Titles, otherwise known as the bane of my existence

This was inspired by a Buzzfeed thing (article? link? Whatever, I like thing) about things all writers understand. My favorite was a list of questions taken from Tumblr and the last one was 'HOW DO I TITLE?'

This spoke to my little writer soul because in case you didn't know I FUCKING HATE having to a pick a title.

It sucks. It's like trying to summarize your whole book into a few words and I struggle boiling it down into two lengthy paragraphs. 

For those of you who might be thinking, Oh please, it can be abstract or Just reference something important in the book or Stop being a whiny writer.

To the third person, bite me. Seriously. Then I'll have a reason to beat you senseless with my Shakespeare book.

The other two, okay, yes, when you put it like that it sounds easier. But it's just freaking not. Do you remember how I referred to Black & Gold as The Stupid Book for months because I didn't have a title for it yet? I have a whole document dedicated to possible titles and let me tell you, all of them suck. The one I picked isn't the greatest but it sucks the least. 

I thought I had it all figured out ahead of time for the second book when I named it Crown & Claw. Then, as I revised, I slowly realized that that is not a good title. 

And promptly pretended I didn't know that because having to think of a new title made my little writer soul very, very angry. 

Of course, I got over it and texted my boyfriend possible title combinations before settling on one I think I like. I'm not making any promises though. I might still change my mind. So for now, the second book is going to be called Throne & Fire.

It's not freaking over though. Because I still have to name the trilogy. The nice thing about titling a single book is it usually does contain some concrete themes and ideas and events to go on. But how do you take three books' worth of plot and characters and condense it into a single title?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

That's not even the end, because I still have only half a title for the third book.

HOW DO I TITLE????

Just Some Thoughts

"The only thing worse than writing is not writing."

I see some variation on this quote all over the place. Some of you probably scoff and roll your eyes. Writers, you chuckle, always so melodramatic. 

I admit, the sentiment can come across as an exaggeration. Sometimes, I roll my own eyes because some people love to tell everyone how important their writing is to them. I roll my eyes not because I don't believe them but because I believe that the most important things are not the things you shout from the rooftops.

For me, at least, 'not writing' is just as important. That's the time when I think things through, figure out where I want to go. 

Take the third book of the trilogy (which I realize I have to name soon...ugh. Titles suck balls.) I've had a general idea of the ending since I realized Black & Gold was going somewhere. But now I'm coming up on the time when I can write it. So I've started thinking about what else needs to happen.

Let me tell you, I am full of ideas. They bounce around my head like five year olds on a sugar high at Chucky Cheese. I want more than anything to put them on paper, turn them into an outline and plunge into the story headfirst. I know it will make me happy. I know it will be difficult and frustrating and exhilarating and sobering and exhausting. But I want it.

This is a time when I agree. I can't start writing this next story until I finish this draft of the second book (now officially re-titled as Throne & Fire). I can't start until I finish school.

To say I've never wanted anything more would be an extravagant exaggeration. But I want this even more than I want it to be summer.

So, okay, maybe that's a little melodramatic. But come on, I've got half a dozen people who won't shut up in my head. The only way to quiet them down is to write their story.

April and Almost Being Done

The next two weeks for me in school are what I believe could be found in the dictionary as a description for 'hellish'. I have two big research papers due with five days of each other as well as a proposal for another research paper that requires me to have already read two of my sources due somewhere in between the full length papers. I'm training to run a distance farther than I have run in almost two years.

Oh, and my parents are coming to visit in the weekend in the middle of everything. Which means yummy food and my mom will probably buy me shoes (and what girl doesn't like new shoes?) and my dad will reassure me that going to law school isn't just signing up for another three years of hellish Aprils.

It would be easy to put my book on the back-burner for a little while. I've definitely accepted that about querying for B & G but I refuse to let that happen with the second book. Strange as it sounds, and as much as I can bitch about how hard it is, working on my book is one of the ways I manage my stress levels. 

But after these two weeks, my life in college gets a lot easier. Like, a lot. Yes, I still have finals to study for and yes, I still have to study for the LSAT on June 6, but those are spread out over a few weeks. So I know I can do it.

And after June 6, I'm done. Which means....it's almost time to start writing the final book in my trilogy. 

*cue trumpets*

Isn't that exciting? Honestly, I'm not as in awe as you might expect. In high school, I wrote a series of five books, so finishing three in the same series doesn't feel like a new experience for me.

Except that I have absolutely no idea where to start. Ever since I finished Black & Gold, I've been jotting down random ideas for the third book in various journals but that's not a plot. Yeah, I know the big things that happen and yes, I know how it ends. But everything else? I have only a vague idea.

The solution to that is to make an outline. Some authors are strict about outlines and others just sort of jump in and figure it out as they go along. I was the first kind of author for the second book and the second kind of author for the first book.

