Sometimes the hardest part of writing is the not-writing.

Right now I am still on an enforced vacation from my recently-completed draft, both to allow myself to gain some objectivity about the project and to let my revision thoughts brew and stew. And it feels weird. I’m a shameless wordcount addict. I love the external validation of seeing my daily wordage accumulate.

It’s hard to remember that these between-times, these thinking-times, are just as important to the process as the active work periods: that it can be just as much “work” to synthesize critique feedback into a revision plan as it is to actually carry OUT that revision. But I know my revision will be better and more successful if I wait and give my backbrain time to mull and ponder and work things out.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is something one of my beta readers (the very wise Megan Crewe) said: “You have to know that the character as they are at the beginning of the story could not at that point have done what they need to do to succeed at the end of the story. It’s only because of the growth they go through on the way there that they can.” (Edited to add: R. J. Anderson has some interesting comments about places where this rule might not apply, over on the LJ xpost. And indeed, I don’t think any writing rule is universal, though in this case this “rule” has been helping me focus on how to (I hope!) strengthen a particular character arc. Also, Megan says she picked this wisdom up somewhere else, but I will still give her the credit for introducing it to me!)

Right now, this is true (I think!) for one of my two POV characters. But for the other, not so much… Part of the problem is that I haven’t quite nailed down her character arc. I know her backstory and emotional damage, but I need to dig deeper into what she truly needs to grow, and what scares her, and how the events of the book can force that growth and change. The other issue is determining exactly what that “they need to do to succeed” moment is — I am not entirely sure it’s the obvious one. So perhaps I need to focus more on the true moment of success.

These are all things that need thought and reflection. And time. So it’s a good time to retreat and think, to read craft books (most recently Cheryl B. Klein’s fantastic SECOND SIGHT and Donald Maass’s THE FIRE IN FICTION, both highly recommended).

Conveniently, I’m actually going off on my first official writing retreat next week! I am SO looking forward to some dedicated time to consider my revision plans, new book ideas, and more general writing-life stuff! And to visit with some fantastic fellow writers!

Those of you who have gone on informal writing retreats: what do you work on while retreating? First drafts? Revisions? Play & exploration of new ideas? Do you find retreats are especially good for any particular part of the process?

Books that have made me cry:

The Time-Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
Abhorsen by Garth Nix
Ptolemy’s Gate by Jonathan Stroud

…and the draft of the new novel I just finished last night.

As I said on twitter, I suspect I was slightly off balance emotionally because because I had just written 20K in 7 days in the rush to the finish. But one of my goals with this book was to push for more, and deeper, emotion. This is the first thing I’ve written that I consider a love story. I set two characters in motion, not quite knowing them yet, but eager to see them work from mistrust to trust to friendship to love. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, but I wanted to try.

Now I’m in that post-drafting crazybrain space right now, and feeling kind of sappy and goofy, so take this with a grain of salt. But I’m so happy I pushed myself to write this book. I feel like I accomplished something new, bigger and deeper than my previous stories. Whether it sells or not (though I hope it sells! I want other folks to meet these people!) I am glad I did it. I cared about it. I loved telling it. And that is a gift.

What books have made you guys cry? I cry all the time over tv and movies, but rarely over books, myself…

My morning routine is fairly straightforward and unchanging. I wake up around 4 or 5 (no alarm, I’m an early bird. Or a crazy bird, depending on your feelings toward morning) and shuffle into my purple writing library and turn on the computer. I pet my sleepy dog, who has managed to compact himself into half he apparant size in order to sleep on the comfy reading armchair. I go make the first of many cups of hot black tea with milk. I look out the window at the one bright star that hovers over my neighbor’s single tall pine tree.

And then I get to work. Sometimes I unplug the wifi. Sometimes I evict Charlie from the armchair and write curled up under a blanket.

Today I roasted a squash.

Just a small one — an organic Delicata squash I picked up at the natural food store last weekend. [Sidenote: I highly recommend this variety to any fellow winter squash-lovers out there, especially those living in a household otherwise inhospitable to squash. They are the perfect size for one person, and you can easily slice them into "fries" and bake them, skin on, with a few sprays of olive oil and sprinkle of salt. Yum!]

I was procrastinating, you see. I’d just gotten to a scene in the book I’m drafting that needs to be a sort of turning point where one character makes a hard decision. I know what I want her to do. But a story needs more than just authorial intent. I needed to understand why she would do what she did.

One of the dangers of being a more plot-first type of writer (as I am) is that you can easily fall into the trap of treating your characters like puppets, dancing them through the motions of the plot points you want them to follow.

But that’s not a story (to use my personal terminology). Story requires character as well as plot — the characters need to have believable reasons for doing what they do. Motivations. They need to be protagonists, not puppets.

