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Posts Tagged ‘first drafts’

Status Update

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2012| 2 Comments »

Just a (relatively) quick status update today.

Monday, I finished the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT. Yay! I took longer with that than with any first draft since my first novel. Now it rests for a while before I go back for revisions. I have it slated to be read by my writing group in January.

It’s good I have something to celebrate because my chances of getting into the second round of the GUTGAA (Gearing Up to Get an Agent) agent pitch contest aren’t looking too good. That’s a disappointment, but with four anonymous judges making the picks, you just can’t ever tell what particular kinds of stories will appeal to them–just like with agents.

Meanwhile:

Yesterday, I went through and outlined the existing version of that first novel, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, as a way to help me decide what direction I want to take with this story. That was a very interesting exercise and certainly exposed some of the weaknesses. It also proved to be a pretty good way to get the last story out of my head and clear it for the next. Whatever I do with this will be a rewrite, but I need to decide on audience first. After I play around with it some, I may just submit this to my writing group for some brainstorming.

Now, it’s time to get back to the revisions on my middle grade fantasy, MAGE STORM. I know exactly what I want to do, so once I get into it it shouldn’t take long. 

Then I think I’ll get to the revisions on BLOOD IS THICKER (paranormal romance). I might even squeeze in a couple of short stories that need some attention.

And then it’ll be time to go back to THE BARD’S GIFT.

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Multiple Versions of Queries

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2012| 2 Comments »

First, a little status.

I made it into the first round of the GUTGAA Agent Pitch! Yay! Man that was competitive–in the sense of being able to click on send really, really fast. Now it’s fingers crossed that I make it through to the second round.

Also, I’m within a chapter of writing “THE END” at the bottom of the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT. Whew! TBG will be my ninth completed novel. (We won’t talk about the first three, okay? I’ve got to work on revisions of two others while TBG cools. And one has been tabled for the time being.) It still feels great to get to “THE END”–or even close to it.

Now to the main topic.

I’m currently contemplating the possibility of working up–and polishing–another version of the query for FIRE AND EARTH. Not a new version to replace the current one (version number seven), but a whole new and separate query. After all, you do it for resumes, rght?

See, FIRE AND EARTH has two point-0f-view characters. I’ve consciously written the query from Casora’s story but, if I’m honest, Tiaran has a strong story, too, even though he didn’t even show up until Chapter 5.

And now, as I research agents to query, I find that at least some are actively looking for boy stories. Well . . . but to get their attention I’d have to write another version of the query. And then the fact that Ti doesn’t come in until Chapter 5 could be a problem. He probably wouldn’t even be in the sample pages.

Hmm. Probably not. I’ll just wait until I get the revisions to MAGE STORM completed. That’s a legitimate boy story, with a single point-of-view character.

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Back to the Drawing Board

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2012| 2 Comments »

If you’re here looking for my GUTGAA Pitch Polish entry, go here.

I’m within sight of finishing the first draft of my YA alternate history, THE BARD’S GIFT, probably next week. So it’s time to look up and start thinking about what I’ll work on next, while the first draft cools a bit.

I have plenty of choices. Revisions to MAGE STORM are certainly at the top of the list. I have another story in first draft that I need to get back to, BLOOD IS THICKER, the sequel to BLOOD WILL TELL. And there are a couple of short stories that I need to polish up. I have a pretty good idea what to do with all of those stories. And that’s certainly enough to keep me busy until I can go back to work on THE BARD’S GIFT.

But, even though I may not start working on it yet, there’s one more story I’ll at least be thinking about as I try to figure out what to do next. This story was my first completed novel (if you don’t count the thing I wrote in college–and I don’t). In that incarnation, as THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, I thought it was a mainstream fantasy. Now, that version has so many serious flaws, I’m not even going to try to list them here, but, in spite of those flaws, I still love the characters and the whole arc of the story (which was always intended to be a series).

Therefore, last year about this time, I started a rewrite, this time as middle grade. I called it MAGIC’S FOOL and had even started the sequel, MAGIC’S APPRENTICE. The original story had to be changed, of course. Some elements had to be dropped and in order to tell a complete story in about half the length I had to choose a different central conflict. I like the results and was planning on going back for another round of revisions and then polish it up.

