Curiosity

I was chatting with my boss's PA the other day, and she wondered how we scientists keep motivated through failed experiments and frustrations. What drives us? I had to say curiosity. Just as a child will ask why until your brain explodes, a scientist asks a never ending series of whys and hows. It occurred to me that this is just as true for writers.

Some of these questions pertain to the real world, like how does a nuclear reactor work so I can have my main character stop the bad guys from blowing it up? Though, my question today was how do they get those thin orange tubes in place to switch a two lane road into a three lane to accommodate heavy morning traffic? Does someone put them there? Do they pop up automatically? I may have a character who works on the road crew someday, who knows. (by the way, I haven't figured it out yet and it's driving me crazy)

Other questions a writer can ask are what if and what's the motivation. What if that road crew guy decided to mess with those lane markings late one stormy night and cause a massive traffic accident? Why would he do that? Is he a terrorist, a disgruntled divorcee, what?

My favorite question is, what will you do when I do this! I love putting my characters into a new situation and watching what unfolds. They surprise me alot, and that's the best feeling. This bizarre 'channeling' phenomenon is an entirely different topic that I won't go into here, but I think it's akin to having a bunch of imaginary friends.

As with a two year old, in science the predominant question is why. Why do we age? Why do we get cancer? More often, it's why didn't that experiment work? Some times there are no answers, at least not with the current techniques and technologies available. So, most of the time I prefer to ask when can I find some time to write?

Art and science are perfect soul mates. That must be the reason I married an artist. [see curious cat painting above and insert shameless plug for husband's website]

This is actually fun

I spent four hours on Sunday rewriting Chapter 1 of my first novel, and I enjoyed it. I'd been putting off the revisions for ages, wanting to learn more first and dreading going back over old territory. It seems much more enticing to move on to new stories. A writer, however, re-writes. So, I disciplined myself and had at it. I knew the characters better this time around, wasn't afraid to get into the action and ditch some backstory (or save it for later), and had loads of fun. I took a few new directions, which will send ripples into the rest of the manuscript, so I have much editing ahead of me, but it was worth it. I can make this thing better, stronger, faster...

I would have spent the whole day writing, but I made the mistake of taking a break for dinner and watching my recordings of "Glee". It was good. I hadn't seen it before, but I was instantly hooked and had a monster marathon until midnight. To feel less guilty, I called it "research" on high school students. Everything feeds your writing :) Tonight I have to actually write, however. After I watch one more episode.

Holiday Over

I love Halloween. It's the jack-o-lanterns, the creepy decorations, scary movies, and the candy of course. Now, as the pumpkin starts to look a little shrivelled, I'm suffering my usual post holiday blues. Fortunately, I have my revisions to distract me from it.

I gave myself a week to cool off before reading the latest wip in its entirety. I managed it in a day, and there were few changes needed that I could see. That worries me. Am I objective enough? My co-writer husband was more involved in this project than the last one, so I'm not sure I can entirely trust his judgement either. Test readers are needed asap methinks.

One thing I did notice was that my protagonist comes off a bit snarly. She is, which is what I like about her, but will others like her? There are plenty of fans of "House", so I can hope. I've considered nicing her up a bit, but I don't want to end up with a bland main character, especially worrisome for a first person detective story. Besides, she needs a lot of fire to stand up to the even more snarly people around her. I'm going to keep it as is and, once again, see what my test readers think.

In the mean time, there are a few small edits to make and a new book to work on. I want to really challenge myself with the next one, not only in terms of story and characterization--I want to push my prose. I'm a lean writer, and I hate too many adjectives, but I want to try something literary, something sumptuous. Don't worry, I'm not turning into a snob. Genre writing is my first love, but I'm giving myself an education here, and I can't be too easy on myself. If I do get published and manage to make a career of it, I'm sure I'll have deadlines and promotion to worry about, so this is my best chance to experiment and improve my skill.

