Tag: Kelly R. Fineman

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The New Year’s Post

Posted on by beckylevine

I’ve probably mentioned here before that I don’t like New Year’s Resolutions. They reek of deadlines and pressure and a life that is actually controllable(which implies one that I should be controlling!). They make me feel like this:

headinclamp

So, those resolutions, I usually avoid them. And I’m not making any this year.

Except…

Well, except that this year there is something I want to accomplish. It’s one of those goals that I keep coming back to, reminding myself about, and that I often manage for a while. This year, I’d like to manage it for longer than a while. I’m thinking of something like Debbi Michiko Florence’s Year of Writing (YOW) or Gail Gauthier’s Time Management Tuesdays. It’s not that I want to blog about this all year, but I would like to be able to make and stick to the commitment. The commitment of showing up.

Kelly R. Fineman got me thinking about all this (again) in her series on Writing Avoidance (start with the entry on December 21st). She talked about a lot of things that resonate with me–writing less when life is happily busy, writing less when you’re questioning the long-term success or value of the words you’re putting on paper, writing less when there are so many distractions that are easy to turn to and relatively easy to accomplish. I’m not sure if she mentioned this, but it’s a new one for me, so I’ll include it: writing less when you have multiple projects you could be sitting down with but feel split over them. In other words, there are days when the minutes I put into a project feel as though all they’re doing is pushing the completion of another project further down the timeline.

The other thing that’s going on for me, right now, that I need to do something about, is that–in going back to work–I’ve developed a different relationship with my computer(s). I know, silly, but true. In the pretty-much-just-writing days, I had a desktop and laptop, and the primary work I did on both of them was my writing. That was even more true of my laptop, because I kept all my bill-paying and other life-stuff on the desktop. These days, my laptop has become my work computer–it goes back and forth with me to the museums, all my work emails are on it, and it’s kind of an auto-pilot reaction for me to open it up and go right to the Museums folder of work. So, you say, why haven’t I reclaimed the Desktop as my writing machine? Yes, why? Is it because at the end of a working day, I don’t feel like turning on the computer again? Probably. Is it because I’m tending to clean up the rest of the house to my office desk, so it’s cluttered and disorganized and doesn’t feel like creative space? Yes.

But, bottom-line, whatever is making me avoid the writing is–go figure–adding up to less time writing. Wow, who knew I could be so good at something?

Does that make me happy? No. Do I want to do something about it, this year? Yes.

So, this is NOT a resolution, but hopefully it’s a commitment. In two parts.

Part 1. Show up for my writing. As much as life has changed in the past year, with going back to work, I do still have writing time. It’s there. It’s available. I want to start using it much, much more than I have. This will probably mean figuring out some way to deal with the computer/writing space issue, some way that I don’t leave till the last-minute. All that does is give me more obstacles when the writing time shows up–now I have to clean up my desk first. Now I have to put things in folders so I can grab the project. Now I have to get in the mood to go with the writing time. Meh. I’m honestly not sure what that fix will be, although–from writing things out here–I’m suspecting it has to do with switching computers for tasks. It may be time to take ALL the museum stuff OFF the desktop and reclaim it for its own gig.

Part 2. The blog. I have been gone. I miss it, and I miss reading & commenting on other people’s blogs. But mostly I miss the freedom of the writing that I get here. My blog started out being for me, with a little extra layer of “Nice!” when someone else out there likes & comments on what I’ve written. For some reason, over the past year or two, it’s turned more into a have to, more into a for-an-audience kind of thing. I have enough of that kind of writing in my life. I can’t do what Kelly’s shooting for–daily blogging, this I know. But the commitment I want to make is to at least once-a-week blogging. I’m saying it here, hoping it sticks: If I haven’t blogged by Friday, I will put up a Friday post. And while there are days when a Friday Five feels just right, I’m going to work very hard not to fall back on it every week. Will my posts be about writing? Will they be rambly? Will they be about these commitments? Don’t know. Can’t tell for sure. Just staying that, yes, they’ll be here.

So, yeah, sort of a couple of resolutions. Can we just not call them that, though? Cause, you know, this:

hourglass

What are you resolving or not-resolving this year? Whatever it is, I wish you all the best with it!

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The Word for 2012

Posted on by beckylevine

Yes, I know it’s January 3th. Yes, I know that’s a little late for resolution-type posts. But, hey, I’ve been busy writing and working, which–since those are a big part of my goals for 2012–I believe is a satisfactory excuse.

