Criticism!!!!!

For those of you who don't know, my dad got an English degree before he went to law school and he had a book published before I was born. (It's called The Garcia File if any of you are curious.) He's a pretty good writer. And he's a very good editor.

When I showed him the first novel-length story I finished (when I was twelve) he covered that first page in red ink and said when he was done, that page would turn into six pages.

Being a twelve year old, I was not prepared for that much criticism. It's not that the story wasn't deserving of criticism but budding/aspiring writers need encouragement in the beginning more than criticism. 

Gradually, that shifts to more criticism, less encouragement. (Side note: I mean HELPFUL criticism. Not just criticism to be mean.)

Now, you might be wondering why, if my dad is such a good editor, he has only now finished a book I finished two years ago.

Well, there are two reasons.

Number one, my dad proved completely incapable of finishing any story I gave him. I blame this almost entirely on his golf addiction when I was in high school.

Two, he remembered how twelve-year-old me reacted to criticism and so didn't think I wanted him to read my book.

But I want criticism. I want someone to help me figure out how to make it better because I want this book published. I want to walk into a book store and see it on the shelves next to the books written by my favorite authors. To get there, I need someone to tell me where my writing is just plain bad.

Which, of course, my dad is more than happy to do.

And I am so grateful. He gave me a few very specific things to work on (and he's absolutely right about what I need to work on) but in addition to that, he told me something I didn't expect.

He said that parts of it were really well written and well done.

*cue wide eyed gaping in shock*

My dad is not someone who gives out compliments lightly and YA fantasy where the two main characters are teenage girls is not my dad's favorite genre. But he liked it!

He. Liked. It.

Well, parts of it, but let's not get caught up in the details. And the parts he think need the most work are the same parts that make me want to binge watch all of the Disney movies to avoid them.

Meaning, yes they definitely need work.

So, I have a brand new opening scene for the first book (which may revert to being untitled because we both agree Black & Gold might not be the best title but we'll see because titles are the bane of my existence.) I showed it to my dad and, being my dad and not my mom, he told me that it was better but it still needs to be distilled.

And me, being me and not my father, told him that I was, of course, shocked to learn that my first attempt at a scene did NOT produce pure gold worthy of Hemingway (Dad's hero, not mine. That man was an arrogant prick.) I was also being sarcastic, if you couldn't get that.

But I'll take it. Opening lines are incredibly difficult and if I've made it even three steps in the right direction, I'm excited. You only get one opening line so if I'm going to obsess about a single sentence, it should be that one.

Well, that one, and the closing line of Sky & Steel (which is a title I do like and will not change because god-dammit, I know that's the title I want!)

Since I've now used two exclamation points, I'm going to wrap this up and go back to obsessing about how to redo Elana's introduction scene.

Woohoo!

Okay. Stopping now. I mean it. Not going on the Internet to look at clothes.

Sensitive Topics

This is a sensitive topic but I am going to try to limit my opinions to explanations as to why I made certain choices in my story. That being said, I am entitled to my opinion just like you are entitled to yours. If you want to have a discussion about the differences, fine. If you broach the topic in any way that is not respectful, that discussion will never happen.

I want to talk about gender in stories.

Both my main characters are young women. They came into existence in my head being young women but that doesn't mean I did not choose to keep them that way. I did. I wanted them to be women. I wanted them to be smart and capable and determined but I also wanted them to be a little naive, a little uncertain and more than a little flawed. I wanted them to have meaningful relationships with their friends, their family, and their love interests. 

I wanted them to be characters that 14 and 15 year old girls could read and think, I want to be like them. Not because they were pretty or because they had the perfect relationship with some over-idealized person. Because they were smart but they worked hard at learning new things, they learned from their mistakes and learned about who they are. 

That was the story I searched for when I was that age. I wanted a story that yes, had romance in it, but the lead character had interests outside of it and the overarching plot dealt with much more complicated issues. I wanted characters who were smart but were shown to work at learning. I wanted them to be imperfect.

Now that I'm in my twenties, I also wanted at least one of them to be confident in who she is most of the time but to also show her uncertainty because I think that is so incredibly important to let teenage girls know and also because it is authentic. Confidence in women is something to admired and applauded, not mocked or put down--even by other women.

I also wanted the female characters to get along and lift each other up because every day I see women tear each other down, as if one woman's confidence or success somehow diminished another woman. We do it with each other's make up choices, fashion choices, lifestyle choices, parenting choices, career choices, education choices, hobby choices, and the list goes on.

I might be just an unpublished writer but one day, I will have a book published and do not ever doubt the power stories have. When that happens, I want that 15 year old girl who's worried about everything, just like I was, to read my book and think,

I want to be like her.

What You Know

Today I was reading Marissa Meyer's blog (she wrote The Lunar Chronicles which are fabulous YA sci-fi novels if you didn't know) and I came across a post where she explained why she disagrees with certain pieces of writer advice that writing instructors hold dear. Specifically, she mentioned what is perhaps the most dangerous piece of advice that I have heard many, many times:

"Write what you know."

