showing a female character's strength by never showing her mistakes or showing how something affects her undermines any 'strength' a writer has given her. Write about something that has nothing to do with her intelligence or her strength. Give her dimension beyond her strength.

The last thing I want to address is romantic relationships in relation to strong female characters. Some writers will go to extreme lengths to demonstrate that even if a strong female character falls in love, she does not need the male character for anything other than romantic endeavors or that he is content to let her be the strong one. There are so many variations of this I won't detail but suffice to say that any instance of a male character taking care of a strong female character is called misogynistic. 

Which, of course, is ridiculous. People (read=my mother) have told me that my two heroines are strong female characters. Yet both are in relationships with male characters who are strong- one is a knight and the other is a prince. I am aware that there are some people who would be offended that my heroines 'need' their significant others at various points throughout the book. I would disagree and I would also point out that those significant others 'need' the heroines just as often.

Real romantic relationships, the healthy kind, encourage and empower the people in them. They push each other to be better, to try harder, to keep going when the mountain seems too steep. They take care of each other, because sometimes it is very okay to let go of that strength and just curl up in bed. Characters should reflect that.

The point of this rambling post is not to advocate against writing strong female characters. God knows the world still needs them because too many people still believe female characters have no place outside the damsel in distress archetype. Strength should not be the summary of a character-it should be a note in a long list of traits and facts about them. People who are strong are also funny and shy and like salsa and hate peaches and have favorite songs and movies and books. Characters should have all of that and more.

And that goes for male and female characters.

I'm Back!

Why hello there. It's been a long time, hasn't it?

I have a few reasons for ignoring my blog and I've decided to present them in chronological order. The first is school. The last quarter of school was very busy in that my professors decided it was a good time to hand out essays like they were candy. Trust me- they were not candy.

After I got home, I went straight into the 'relaxing' time of summer vacation. But even that only lasted a week because my brother's high school graduation led to a lot of family obligations. I had a lot of fun at the graduation and at his party. It's a little surreal to think that my little brother is done with high school and will be joining me here in August. 

Then I moved into my first apartment and immediately went into job-searching mode. Which did not go as planned because I only got a job offer last week. But it was definitely worth the wait because this is the job I wanted most when I was applying everywhere under the sun. But it made for a stressful month.

BUT during that month I started working on my query letter. For those of you who don't know, the query letter is what you send to agents in the hopes that they will want to read part or all of your book. It generally includes a hook and a few paragraphs outlining the main characters and conflict in the book. 

This query letter might be the piece I have struggled with the most. I'm not exaggerating. It was hard to condense 102,000 words worth of story into less than 400 words. I had to decide what was important enough to include and what was actually most relevant to the story. Then I had to work on the phrasing, again and again and again and then again just for good measure. This morning I sent it to my dad, who is merciless with his red pen, and hopefully I'll be able to send it out to a few agents before the weekend.

In addition to the query letter, I gave the book to a few people as beta readers. (These are the people who read a draft and give notes about plot/tone/character/setting etc.) Before I did this, I imagined it would be really hard to get feedback because most of it was going to be criticism. But so far, it hasn't been that bad. I've found all the feedback helpful and I also am not required to change everything suggested. I am still the writer so I still get to decide if something really needs to be changed. I am listening to a quite a bit of the advice I'm getting but not all of it. 

Thanks to everyone who read this whole post. I appreciate it. Sorry it wasn't super funny. To reward you, I'm going to tell you the name of the sequel to Black & Gold. I'm only 30 pages in but it's going pretty well after a rocky start. Without further ado, the sequel will be called Crown & Claw. 

Updates

Wow, it's been a long time since I was on my blog. Life got a little crazy and then school decided to jump on the crazy train too. Everything has settled down for a minute, so here I am.

I finished the second draft of Black and Gold in February. I'm currently halfway through my next round of revisions. I'm guessing I'll need maybe one more round after this but we'll see. I got excellent advice about that, actually: I should revise until 75% of the pages don't have any marks on them. 

The third draft will be finished before school ends in May. That is the personal goal I have set for myself and I'm in a good place to actually accomplish that goal.

In the time I didn't get to work on BG, I was writing papers for school. I had an in class midterm and a critical essay in Shakespeare. I also had a researched story for my fiction class. I wrote mine on the WASP and B-29 in World War II. 