Every year, Laura Purdie Salas picks a theme. I like this idea so much better than resolutions, which–in my head–seem to take the metaphorical tone of that anvil in the coyote-road runner cartoons. You know, the one that hovers over the right spot just until the coyote stops under it, then drops…WHAMMO!

Themes are softer.

My themes are usually a word. This year, after two months of upper-respiratory plague running through the family, my word came easily.

RECOMMIT

Now, I do have to say that, with Son over his pneumonia and me over my bronchitis and Husband over HIS pneumonia, I am starting to realize that I didn’t just spend November and December bailing out on my writing. I know, I know–it should have been obvious that they AND I were tired and drained, and not a whole lot of writing gets done at times like that. Yes, I know I was too hard on myself.

There is, however, a silver lining. Because struggling so hard (and pretty much failing) to get any writing, revising, or thinking done during those weeks was a big wake-up call about how much I dislike not making progress. It was also a big wake-up call about what I’ve been focusing on for the past year or so–the WHEN of publication.

It’s a dream. It’s a wonderful dream, and it’s one we all have. But it comes with churning and stress and panic-modes that do NOTHING to help us write. I’m stating the obvious here, but it just really came home to me at a gut level toward the end of 2011.

I want to write. I want to work on my stories. I want to push myself to dedicate some time, as many days as I can, to making my books and my craft better. THAT is what I missed these past few weeks, not the idea of seeing my book on a bookstore shelf or someone’s e-reader. Of course I want that. But the timeline needs to return to “someday,” and back off from drumming insistently at “how soon?!”

I’ve been there. I’ve concentrated on the the actual project–the characters, the plotline, the prose. I’ve done it. And it’s time to do it again. That’s why my word for 2012 is “recommit,” not just “commit.” Because, for me, it’s a return to doing this writing thing the way I really need to.

I seem not to be alone in this feeling. Susan Taylor Brown talked about it on Facebook.  Check out Kelly R. Fineman’s series of posts on commitment, starting here and moving forward chronologically, and do not miss Jo Knowles’ post, Defining “Work” and Another Invitation.

Do you have a theme or a word for 2012? Did you make some writing resolutions. I’d love to hear about yours, and I wish us all the best of luck in keeping them in mind during the next twelve months!

Happy New Year!

Posted in Plot

I’m on Page WHAT?!

Posted on by beckylevine

I wrote a fun scene the other day. One of those BIG scenes–when things turn in a different direction for your hero. When your hero turns things in a different direction. It was rough. I knew I still had a long way to go to turn it into the scene it ultimately needs to be (not like I can’t say that about EVERY scene I’m writing these days!). But I’d made one change in how my hero was approaching the moment, and it felt like the right change. It felt like I was putting something important on ground.

So, happily, I printed out the scene & stuck it in my binder and backed up the file. And then I happened to take a look at the page count. (I know, word-count is cooler, but my brain still wants to wrap itself around the placement of scenes in the pages I turn in a printed, published book.)

145 pages.

Okay, sure, it felt good in a way. 145 pages is a nice, little pile. It’s a good way into a project. It’s proof of productivity.

It’s also WAY too far into the story for this scene to be happening. We’re talking YA here–which means 145 pages is, unhappily, over halfway through the book. And this scene does NOT take place halfway through the book. Or it shouldn’t.

No, I don’t have the scene in the wrong place. It’s not that I need to mix things up and rearrange. It’s that I am facing the fact of how much cutting I’m going to be doing in the next draft.

I’m not panicking. Not yet. Not really.

Well, maybe a little.

I’m still writing forward, and I’m not going to stop. But I’m going to do a few things along the way, too.

I’m going to get back into reading YA, and I’m going to take a page from Kelly Fineman’s book of rereading. I tried to find the post I’m remembering, but couldn’t–that’s okay, you should be reading Kelly’s blog, anyway, so you can go hunt it down if you want! But, SOMEWHERE, Kelly talks about rereading, which she sometimes does the minute she’s finished a book. The point, though, is that she rereads for many reasons, but the one that I think is the most important for me to take away is that it helps you see HOW the author is doing something. You’ve got the story down, you just read it, so you’re less immersed in what’s-going-to-happen-next and more available to wow-how-did-she-get-all-that-into-a-four-page-scene. (Or in the case of Kathryn Fitzmaurice’s wonderful soon-to-be-published A Diamond in the Desert, a half-page!) Kelly, if I’m getting this wrong, come slap some sense into me in the comments! ANYWAY, I’m going to pick a few well-done YAs with short chapters and do some studying. Not copying, people, studying. I want to find a structure, a voice, a way of telling that works for me and Caro.