Done psyching myself up now. I can do this. Back to work I go. And, with any luck, Thanksgiving will be here before I know it!

An International Mess

Now that I've finished my second book, I'm thinking about new query letters. My problem is, which country should I focus on? I'm from America, and my first book was set in Nevada, so it was obvious that I approach American agents for that one. (I haven't given up on it, by the way, just doing some retrenching and revision before I send out more queries). My second book, however, affords some additional opportunities. It's a fantasy detective story that isn't so clearly American, so I could approach publishers here in Australia (there are few literary agents in this country so it's still the norm to approach publishers) or I could try agents/publishers in the UK, since Australia falls within the Commonwealth. What to do?

This brings up another conundrum I encounter when writing: spelling. I work on two different computers, one set to American English the other to Australian. I'm constantly getting my wires crossed and mish-mashing words. I wrote some screenplays for practice with the BBC writer's room in mind, so those were obviously done with British spelling. "Seer" was done in American, the whole Nevada thing made it simpler to stay in that mindset, but my latest book is the mish mash. I suppose I'll have to do two versions and make sure I send the right one to whoever (if anyone) is interested--America, Australia or the UK.

You should hear my messed up accent (Southern parents, raised all over the Western U.S., college in Seattle where I picked up some Canadianisms, now 12 years in Australia)--I'm even worse off than my manuscript.

Whew!

Big relief when I finished the first draft of my new manuscript this weekend. I felt so light, I hadn't realized there was a 20 tonne weight on my back until it was gone. My first book was not a fluke. I may be a long way from being published, and I still have lots to learn, but at least I know I have the stamina to keep writing.

There's more editing to be done, plus I'm going back to work on the last manuscript now that I've a learned a bit more from my reading, but for the moment I'm savoring the accomplishment.

Now that I'm no longer looking at the keyboard, I see that Halloween is almost here. My favorite holiday! There are decorations to go up, pumpkins to be bought and cookies to be baked. Off I go to live a little.

Dust Storms and DVDs

I had organized ages ago to take yesterday off from work. I had some errands to run in the middle of the week and thought I'd celebrate spring in Sydney with a picnic. I have a favorite spot beneath a big tree next to the river, and it also happens to be in the middle of gardens with lush wisteria, cherry blossoms and poppies filling the air with wonderful scents and delighting the eye with colours. It's a yearly ritual for me and my husband, enjoying 30C heat, watching the water dragons and skinks, the birds and butterflies...

Of course this year there was a freak dust storm carrying red dirt from the Outback across the entire city. At dawn the sky was orange and the air so choked with dust, I had to shut the windows. I couldn't even see the neighbor's houses across the street! Thus, my plans for the day were revised, and we watched a stack of rented DVDs instead. The standout of the batch was "7 Pounds".

I'm a big fan of Will Smith, and that movie was probably his best. My husband and I have been studying writing too much lately--in the first two minutes of the film, he figured out the plot and I figured out the backstory. My husband and I really are a great team. It's not that it was obvious, but it was so brilliant we hoped we were right. I'm glad we were. Even though we guessed what was happening, it didn't detract from our enjoyment one bit. If anything, each scene carried an extra significance; we understood the subtext. As a consequence, I was in tears most of the time.

The point I want to make is that it's important to have a great story, an original plot, a twist...but, just in case your audience is spoiled or guesses what's going to happen, make the journey, the telling of that story so good they don't care that they're not surprised. Quality throughout--don't rely on gimmicks.

Still Writing

I'm very proud that since I dedicated myself to writing [as opposed to a lifelong dabbling in the art] a little over a year ago, my enthusiasm hasn't waned. I'm 200 pages into my new book, and so far it's easier than the last one. Yet, I'm pushing myself to learn new techniques, try different styles and expand my horizons. I've always wanted to write novels, but I have to give credit to screenwriting for inspiring me to do it.