Three years ago, I had to write the outline for the fifth book in that series I mentioned. It took me being stuck on an airplane for three hours for me to actually get it done. And let me tell you, I spent a lot of time looking out the window at the clouds because I wanted to be doing anything else.

I'm hoping that's not what happens with this outline because I have no plane rides to force me to get it done. I also can't let myself start until after I take the LSAT, for a number of reasons, chief among them that the LSAT is just a little important. Actually, pretty damn important.

Once I finish this draft of the second book (which I'm in the middle of re-titling by the way), I'll start giving it to people to read. And I'll start writing the third book (only have half the title.)

Hot damn, we're almost to summer! 

See what I did there? No? Okay, I'll let myself out.

The Steps of Revision According to Elizabeth Miller

Step 1: In a timely manner, complete the things necessary to continue your existence as a part-time adult. This includes feeding yourself, finishing your homework, and put on comfortable pants.

Step 2: Make sure you have consumed coffee today. If it is before 5:00 p.m., consume more if you find your caffeine levels lacking. If you don't drink coffee or it is after 5:00 p.m., drink tea. If you don't like either, go away.

Step 3: Sit down and get your chosen pen out. If you have proceeded to entering your edits into your computer, open the document.

Step 4: Promptly check Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest, and then Instagram again with the pen out next to you.

Step 5: Grumble and get one page through. If you feel like you are the world's worst writer and no one will ever publish your stuff, proceed to Step 6a. If you feel your writing is pretty darn good, proceed to Step 6b.

Step 6a: Remind yourself you're making it better and continue editing.
Step 6b: Turn off Netflix because clearly you need to devote your full attention to your book.

Step 7: After three pages, decide you've earned a break. Get a snack and re-watch an episode of Arrow and ogle Stephen Amell's abs/arms/chest/back while he does a salmon ladder.

Step 8: After two episodes, get annoyed with yourself, shut your laptop (if you need it, take it to your bed). Remove pants for maximum comfort and crack down. Ten pages later, turn off the lamp and go to sleep.

Step 9: Turn the lamp back on to jot down the great idea you spent five minutes trying to convince yourself you'd remember in the morning before coming to your senses.

The Bad Guys

I want to talk today about villains. Also known as the bad guys or the antagonist. They range from the likes of Ursula from The Little Mermaid to Voldemort from Harry Potter to Agent Smith from The Matrix. Side note: the only reason I picked these three is to show that I watch and read a wide variety of genres. 

Villains can be lots of fun to write. In many cases, they are the only other character who can provide a real challenge to the protagonist/main character. There's also something fun about pitting your hero against this new character and seeing how it turns out. Evil dialogue too is just so much because I can let my melodramatic side run wild.

But successful villains, the ones that scare us, are so much more than that. They aren't melodramatic and more importantly, they aren't evil for the sake of being evil. 

I think this is a particularly important distinction to understand because as soon as you try to imagine what evil for evil's sake would actually look like, you start to come with the reasons why they're evil. You might think they're bullshit and to us not-evil folks, they are bullshit. We get to hide behind the knowledge that those people are just evil and somehow that Others them.

For those of you who did not take Tom Drake's lit class (or don't spend your free time knee deep in books and stories): Othering is claiming another person's differences from you makes them less than you.

As a writer, though, I don't have the luxury of simply writing a villain who kills or tortures or plots the overthrow of a good leader and chalking it all up to 'He/she is just evil'. Nope. Not gonna cut it. At all. So I have to do for the villain what I do for every other character: crawl inside their head and see the world from their perspective.

Most of my villains, once I got over my tendency to just shout THEY'RE EVIL and move on, aren't diabolical fiends who feed off the pain of others. They're just people who have goals and fears and hopes. Sometimes the ways they go about getting them (i.e. fighting a war) aren't that different from how the heroes are going about trying to reach their goals (i.e. defending their homeland). 

But there was one villain I wrote who absolutely terrified me. I think one of the characters in the story described him in this way: "He's fire and fire loves nothing more than to burn." But he had a story for how he came to be that way. He didn't come into the world wanting to watch it burn. Life before he met my main character made him that way. 

What terrified me about him was the fact that he had come from me, like every other character I've ever written. I imagined him, I created him and I justified his actions. He was incredibly human to me because I saw parts of myself in him. I tend to see the parts of myself I like in my heroes: stubbornness, intelligence, determination. But in this villain I saw my anger, the way I find it too easy sometimes to hate.

The nature of evil that terrifies us is not the horrible things it creates but the reasons behind it. If we look just a little harder, we can see the path that led to the thing or person we've named evil. We comfort ourselves by saying we would never do that, we're better than that, we value the lives of others, we're different from the people who made those choices. Sometimes, that is true. Most people wouldn't make the choice. 

Whether that's true is a topic of debate in the field of psychology- ever heard of the Milgram experiment? 