And I could tell that even though I knew what I wanted to have happen, I wasn’t as sure about why. So I baked a squash, and petted my dog, and drank tea (not all at once. Well, the tea-drinking was relatively continuous).

I also read this post by the wise and talented R L LaFevers on the value of time for thinking, stewing and fermenting, when pursuing creative work.

I’m still stewing on this particular scene, but hopefully I will find my way to the guts of the character motivations if I keep searching.

And in the meantime, I have some crispy, sweet, salty delicious squash to eat. Nom!

How about you all? Do you need breaks for thinking time? How do you distinguish between procrastination and necessary stewing time?

I can forget, sometimes, how different the entire world feels when I’m writing regularly. How just making a tiny bit of forward progress every day can make everything feel full of promise and possibilities.

And yet I do forget, and I fritter my writing time away. Some of it on useful things (say, baking banana bread), some of it on fun things (look, someone built an Antikythera mechanism out of legos!) and some on pointless and/or self-destructive things (hello, Amazon rankings).

So on Jan 1 I did something slightly desperate and unplugged the wifi when I got up. Then I sat down and started my new project.

It was still tough. I hadn’t tried to write in a few weeks, and before that I’d been struggling with false starts. I wrestled with that blank screen for three hours, writing and deleting different openings. But finally, finally, I found a sentence I liked, and it led to another and another. And an hour after that I had a 600 word beginning. It didn’t feel anything like a book. It didn’t even feel like the dream of a possible one-day-maybe book. But it was a step forward.

Ten days later, my wordcount just hit 10019.

It’s finally starting to feel like it could really be a book. You know, if I can do this all over again, seven more times. Heh.

So good luck to anyone else out there taking small steps! You can do it!

On an only tangentially related note, here’s a quote I saw on twitter today that resonated very strongly:

The side of me which longs, not to write, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. ~ C.S. Lewis

And last of all, hooray for all the winners of the ALA Youth Media Awards! I’m especially excited to see a sci fi book win the Printz (Ship Breaker by Bacigalupi)!

I am still at the stage where winter is beautiful (ask me again at the end of February and I will probably answer differently). It’s hard not to love it right now, though, when there are colorful lights glowing under veils of snow, mornings pale-blue with icy light, and the house smells of paperwhites and evergreen and honey-lavender caramels.

Tomorrow, Bob, Charlie and I will all be heading off for a long weekend away. There will be no internet, but there will be a Christmas curry dinner, family, boardgames, woods to hike, my favorite unicorn puzzle to assemble, and perhaps some pumpkin pancakes. And also books:

That fuzzy thing is an adorable plush bookworm my friend Kath sent us (I am currently running a LARP plot that involves a spooky library, which is currently infested with magical bookworms).

So yeah, I have plenty to read — especially as we also have the audiobook of the new Bartimaeus book (THE RING OF SOLOMON, Stroud) for the car ride! And hopefully I’ll have some peaceful brainstorming time as well.

Thankfully things with my current writing project have been going much better since my last blog post. Giving myself permission to start from scratch, to toss aside the things I was clinging to and brainstorm freely, all that has been tremendously helpful in finding my enthusiasm for the project. MANY thanks to all of you who commented on my website ur-blog, or on the LJ/Facebook/Goodreads/etc feeds. The support and the advice were both very welcome.

My plan of attack for dealing with the balky story was to follow the excellent advice from several folks who advised trying to focus on what the core of the book was to me. So I started with the several scenes that I really was aching to write, and figure out what they had in common, and made a list of all the things that were most important to me about the story (it wasn’t the things I expected!). Then I looked at the one must-write scene in my list that came earliest chronologically, and asked myself, “well, why shouldn’t the book just start there?”

It was one of those moments where I could practically hear the lightbulb going on over my own head. Yes, the book probably SHOULD start there. All that other stuff I’ve been working on and outlining, it is really all just backstory that leads to this one moment, when these two characters meet and start changing one another’s lives. So duh, ditch the backstory and start with the actual story.

I’m still holding off writing, probably until after holiday travel and activity subsides. I’ve spent hours scribbling down notes in my project notebook (using a purple pen somehow make this so much more fun!) and listening to inspirational music (mostly Dead Can Dance/Lisa Gerrard and Irfan/Azam Ali). I feel excited again, which is the best thing I could have hoped for. The story still may turn balky again when I set fingers to keyboard on Chapter 1, but at least think I am getting closer.

To quote a favorite movie in our household: Never Give Up! Never Surrender!

Peace and joy to all of you! I’ll be back next week with my highlights of 2010 and my hopes for 2011. I’m already enjoying thinking about the new year and new plans!