I say dangerous not because it will ruin your writing but because the implication is that you are only qualified to write stories about what you know from personal experience.

Which, in my humble unpublished opinion (and it's worth pointing out most of my writing instructors are not best-selling authors like Marissa Meyer, though I do love most of their other advice), complete bullshit.

I don't know what it's like to be an orphan (like Elian) because I have both my parents. I don't know what it's like to have a difficult relationship with my mother (like Elana) because my mom and I get along wonderfully well. I definitely don't know what it's like to be a ruler or even to be obeyed without question in anything. And I have no fucking clue what it's like to be able to fly.

So clearly my novels are just no good because I didn't write what I know.

Like I said, bullshit.

I can imagine. Imagine is something we are discouraged to do after we reach a certain age, especially in school. We stop playing make believe. We deal with facts, things that can be broken down into testable questions with one right answer and we forget.

Only that doesn't work. All of you are capable of losing yourself in something that doesn't exist, be it a movie, a video game, or a book. You don't have all the details but you can imagine it and it is as easy as breathing.

I can imagine. I can imagine whole worlds and people and places and times that never were and never will be. I don't know it all from personal experience. I write it to explore the question What if...? and I don't stop until I've found my way to the end of the answer. 

Besides, if I only wrote what I knew from my personal experience, I would only write stories about nerdy girls who spent more time reading than watching TV when they were kids and how they spent almost every Friday night writing in high school.

Bullshit. I can write so much more than that.

I understand many of you have no interest in becoming writers, so feel free to stop here.

Fellow writers, you don't have to listen to everything the All-Mighty Instructors say. Sometimes what they say works and sometimes it doesn't. You learn to tell the difference by trying and failing and trying and failing some more. 

Write with unbridled love. Write with compassion and determination. Write because you have a story to tell. Write the story you know, in your heart, because your heart will keep going when your mind gives up.

The End

Endings are the hardest.

First of all, getting to the ending can prove damn difficult. Most writers have no problems writing a beginning, some even manage a middle, but only the really determined writers get to the end.

Obviously, I got to the end.

There are, of course, different kinds of endings. There's the ending to the first book in a trilogy, which has some resolution but leaves the story open. There's the ending to the second book, which more often than not suffers from being the connective story and thus lacks resolution and often has a cliffhanger.

Then there's the real ending. The last scene, the last line, the last page.

That's the ending I got to last night. 

I thought I would cry but I didn't. I no longer have the dream of writing these characters, the dream of getting to the end. I've known from the very beginning how I would end it. The details were murky, but the general idea has never changed. So I have dreamed about it for three summers and now it is over.

But I feel strangely calm. Maybe it's just shock and tomorrow I'll wake up utterly heartbroken  but I think it's more than that. I think I did justice to my characters and my story. I think because of that, my writer's heart is at peace.

Part of it too is that I know this isn't the real end, not for me as the writer. I still have revision to look forward to. First I will take a few weeks or a month off, to let the story settle and to get some distance.

I will also resume querying for the first book because I have slacked hard on that front and there is no longer an excuse. I have a whole other post in mind about my thoughts on the value of querying, but that is for another day.

How Do I Begin

For those of you who weren't around way back when I first wrote Black & Gold, I thought I would share with you how I came up with the idea.

I feel like that's a question people want to ask me. Where do you get your ideas? How did you pick such a good one?

Well, first, I picked a lot of really bad ideas. Like, a lot. I don't think saying I picked a thousand bad ideas is hyperbole. As in, an actual 1,000. I'm not kidding. And 98% of those ideas were absolute shit.

I know. I still have them on my computer. On days when I really need to feel good about myself, I open up something I wrote in 7th/8th/9th grade and revel at how far I've come. 

But yeah, I had a lot of bad ideas. I could say I knew from the beginning that this story was going to turn into this massive saga. But I'd be lying through my teeth.

The simple answer is that every summer while I was in high school, I wrote a book in a series (that shall never see the light of day) that ended the summer before my freshman year of college. So I wanted a new story to write the summer after freshman year. This was right after I started watching Game of Thrones and I thought to myself, Why don't I write a non-cliched story with dragons in it? Then I wrote to explore the characters I came up with and three months later, I had a book.

The truth is that it's a little more complicated than that. Because I realized a few months later that this wasn't the first time I'd told Elian's story. When I was in seventh grade, I wrote a 40,000 word story about a girl who could turn into a *black* dragon. And my favorite movie when I was very young was Sleeping Beauty which features a witch who can turn into a--wait for it--black dragon.

So the seeds of the story were sown long before I watched Game of Thrones.

What about Elana then? She's the medieval love story I've tried to write for years and with her, I think I got it right. If I had to guess, I'd say I've tried to write her story four times. 

Complicated? Yes. But it makes sense. I kept writing these different characters or bits of this story until it finally came together in a way that made sense, in a way that works as a whole instead of just pieces. 

I don't know what my next idea will be after this. I have a few floating around but it's too early for me to give them serious thought. I'm still in this world, with these characters, and I'm not ready to leave yet.