Unintentional stroke of genius

I was trying to figure out how to describe a smell the other day. In my WIP, I mean. In real life, I say things like, "It smells yummy," or "It smells gross." In writing I try to be more . . . artful.

Anyway, smells are hard to do justice to in writing. And they matter. You know that whole thing about how smell is the sense most closely connected to memory? Imagine successfully triggering that as a writer. Dang.

So. The smell. My main character loves the smell of old books just like I do, coincidentally. And I was trying to explain why, but to show it, not tell it. I wrote this from my MC's point-of-view as I toyed around with a new opening:

The dust from books smells different than any other kind of dust, somehow rich but not quite sweet. Vanilla. Book dust smells like regular dust with a hint of vanilla.

Guess what. I'M TOTALLY RIGHT. So says Mental Floss right here, and I quote:  

“A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is how an international team of chemists describes the unique odor of old books in a study. 

Did you see that? VANILLA.

Nailed it!

Confessions of a reformed pantser, Part 2

Part 2. You can read Part 1 of my reform here.

So if you've read Rachel Aaron's post here's how I managed to go from doing a 95,000 word manuscript in 9 months, to turning out an 85,000 word manuscript in 6 weeks. 

1. I had to begin with the end in mind. I needed to make a firm decision about whether my story was a romance or a coming-of-age story, because it would determine how it ended, and everything has to build to the end, to the pay off for the reader, to the reward they get for sticking out your story for hours. Dan Wells talks about how you have to begin with the end in mind, and I'm a big believer in this. (You can watch his great series on plotting in these You Tube videos here.)

2. Once I had my ending, I started thinking about major conflicts I knew would be in my story. These were little tidbits I'd saved up over a few months of thinking about the new story while I was finishing my previous manuscript. 

3. I wrote each of these on a 3x5 index card in ten words or less, just a quick jot of what the scene would be.

4. I started stringing them together. I figured if I was doing a 75,000 word story, and I averaged 3,000 words a scene (a lot of people average less than this), then I needed 25 cards. I ended up with 30. I rolled with it.

5. Once I had them all laid out, I figured out what order I wanted them in. Pro tip: NUMBER them. I didn't. I have toddlers. I was stupid. After reshuffling them due to a disastrous card-flinging courtesy of my littlest one, I numbered them and I'll never make that mistake again.

6. Each time I sat down to write a scene, I spent about ten minutes free writing what would happen in the scene that day. 100 words or less, typically. Then I would write. Oh, and another pro tip: I use Mac Freedom for PC. It locks you out of your Internet connection for the amount of time you tell it to. I do an hour, catch up on my social networks, and do another hour. I can easily get 2,000 words done that way. Anyway, the 5-10 minutes was super easy, and it made the scene that day SO fast to get down.

What I learned about writing: my scenes ended up being far shorter than 3000 words. I wasn't wandering through them, writing until I figured things out. The story still got away from me in the middle a little, because the spontaneous, surprising parts of writing don't go away. Some of the stuff that came out and surprised me (in a good way) needed wrapping up, but that's okay, because I'd saved a lot of space on earlier scenes that weren't overwritten while I meandered. And in the end, the final word count was only 84,000-ish. My shortest manuscript to date. It was over my goal, but well within the limits of the contemporary YA genre I was writing in this time.

What I learned about my process: Because of the no-nap situation in my house, I had to make a few other adjustments. I finally busted out and used the Alphasmart Neo my husband gave me for Christmas. Light, portable, runs on regular batteries forever, and is a small screen that shows text only with no Internet access. It easily came with me to gymnastics class or the park or wherever I was with my kids when my kids didn't really need me. I would type a few hundred words at a time in addition to the hour I carved out during the kids' TV time. And I flew. I knew exactly what I was writing each time I started and I never had to grope for words.

Something different I did this time too: a writing retreat for 2.5 days where I got 18,000 words done. It cut about two weeks off of my drafting time at least, and I will definitely do this whenever possible for every manuscript now.

And the biggest personal revolution of all: because I didn't fight so hard for the words, I didn't fight so hard to keep them. Revisions became fun. FUN! The impossible happened: I didn't mind them in the least. It was challenging the way puzzle-solving is. I liked it. WHAT?

So that's how I did it. That's how writing became fun again and I went from 9-month manuscripts to 3-month manuscripts. I'm a plotter now, and I'm not going back. Whoohoo!

How I increased my word count while DECREASING my writing time

I'm a mom with two little ones at home. They used to nap. That was a great time to write. And then they gave up naps, and this summer became the first time that I had to figure out how to make writing happen when I had a two-year-old laying herself across my keyboard and demanding that I play dolls with her.

The answer is that I didn't write. I played dolls. And I still produced a manuscript faster than I ever had. I started July 12. I finished my first draft on Labor Day: 82,000 words. And even sending it out to beta readers and doing several revision passes, I had a polished manuscript to send to my agent at the beginning of October. 

Here's how I did it:

1. Don't be too precious about your process. This post should be subtitled "Confessions of a Reformed Pantser."

I have seven complete manuscripts under my belt. I started writing almost five years ago and I was all about thinking my plots out in the vaguest terms, sitting down at my laptop, and then letting the story come out however it wanted to. It was fun. And it kinda worked. I mean, I was writing genre fiction--romantic comedy--so I started with a funny conflict, came up with a meet cute, figured out how to keep the characters apart for most of the book, and then a way for them to get back together. And then I wrote and the scenes came to me slightly faster than I could type them. It was cool watching what came out. I mean, I didn't know what to expect, and it so often charmed me. That was it: I was a pantser through and through. I didn't even do outlines.