That was until WriteOnCon, where I found out that agents and editors don’t want stories with main characters betweeen twelve and fourteen years old. Bummer. My main character in MAGIC’S FOOL was thirteen. (He had started out as fifteen in THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.)

So now, I have to go back to the drawing board and decide what to do with this story. It’s not an easy choice, like MAGE STORM, in which I can easily change or delete a couple of elements and make the protagonist younger, say around eleven. Thirteen was already pushing the limits on just how young this character can credibly be.

So, as far as I can see right now, my choices are:

  1. “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.” Just ignore this age limit or maybe delete the one or two references to the protagonists age and go ahead with it as it is. This feels a little like trying to swim upstream (even more than is normally the case).
  2. Keep the story as it is now (more or less) and just make the main character a bit older. Go back to fifteen as he was in the original. To do this credibly, the story would have to be expanded by about half again as much (from around 50,000 words to somewhere around 75,000 words). There are things I could expand. There are also a couple of subplots that could easily be added–and which would add depth to the overall plot. I’d be betting that agents and editors really mean it when they say they want boy YA stories.
  3. And the third possibility would be to go back to the original story line and central conflict. I’d still have to rewrite it, of course. That would actually be better and easier than trying to revise it. This version has what may be a more satisfying central conflict. That’s a draw, frankly. Now, I could still go two ways with this. I could still try to make it YA. There really aren’t any plot elements that are inappropriate for YA, although I might handle one of them a bit differently. Or I could just leave that alone and let it be a mainstream (adult, but not in a sexy way) story.

I’ll be giving this some thought as I work on the other revisions I’ve got stacked up.

 

 

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Inciting Incidents

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , on August 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Related to my last post about middles, I’m going to share a few thoughts about inciting incidents.

Inciting incidents aren’t precisely beginnings. Even if a story starts in the middle of the action, as some do, the inciting incident may not occur until a bit later. I’m thinking here of HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON by Naomi Novik (quite a fun alternate history about the Napoleonic Wars–if both sides had an air force composed of dragons). This book opens with a sea battle, definitely in the middle of the action, but the inciting incident doesn’t occur until a bit later when the captured dragon egg hatches.

The inciting incident is the event that sets the rest of the story in motion, the thing that makes it impossible for the main character to continue on as they have been. The inciting incident also sets up what will be the central conflict for the story. For example, when Frodo discovers that the ring Bilbo left him is the One Ring of the Enemy.

Generally speaking, the inciting incident should occur within the first ten to fifteen percent of the story, or by about page thirty of a three-hundred page novel. Usually, the sooner the better–especially in young adult or middle grade fiction. My general rule is to try to have the inciting incident in the first chapter. In fact, if you were to look for the inciting incident in one of my novels, the last scene of the first chapter would be an excellent place to start the search.

Often, of course, especially with fantasy, the story needs a little set up before things start to unravel following the inciting incident. The reader needs a chance to find their feet in this new world that’s being introduced and a chance to learn to care about the main character. It’s a delicate balancing act.

There are different kinds of inciting incident, too. If a story is going to be about the internal journey of the main character, the inciting incident may not be a big external event. It might be something that other characters barely even notice. In an action-oriented story, it’s much more likely to be a big dramatic event.

This is where I’ve run into some questions from critiquers on recent stories. The later scene which I intend as the end of the first try/fail cycle may be much more dramatic. I’ve had a couple of critiquers on different stories misidentify the inciting incident.

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. What it likely means is that even though I mean the inciting incident to be something of importance only to the protagonist, at least at the start, I need to ramp up the significance to that character.

This is something I’ll need to consider when, later this year, I start the revisions to THE BARD’S GIFT. It will also be an important consideration when I figure out exactly which of several possible courses I’m going to take with the rewrite of MAGIC’S FOOL/MAGIC’S APPRENTICE (formerly THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY). Who know what the eventual title(s) of that story will be.

But titles are another subject entirely.

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Revision Process

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , on August 22, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m mostly a discovery writer. I usually have a few sign posts marked before I start, to keep me from going too far off course, but I don’t outline before I start.