(It was too cloudy here to see the lunar eclipse earlier this week, but check out this picture of the eclipse + aurora by Francis Anderson! Found via Discover Blogs)

Writing has been difficult for me lately. And when the writing isn’t going well, it tends to cast a pall over the rest of my life. I feel grouchy and sad and I’m probably not very good company. I debated whether or not to even post this, because I have a horror of being whiny, and because I generally try to keep my blog focused on the positive.

But then I remembered how much I value hearing other authors talk about their own tough times, and how it helps to know that other people are forging through these slogs. Plus, if I *do* make it out of this current swamp of self-doubt with a real draft I’m proud of, I’d like to be able to look back and remember what it took to get there. So.

I have this story I really want to write. I’ve been working with the world it’s set in for over ten years, on-and-off. I think I’ve finally found the right characters and plot. I know the themes and emotions I want to explore. I have a dozen key scenes I’m aching to write.

And yet I’ve spent the last two months writing and abandoning first chapters. Stretching and twisting and shredding outlines. Taking a chapter and ripping out two thirds of it and trying to stitch it back together. Some good has come out of it: I’ve discovered new secrets about the world. I know my main character a lot better.

But it still feels so… clumsy and not-right. So this morning I moved my entire working document into my “Cuts” folder. And now I have a blank document staring open at me. Word Count: 0. Again.

I am afraid. I am afraid I am not talented enough, skilled enough to write this story. I worry that something is fatally flawed in my concept, and that is why I can’t seem to make it work. I worry that maybe I’m just being lazy, that I should push harder, just get *something* down and keep going, even when it feels wrong.

You’d think I’d be happier just giving up, working on something else. But no. It works for a while, but eventually I realize I’m more unhappy not-working on the book than I am struggling with it. Because this story is still inside me, trying to get out. And I still love it.

It may be that I never finish this book. Maybe next time I give up, I won’t miss it enough to come back. All I know is that for now, I have to keep trying.

But I’m definitely going to need more tea. And possibly some cookies.

Have any of you all had similar experiences? And how did they turn out? Stories with happy endings welcome!

(Also, I should note that this book isn’t under contract, thank goodness. I made a choice after my last contracted book NOT to attempt to sell on synopsis for the very reason that it makes these kinds of stresses a million times worse — for me, at least!)

I’ll admit it: sometimes writing isn’t entirely fun. Sometimes it is hard work. Sometimes it is painful, when the words I am wrestling with on the page are unmalleable, ugly, colorless clay compared to the perfect story in my mind. [Of course this isn't always the case. There is plenty of fun during the actual writing too, though I am always looking for ways to improve my level of fun. The brilliant Laini Taylor wrote an inspiring post about this recently in her blog. Her book Lips Touch: Three Times was also just nominated for the National Book Award! Congratulations, Laini!]

There is, however, one part of the process that is almost always composed of untarnished fun and excitement: the pre-writing, the brainstorming, when ideas and images are flickering around my brain and I am free to cast my net of dreams out into the sea of ideas and see what I catch. I haven’t committed to anything, so anything is possible.

That’s where I am right now. I had been waffling between two ideas for my next project, which I will be writing for NaNoWriMo. I very much want to do a sequel for my space circus, because that world and those characters are enormously fun to write about and I care about them quite a lot and want to find out the rest of their story. But there’s another idea that’s been drifting around the edges of my mind, looking all shiny and bewitching. It’s a very different sort of book: darker and more romantic. And I think it wants to be written in third person, with a somewhat more lush storytelling voice. My last three books have all been first-person, so the thought of third is a bit scary. I’ve written plenty of third-person novels, but they are all unpublished. I am not entirely sure I can pull off third-person successfully. But one of the things I want to do as a writer is to try new things, and to challenge myself. NaNoWriMo seems like a perfect time for that. I’ll be writing so fast hopefully I won’t have time to be scared!

So here’s what I’ve got:

• A new inspirational desktop image (of the historical site of Bam, Iran).
• A new inspirational playlist (lots of Dead Can Dance, and a bunch of new discoveries courtesy of Last.fm: Irfan, Azam Ali, Vas, L’Ham de Foc, Stellamara).
• My two main characters and their emotional baggage.
• A bunch of world-building/cosmology/secondary characters stolen from a trunked novel (Obsidian Shield, for those of you who have known me long enough).
• The opening scene.
• A very rough outline, and a couple of pivotal scenes from the rest of the story that I am really looking forward to writing — I am going to try to firm these up and identify a few more to serve as “carrots” to tempt me forward through the drafting process.
• Lots of excitement (and a tiny bit of fear)!

What is your favorite part of starting a new project? Any other suggestions for keeping the fun alive during the drafting process?