That was actually an interesting experience because I always thought I would really like writing historical fiction. But after writing that story, I'm thinking maybe not. I liked doing the research for it but when it came to writing the story, I had a lot of trouble with interweaving the historic information and my plot. I don't like the idea of not writing something because it requires more work so at a later date, I'll return to historical fiction and give it another shot.

So now I'm going to go for a run. When I come back, I'm going to make some coffee and keep on revising.

There's No Place Like Home

After I graduated from high school I went on a school trip to Costa Rica. We spent ten days touring the country. We spent time deep in the rain forest (and I mean deep: it took an hour by boat to get up the river to the town where we stayed), we went to the middle of the country in what is known as the Arenal region, we went to Monteverde and then we ended up on the Pacific side to spend two days on the beach.

It was a fantastic trip. I had a lot of fun and I really liked being exposed to a different culture. And it was beautiful. 

A few days after I came back, my family went on a camping trip to a place about two hours from our house. As we were driving, I realized that as beautiful as Costa Rica was, I still thought those mountains, the ones I had grown up in, were more beautiful. 

When I was younger, I wanted to write stories that were set in places like New York, France, and England. I have never been to any of those places. I used to want to leave but in the past few years I've begun to realize that the Northwest is my home. This is where my roots are.

Black and Gold is set in a fictional place that didn't exist until I made it up in my head. But it is real to me. The places there look like places I have been in Idaho, Washington and California. 

Idaho is beautiful to me. I seen a lot of it when I drive home from school. I love the mountains, the rivers that rage white in the summer and flow between frozen snowbanks in the winter. I love the rolling farmland of the Palouse. I love the sagebrush and the tall grass that decorate the southern desert and the foothills of Boise. I love it all.

People give Idaho a lot of grief, calling it Iowa and what not. Some of my native Boiseans make the distinction between being from 'Idaho' and being from 'Boise', as if the latter separates them from the stereotypical Idahoan. But I don't care. I am from Idaho. 

This love of place is something my characters share. It is not just their country that they love but the land itself. Both find it beautiful.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: if you love your home, don't be ashamed. Write about it. There is no better writing material than authentic experience and you experience your home in a way you don't experience a distant city. 

Here are a few pictures I've taken of Idaho:

No place is perfect. Idaho has a winter that holds on longer than we think it should. It has a summer that ends with an August that roasts in the triple digits or suffocates us with the smoke of forest fires. It has trouble making up its mind what kind of weather any given hour will have. But it's home.

Thank You

Thank God for the people who love writers. 

It's easy to love the writing produced by writers but that falls under the label of 'loving reading' or 'loving books'. But writers do not sit quietly on bookshelves or on night tables. We are, of course, human beings just like you.

Except that we are difficult. Neurotic. Moody. Prone to sitting in a room alone with the door closed and abstaining from human interaction of any kind. This is not typically considered 'normal' behavior. (The definition of normal is a debate we can have later). 

I am difficult. I talk too fast and say things I shouldn't more often than I am proud of. I am neurotic. I have at least a dozen characters vying for space in my brain every day and sometimes old characters resurface for no apparent reason. I am moody. When my over-analyzing brain turns from fiction to reality, it drags me into a freak out session that fully embodies the definition of the word irrational. 

I am aware that I am all of these things. I do my best to accept them. I don't always succeed. It is those times that I am incredibly grateful for people who love writers. Friends who don't care when I'm in a mood or talking too fast to understand or just feel like talking because I've spent too much time in my own head that day. On days like that, there really is nothing better than knowing someone who is not a figment of my imagination also thinks I'm funny and worth talking to.

So, to those of you who love writers enough to hang out with us, thank you. Thank you for putting up with us and reminding us that the real world is sometimes better than the ones in our heads.

Clarity

Sometimes I wonder if I am crazy to enjoy writing as much as I do. When I'm revising, I have to remind myself of how much fun I had writing the first draft. But even when I think about writing something new, sometimes I dread it. I can't recall the reasons I love it.

Then I start writing and I remember. There are a thousand reasons I love it. Tonight, the top one is that it clears my head.

It sounds strange, I know. But going to live in a world that I've created and thinking someone else's thoughts makes my own thoughts less tangled. And let me tell you, my thoughts tangled makes me a basket case of nerves, crankiness, and general moodiness. I can think about why they've gotten tangled but that only makes it worse.

But when I write, all of that fades. I feel like myself. I feel like I know my own mind again. And there is nothing better than that after a day that went from bright and clear to murky and tangled in the space of half an hour. (Don't ask me why, because I haven't got the slightest idea). The important thing is that I am here now. And I am writing.