My point is this: yes, there are people in the world who make choices that lead to terrible, awful, gut-wrenching things. But when we refuse to see them as people, we aren't doing it because it's true. We're doing it to make ourselves feel better because if they aren't people and we are, then we would never be able to do the things they did. 

But that just brings us back to the act of othering and suddenly we don't see so different.

This is Mine

I believe in the power of words. 

Sometimes, though, I forget something and tonight I stumbled across a reminder. Occasionally, the writer gets separated from the writing. It takes on a life of its own and as the writer, I feel like a branch caught in the current, just along for the ride. 

But the thing is, I am the writer and that makes the writing mine. 

The world is made of uncertainties. People drift apart from childhood friends. They fall in love and get their hearts broken only to fall in love again. Maybe they find the right person or maybe that person never shows up. Maybe there is no one right person. Hopes rise and are brought crashing down by ruthless reality. Dreams fade under the sheer weight of passing weeks where nothing extraordinary happens. There's a saying my history professor is fond of: All we know for certain is I am here and this is now. Nothing else is known for sure.

My writing is mine. Nothing, death or travel or change or loss, will change that. I wrote it down and so it will live. Even if I got hit by a bus tomorrow and lost all memory of the last ten years, my writing would be there. It would still be mine.

Writers too often get consumed by what other people think of their writing. Their criticisms, their preferences. Sometimes, I find myself furious with what someone said about a line in a poem that I love but they think I should have made a different stylistic choice. I thought it was just my inner bitch coming out. 

It isn't (well, maybe a little bit.) It makes me angry because that person is trying to take my writing and make it theirs. And no one, no one, has that right.

Writing belongs to the writer. It is part of us, no less vital than our blood or our skin. Writing gives us power if we do it well but that does not make it any less ours.

When everything else fades into memory, lost to the haze of age and decades of life, I will still have this. 

This is mine. 

Rambles: Writing is Hard

Writing is hard.

I've probably said this before and I have no doubt I'll say it again. Writing is damn hard and if you don't believe me, just think about having to write a five page essay. Doesn't part of your soul just hurt thinking about it? 

The thing is, I get the impression people forget that writing is hard. Ironically, some of those people choose not to write and occasionally scoff at those of us who have chosen to study it in college. 

Some day I'll have to write a post about how irritating it is to have what I do dismissed as 'easy' in one breath and deemed the most horrific form of homework known to man in the next. But today, that's not the point.

Fellow English majors, college seems hellbent on destroying our love of writing by forcing us to write essays and when we do write creatively, we have to take criticisms for it.

Now, I think workshop is an incredibly valuable tool for a writer. We get too close to our own writing and we need advice. But the trouble with workshops is that they are only as good as the people in them. Not every creative writing class is going to have writers at your level or, preferably, above your level, to give you good critiques and pointers. Believe me, I know. 

But I have a thick skin when it comes to my writing because by the time I got to workshops, I had written enough that I knew my general weaknesses. I also knew enough about writing stories to know what was good criticism (and by good I mean useful) and what was just stupid.

It can be hard when you're used to writing because you love it to suddenly have your work picked apart. So then you get caught between hating writing because you have to write essays and being too afraid to write for fun because you've acquired an internal editor who did not come with a mute button.

I'm here to tell you it's okay that writing is hard. It really is. It's supposed to be hard. If it isn't hard, you aren't pushing yourself and if you don't push yourself you won't get better.

Some parts should get easier. Like basic punctuation (although this seems to be a huge struggle even for college students and is a huge pet peeve of mine. I mean, if you read books you can just learn proper punctuation from that for shit's sake. I digress.)

Some days (more like for short bursts of time), writing will be as easy as breathing but those days are few and far between. Don't sit around waiting for them because writing on all the other days is hard. 

It's okay to write shit. It really is. Seriously. My dad thinks Hemingway got it right with his 'if I write one perfect sentence in a day it was a good day' or whatever it is but this is, in my humble opinion, absolute bullshit. That's like doing one squat on leg day with perfect form and thinking that will do anything for your booty. 

Write a lot. Write stupid shit that you cringe to look at it. Write some halfway decent shit that you get a few good things out of. Write mediocre crap that you can make better. Write a decent poem so you can borrow the two really good images for a different piece. Write all that because somewhere in between all that, you'll write that one line. That one amazing, unbelievable line. The one that when you read again, you can't believe that you wrote. 

It won't happen often but I promise you, it will happen. But you have to do the work. Like with squats. You have to do a lot of them, probably with less than perfect form, for a long time (weeks) before you see any results. 

Tomorrow is leg day, in case you were wondering why I am so fixated on squats. 

Back to writing. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, sometimes it feels like bashing your head into your desk would be productive. Yeah, you question your life choices on a daily basis.

I've always decided to keep going. I've put in too much work in the past eleven years to give up now.

Don't you give up, either. Ever.