This post on last week’s WriteOnCon was an eye-opener for me. I was really intrigued by this concept and can see some real benefits for story structure and pacing.

I’m still in the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT, though I think the end is coming in sight. I definitely think I’ll try this method–or some variant of it that works for me–when I’m ready to start the revisions.

It’ll be fun to give this one a try.

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The Middle Grade/Young Adult Gap

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

Something new I learned in the very last event of WriteOnCon this year. Apparently there’s a gap between the middle grade (8 to 12) age group and the young adult (14 to 18) age group. Nobody wants books about twelve- to fourteen-year-olds.

The reason given? Bookstores don’t know where to shelve such books. The main characters are too old for middle grade readers and too young for young adult readers. It seems like a pretty thin reason to ignore an entire group of readers. Makes me think that online bookstores, like Amazon, are a very good idea. It’s no big deal to create a new category in the database and nobody has to move bookshelves or books.

Plus, of course, that skips over the difficult period called puberty, which strikes me as just cowardly. Admittedly, it’s been a few years, but there are parts of that time that are indelibly etched on your memory. Not only is it a time just rife with conflicts, which we all know make good stories, it’s also a time when reading about others going through some of the same embarrassing, confusing things might be more than usually beneficial. But, there’s no space on the shelves for it.

It also makes me wonder about something else. The standard wisdom that you’ll see quoted around the internet by industry professionals is that girls graduate from middle grade to young adult, while boys, if they keep reading, graduate straight to the adult section. I have to wonder if at least a part of the reason for this is that the romance element of just about all young adult stories satisfies at least a part of the needs of pubescent girls. On the other hand, the young adult stories in which the boy is almost always older, hot, and at least socially adept enough to ask a girl out without blushing maybe just don’t address the needs of pubescent boys, so they turn elsewhere.

Part of me wants to say that this is an under-served audience just waiting for the right books. On the other hand, I can wonder and even rant about this as much as I want, but one fact remains: getting started in this business is an uphill battle as it is. Making it any steeper than it has to be is akin to banging your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop. An established author with a great track record might be able to write these books successfully. A debut author–or a writer hoping to be a debut author–just hasn’t got the horsepower to get up that hill.

Rats! And I’d started MAGIC’S FOOL with the MC at age thirteen. I’m shelving that one and the sequel, MAGIC’S APPRENTICE, while I decide what to do. Make the MC younger? That complicates the plot of MAGIC’S APPRENTICE enormously. Make him older and take this story to the younger side of young adult? It’s ironic that he was fifteen in the original version of this story. In that case, I’m going to have to weave in a subplot or two or else change the central conflict to expand the story–a rewrite, either way. Otherwise, at less than 50,000 words it’s just too short for a young adult novel. Hmm. I already have at least one idea for a subplot, though.

It’s not all bad, though. I got a couple of really good ideas on how to improve MAGE STORM and make it even better before I start sending it out again. That will probably be my next project after I finish the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT.

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Giving a Story Its Head

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on August 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Kind of an equestrian metaphor in the title, I guess. Well, I’ll let the secret out, then. Back in high school, I had a couple of years of riding lessons. What these riders do in the Olympics–I was never close to brave enough to do that, although I love to watch it. I quit when the jumps went from 3′ 9″ to 4′. That was too much for me.

Anyway, back to writing. I’m past the midpoint in the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT and I have to admit it’s not going quite in the direction I’d planned. For one thing, this is a fantasy and most of the fantasy elements haven’t even shown up, yet. I thought I’d already be at the dragons by now.

I think I’ve mentioned probably a dozen or so times that I’m more of a discovery writer than a plotter. I do insist that I know the central conflict and have a pretty good idea what climax I’m aiming for before I start writing. More is good. Sometimes, I’ll write out what I call a proto synopsis with the main points of the story. I don’t do a chapter-by-chapter outline. I tried that once or twice and I spent as much time revising the outline as I did writing. Totally not worth it.

So, I’m letting this story go off in a slightly different direction right now. I like where it’s going. I like the character development it’s giving me. And it’s still not too far off course.

