Hawaiian Islands Notes from Gay: Planning a Novel: Ann Hood
One more week without posting, but here's another installment of notes
from the "Hawaiian Islands" Writers Conference (its new name).
Ann Hood is a fan of structure and plot, and a big fan of synopsis. She
also loves to write with multiple POV characters.
The first thing to determine is the structure of the novel: how will you
tell the story? Will you have a single narrator or multiple narrators,
and will you use first person or third person? Note that you can have a
first person narrator that tells someone else's story. (Thing "Great Gatsby").
Where does the story begin? (This may not be something you figure out in
the first draft.)
Then Ann writes her synopsis.
Checklist for synopses:
Opening sentence tells reader what book is about?
Main character and conflicts are clearly defined?
Can reader understand what's at stake for the characters?
Have you avoided grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes?
Have you hit major plot points?
Did you resolve all conflicts raised?
Did you write in present tense?
Then, using the synopsis, Ann will begin to write. When writing in multiple
POV, it can be difficult to juggle the characters/subplots. There are two
ways to go about doing it. If the story unfolds chronologically, without
too many things happening at one time, then you can write scene by scene,
asking yourself who the best choice for POV character would be--BUT, if
you have characters in several places at once, and each of their stories
are progressing simultaneously, you can pull your hair out trying to keep
track of everything.
In this case, Ann writes each story as its own separate entity (like its
own short story or mini-book), each scene within it clearly labeled on
its own paper(s) within the larger stack of paper. Then, when she's done,
she puts all of her book piles on the floor and shuffles them together,
rearranging them until the scenes are in an order that makes some kind
of sense. Finally, she reads them in this order and writes bridging scenes
and/or passages as necessary and makes adjustments to get characters from
one place to another if they are found in more than one "mini-book."
Motivation
One of the
workshops I attended at the New England Crime Bake conference was on
goal setting and motivating yourself to write. I thought I would post
some of the suggestions from it here in light of out 500-words-a-day
challenge.
This Thursday when you do your weekly report also take a look at your
goal to see whether it is working for you. If you are stressing too
much over the goal it isn’t working. If you are missing the goal every
week, it isn’t working. If you are exceeding the goal every week, it
may not be high enough. Boredom with a goal that isn’t challenging
enough and stressing over not meeting your goal can be equally damaging
to motivating yourself. So take a look at the challenge. See whether it
is working for you or whether you need to revise your goal, and let us
know when you file your report this week.
I’ll try to post notes from some of my other workshops later, but this
seemed appropriate to get up now. We’ve been doing the challenge for a
good month and a half, and it might be timely for each of us to look at
our goal and decide if it is still serving us.
Waking the Muse: How to Keep it Flowing, a workshop with Steve Kelner,
a motivation psychologist and management consultant, who is married to
a mystery writer and wrote a forthcoming book “Motivate your Writing.”
From the workshop:
Writers don’t write because of discipline. It’s about obsession, addiction, need. Discipline is not enough.
Writers can postpone satisfaction for a lot longer than ordinary human beings.
You’ve got motivation and creativity. You can manage your goals. The
most effective way of managing yourself is setting writing goals.
Toni (his wife) was writing 600 words a day four days a week for a
total of 2,400 words. Then she raised it to 800 words. Then 1,000 as
she got more experience and thw writing came faster. Her editor gave
her a deadline that would require her to do 2000 words a day, and she
said she couldn’t do it. Pretty soone she wasn’t even writing the 1,000
words a day she had been writing. I broke it down for her into two
1,000 word goals a day. She knew she could make the first one and the
second one because a challenge. Goal meeting has a lot to do with
perception.
If I said to you, you have to write 76,000 words in one year, it can
look overwhelming. If I said you have to write 200 words a day, which
is the same thing, you are more likely to feel you can do it.
GOAL SETTING GUIDELINES
1. Different people need different goals. Your goal does not have to be
a word count. It can be a scene or a page. Chose something that is high
enough to challenge you but not so high that it intimidates.
2. The difficulty of the challenge is perception. Break it down in a way that does not seem formidable.
3. The balance point between what is too small a goal to motivate and
what is so large it discourages changes with external issue. Be aware
of what is gfoing on in the rest of your life and expect it to affect
your goals.
4. The balance point changes with internal issues.
5. Be flexible. Reassess the realism of your goals as you go along and
raise them or lower them accordingly. If you find yourself getting
stressed over the goal , then you may need to rethink it.
You want the goal to be high enough it is a challenge, but not so difficult that it discourages you.
THE SEVEN DEADLY MYTHS OF CREATIVITY
1. The Muse: I must wait on my muse.
2. Solitude: I have to be alone.
3. Discipline: I must have discipline.
4. Similarity: I have to do it the same way X does it.
5. Spontaneity. Writing must be spontaneous.
6. Heredity: Creativity is born not made.
7. Worthiness: I am not good enough to be creative all the time.
Iowa Summer Writer's Festival (2007) - Kathy K.
Here are notes from the weekend workshop I took in Iowa City with Lisa Schlesinger. It was called
Character and Action.
Character and Action Notes
San Gabriel Writers Workshop Notes
Notes Syl took on "Writing a First Draft in Two Weeks".
San Gabriel Notes.htm
SCWW Conference Notes
Here are notes Carol took from her experiece at the South Carolina
Writer's Workshop (SCWW).
She sums up each of the workshops she
attended at SCWW. Thanks Carol!!
Iowa Writer's Workshop - Kathy July, 2005
Books on the Bosque
Yesterday I attended Books on the Bosque, at the Bosque Conservatory in
Clifford, Texas. A neat conference and book festival.
Donna Ingham, an oral story teller and author of Texas tales spoke. Something
she said made an impression on me. She talked about story loops.
Paraphrased: "Stories start either in the middle, or sometimes they even
start at the end.
We have this big middle of a story inside us waiting to be told. We may
know the middle, or we may know the ending, but we can't know the beginning
of the story, until we know the ending.
So tell your story. If you have the ending, you can even start there. Or,
start in the middle and see what the ending is when you get there. But
don't tell your beginning, until you know your ending. That is the story
loop, the arch.
Nothing new -- just the way she said it helped make sense. And she did
this by telling a story herself. She moved us into this story by just telling
about some of the 'sayings' of her parents, "wear clean underwear when
you leave the house in case you get in an accident" and "you gotta get
up on the horse that throw you." That sort of easy, humours tale.
Then she moves from that to riding a bicyle and she told about a trip to
the Swiss Alps and she and her husband took a sightseeing trip on bikes,
and then had a terrible accident on the bike that she barely survived,
and then she ends the story by telling us about how happy her mother was
that she had on clean underwear, and how her husband brought her a shiny
new bicycle, that she never wanted to see, much less ride again, and her
husband said -- you guessed it -- "You gotta get back up on the horse that
throws you."
A perfect example of the story loop. The middle was the bicycle tragedy,
the ending then, looped back around to the beginning, about what she'd
told us about her family sayings. Well done. Just wanted to share.
sds