And if anybody has any titles to suggest for this exercise, please drop them into the comments…with my thanks!

I’ve opened up a Scrivener folder in my Draft 3 project called BIG PLOTTING STUFF. So far there are two cards in there: ACCIDENT and QUITS. (Yes, I have more on my actual cards, but you don’t get the secrety things until the book is published!) And I’m going to add some bulleted steps for cause and effect to each of these cards. For instance, you might see this on one card:

Boy mentions party.
C decides to go to party.
Mom says no.
C runs into street.

ACCIDENT

C is hit by train.
Boy brings chocolates.
Mom weeps.
C wins Olympic gold medal.

No, that’s not what you do see on my card; again, it’s what you might see. You know, if there were any Olympic games in my WIP. I’m just going to try and get an idea of what leads up to each big event and what each big event causes to happen afterward. Each of those lesser events might turn out to be an entire scene, or they might all get blended into one scene. I don’t know. And I won’t know for quite a while, I’m sure. But it’s going to start me thinking about what’s smaller and what’s more important, and how much time I need to spend on it all.

Hopefully.

Oh, you know, this may just be another way to procrastinate, to try and get control of something that needs to remain nebulous for a while longer. But maybe it’s me coming at a tricky project in a new way, applying a process I haven’t tried before. And maybe it’ll help.

We can only try, right?

Do you tend to write long or short in your early drafts? What do you do when it’s time to cut or expand?

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Beginnings

Posted on by beckylevine

I’m sitting at the coffeehouse, having just dropped my son off to do volunteer work (his first day) at the little science center in town where he, many years ago, took after-school classes. I’m having semi-mushy thoughts about how far he’s come, thinking about the two friends he still has, with whom he took those classes, and thinking about how far they’ve come, too. (Their mothers and I, of course, have not aged a day.)

So here I am, thinking about paths and milestones and the beginnings of all those, when I bump into two blog posts in my Google reader, and I realize there must be something in the air.

Kelly Fineman is posting about the fallow periods in her writing, but she warms us up with some thoughts about how she got started on her writing path. I love that Kelly makes a distinction between when she started and when she committed.

And Robin LaFevers is at the start of a new novel and is letting us into her world with a post about how she begins a project. If you haven’t read any of Robin’s process posts, now would be a great time to tune in. And, tell her, yes, we want more of these!

I began writing so long ago I can’t remember; I thought I had committed fifteen years ago, but no that it really didn’t happen until about three years ago when I was hit with the idea for my MG mystery and got serious, in terms of both hours and revision; I started this WIP about a year ago.

Really, you know, it all blurs together, except for moments like today, when I looked at the bike rack by the science center. It’s one of those racks that’s a single tube of metal curving up and down and up and down–one of those that’s perfect for little kids to climb all over, to swing on and between. And I realized that not my son, not one of his friends, would fit on or in it anymore. I’m not sure it would reach up to their knees.

On the writing path, too, there are moments. Kelley’s talked about hers. Mine are the memories of laying on my bed as a young girl, writing a story into my notebook in that curly, loopy cursive we all experimented with at some time or another. Coming to the early meetings of my first real critique group, drinking tea and sharing words. Sitting in the workshop, half-listening to the teacher and half-scribbling notes about Joel & Victoria, the two cousins in my mystery. Reading the passage about the suffrage march in Washington, D.C., when the white suffragists asked Ida B. Wells to walk at the back of the parade and knowing that I had the next story I had to work on. Realizing, as I finished the first draft, that I still wanted to tell that story, but that it was not the one I was working on at the moment. Having instances of revelation and astonishment about story, when I wanted to dance around the room and/or type words into my computer so fast that the CPU would start smoking. More instances of revelation and astonishment, this time about the writing craft–a way to sharpen a character or heighten plot tension–and finding a way to weave all that into whatever book I was working on.

Where am I today? In the middle of all that, still, and knowing there’ll be more to come. We hear it a lot today, and probably enough that it loses some meaning, but there’s a truth in this statement: It’s all good.

What are your beginnings? Your moments?