I also had to write in total silence, in a certain space, at a certain time of day, and so on and so forth. All of that eventually changed. I learned to write with Yo Gabba Gabba during whatever time my kids were willing to quit running around like maniacs and watch TV long enough for me to tap out a few hundred words.

Anyway, this worked all right for a couple of books. And then I hit my third manuscript. And somewhere around the middle of the book, I couldn't quite figure out how to get to the end where my two people get together. So I wrote to find out. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. And I ended up with 119,000 words. I fought so hard for all of them, sometimes wanting to beat my head against the keyboard to make the scenes work out and the characters behave.

But it was waaaay too many words. So I had to cut. And that was painful. I still remember the weeks I spent doing it, going through the manuscript and over and over again, whittling words away, slicing scenes, until I got it to a manageable 95,000 words.

But it took soooo long. Nine months, at least. Probably longer, between the writing and the drafting. But my publisher had asked me for a two-book-a-year commitment, and there was no way to do that at the pace I was working at. Plus, revisions SUCKED. It was iserable cutting out 20,000 of the words I'd fought so hard to get down.

I'd been to lots and lots of conferences and workshops by this point, and I'd heard many writers talk about their outlining processes, but my reaction was always the same: it's not for me. My brain doesn't work that way. I can't think like that. And I don't want to miss the joy of discovery and sense of surprise as I go.

At the same time, what I was doing wasn't going to work. So I tried a compromise: an outline. Think old school Roman numerals and the whole bit. I put in the major conflicts and pivotal scenes in a few jotted phrases.

It helped a little, but I still ran into a sagging middle, where I couldn't figure out how to get my main characters out of the conflict I'd painted them into. Instead of writing my way through it, I quit writing for a while. A month, actually, where I let my subconscious brain work on it until I finally figured out a way through and I sat down to write again. I was still over, only about 10,000 words now. Only. Ha. It still sucked to cut them all out. SO HARD. Once again, I HATED revisions. I couldn't understand how people could talk about enjoying them.

And then came my sixth manuscript. Once again, I felt it getting away from me in the middle. I looked at how many words I had, and how many words I was limited to, and how much story I still had left to tell. I thought, "There's NO WAY." But I had a deadline and couldn't take a month off to figure it out. So I tried something completely different.

I counted how many words I had in the scenes I'd written so far. I averaged about 3000 per scene. And I know I wanted it to come in at no more than 85,000 words. And doing a little math, that meant I could write about 36,000 more words to stay in goal. And that meant 12 more scenes. Since I knew what my final scene was, I started working backwards to figure out what 12 scenes I needed to write to get there. And I wrote about hundred words or less describing each scene.

THIS CHANGED EVERYTHING. Suddenly, it wasn't a big deal to sit down each day and fill in all the spaces around those hundred words. I powered through the rest of that manuscript at record speed. I ended up having to cut 5000 words still, but it was a vast improvement, and I resented them far less. 

I couldn't wait to tell my critique partners about my discovery. It was process-changing. They were impressed, knowing what a pain my drafting and revision process had become. A few days later, one of them sent me a link to a blog post from Rachel Aaron, who took the process I'd intuitively stumbled upon and pushed it even further. By now, I'd recognized that I had to change my process even more to be efficient and lower my stress levels, and so I couldn't wait to apply the full process the way she described it. 

Because here's the thing: when I was able to work faster and not fight revisions so hard, writing had become fun again. And just as full of fun surprises as it ever was.

But this post is too long, so I'll do part two tomorrow (found here) to explain how I translated her suggestions to my own.

Giveaway winner

And we have a winner.

And it's #66 according to Ye Olde Random Number generator.

And that's Becca.

And YAY!

And I'm at the RWA conference all week this week and it's awesome. YAY! I'll have highlights for you soon. And more books to give away!

Book love/Giveaway!

I'm giving away a book. And it falls under the category of great summer reads in this awesome Vacation Reads book hop sponsored by I'm a Reader, Not a Writer. And the book is...

Okay, it's a choice. You can choose one of these two books written by authors whose careers I want to support. 

First, RED CELL by Mark Henshaw. That's my friend's brother. He works for the CIA. He wrote a spy novel. This seems loaded with great potential to me. And to his fancy Big 6 publisher. And to lots of reviewers who have all said excellent things. 

Tagline: From the Tom Clancy for a new generation, a debut thriller following two CIA outcasts who must race to stop a secret Chinese weapon that threatens to provoke a world war.

OR you can choose this brand new YA novel (just out last week) from my agent-mate, Lauren Barnholdt. THE THING ABOUT THE TRUTH. Her books are FUN. Perfect for summer. Get on it. 

Tagline: In this humorous love story from the author of Two-Way Street , an unlikely romance is the best sort of surprise—but the wrong secret can ruin everything.

To enter: follow this blog and then comment that you want one of these books. If you win per ye olde-fashioned Random Number Generator, I'll email you to find out which one and what format you prefer.

Oooh, and you can check any of the blogs below for a chance to win other books. Whee!

Happy summer, y'all!