Besides, it’s a first draft. I can fix anything in the revisions.

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Authenticity vs. Accessibility

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , on August 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Another new issue for my YA alternate history project. Do I go for authenticity or reader accessibility and is there any middle ground.

I put the first part of the first draft of THE BARD’S GIFT up for critique on one of the writers’ forums I frequent. The first response I’ve gotten back indicates that certain words are causing a problem. Interestingly enough, not the ones I would have predicted. There are a couple of jaw-breaker words that I expect to have to reconsider.

The story is set against the failure of the viking colony in Greenland. In places, I’m using the actual terminology that these people would use–hopefully with enough context and/or explanation to let the reader know what is meant. A cargo ship is a knarr, for example. Other terms, because of their similarity to English words, seem to be more of a problem.

So, now the question I have to consider is whether I stay with the actual historical term for accuracy or change to something more recognizable to a modern audience. And whether an alternate history ought to try to be as accurate as possible.

These aren’t problems I’ve faced with straight-forward fantasy. When I get to build my own world for a story, the only issues are consistency and not doing anything that throws the reader out of the story. Then again, maybe terms that are confusing because they look too much like English words with different meanings will throw the readers out of the story.

Well, it’s still a first draft. I’ve got time to figure some of this stuff out.

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In the Flow

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , on July 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Oops. Got busy writing and almost forgot to blog.

It’s taken a while with this story, but I’m finally in the flow. I’m cranking out a chapter or a bit more every two days. It may not last, but I’m sure going to enjoy it while it does. I cranked out the last scene of one chapter and the first scene of another today, about 1800 words.

I needed some help from some writing buddies about something I didn’t know enough about. It’s great to have people with a variety of knowledge and experience in your online groups. That online discussion fueled some ideas that I think will improve the story. It also seems to have really gotten the juices flowing.

This is my YA alternate history, so I’ve often been slowed down by the need to do specific research. I had some on this bit, too.

Now, back to writing.

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First Person Point of View

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 18, 2012| 2 Comments »

In those moments when I need to take a short break from my YA alternate history, THE BARD’S GIFT, I’ve started reading through another one of my projects, MAGE STORM.

MAGE STORM is a middle grade fantasy. It’s also a boy adventure story, something that I see several agents/editors saying that they want. I queried it last year to some interest but no offers. Now, I’ve given it a couple of months to cool off and I’m taking a fresh look at it. I’ve already identified one place where I think I could do a bit better and I’m halfway through a new scene to do that.

But, one of the things I’m considering is whether or not to rewrite the whole thing in first-person. It’s currently close limited third person. Everything in the story is filtered through the main characters perceptions already.

Still, changing it to first person would be a rewrite. Done right, in my opinion, it can’t just be changing the pronouns and the conjugations of the verbs. It’s a lot more involved than that–or it should be. First person point of view invites the reader to live inside that character’s skin. It’s a lot more intimate than even close limited third person.

I’ve written first person before, but only in a couple of novelettes. (Shameles plug: “Heart of Oak”, which is currently free on Smashwords and all the places Smashwords distributed it to, is one of those.) In both cases, it was because I “heard” the story in my own head that way. I’ve never written first person just because it’s the popular thing right now.

Just a quick survey of recent novels in both young adult and middle grade makes it impossible to deny that first person is strongly in favor right now. Is that reason to rewrite this in first person? I haven’t decided yet. After all, I really do want to see this published.

So far, I still “hear” this story in third person, although I could easily see it done in first person. Nearly all of the character’s emotions are already there, and quite a few of his thoughts. While there are a number of action/fight scenes in which, eventually, he comes out as the hero, he’s nearly always frightened enough during the action that he wouldn’t come off as bragging. That can be one of the downfalls of first person.

Another consideration, though, is that this story can be the first in a series. I already know, in a general way, what the next two books in this series would be about. I think I need to consider whether first person would also serve those stories as well as third person.

So, for this pass, I’m just going to concentrate on the sorts of things I’m working on now. When I get through this read-through/revision, I’ll make a decision on whether to make the change or not.

Now, I’m going to get back to work on that improved scene.

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