One day, thinking about how I've reached the pinnacle of my current career in science (as far as I'm willing to go anyway) and how frustrated I am with it overall, I started thinking about what else I could do with my life. What would give me my enthusiasm back? I ran across an inspirational article that asked, "What have you always wanted to do? Maybe that's why you've been put on this earth." I instantly knew, for me, the answer was writing. Yet, I had half a dozen stories stalled at the 10-30 page mark, one overly long sci-fi novel written in my teens that was justifiably rejected dozens of times, and I didn't know how I was going to turn that 'calling' into a reality.

My other love is movies and television (not just any television:I'm a DVD watcher and, unable to endure commercials, haven't sat through normal programming for about ten years). Then I had an honest to god epiphany--people write for movies and TV don't they? This inspired me to write a couple of fan fics in teleplay format. I starting reading more on the subject and heard mention of "The Screenwriter's Bible." I devoured it, and the book turned my whole story telling life around. I wrote a movie length screenplay, three episodes of a series of my own conception...and even though I haven't tried to sell any of it yet, considering them all writing exercises, I discovered that I had learned about plotting and telling a complete story. I now applied this to a manuscript that had been sitting around for years and finished it. Admittedly, the novel took a lot longer to complete than a screenplay (I can write an hour long drama episode in a week), but I now had the confidence to keep at it.

Since then, I've read dozens of books on writing everything from novels to plays, as well as screenplays, and I truly believe that someday, with practice and persistence, I will have a novel published. I may even get a screenplay optioned, who knows? Thank you "Screenwriter's Bible"!

Some people start with short stories, but for me it was screenplays. They taught me to focus on visuals, on story in its purest form, uncluttered by prose, and that practice has also helped make dialogue one of my personal strong points. In screenwriting, brevity and clarity and story are everything, and dialogue is the only place where the author's actual words will be conveyed to an audience. Therefore, dialogue has to have a punch, but it has to further the story, chracterizations, etc or be cut. It's wonderful.

Now that I'm focused on novels, I'm learning to flesh out my prose and to take advantage of the ability to hear a character's thoughts, to convey sensations such as smell and touch, areas where screenplays are limited. There is so much to learn and try and do, and I really feel that I'm on the right path.

True Blood

This post is way off topic, but I'm currently obsessed with HBO's True Blood and must talk about it somewhere. I fell in love with the show upon first watching, read the books in between seasons and came to adore Eric, so when they started building the Eric/Sookie/Bill triangle this year, I got embarrassingly excited. "I Will Rise Up" and "New World in My View" have me itching to write about it. Can I just say, Eric dream scenes = good.

There's the whole debate among fans (and this question is prominent in the books as well) as to whether Sookie's feelings for Eric are false, because they originated after drinking his blood. I must weigh in, saying, first of all, there were some good sparks before the whole bullet sucking scene, and finally--it doesn't matter. As Eric said, 'It's done'. No closing Pandora's box, no going back; the feelings are there irrelevant of where they originated.

I think this is a good point to make when talking about character motivations. Sometimes, things just are, and it has nothing to do with how someone was treated by their mother, a need for attention or whatever. Shit happens. Chaos, random chance, whatever, is a huge factor in the world and is commonly overlooked in our need for meaning. Life is static without change, mutation...and moments of unintelligible upheaval can provide powerful moments in drama: the car crash, the freak storm, the terrorist attack...These chaotic elements mould our characters and make them more interesting, as long as we don't over-analyse and take away their power. These moments show us another aspect of reality: the scary, uncontrollable one. And truly seeing reality through fiction = good.

I have digressed from my digression, so I want to end with one last huff about True Blood. For all those 'it's only the blood talking!' anti-Eric naysayers, ponder this: Sookie's attraction to Bill was influenced by drinking his blood (though there was some sparks even before that); ditto with Eric; more importantly, if the TV series follows the books, Sookie is a faerie and her very presence, let alone her blood, is an aphrodesiac to vampires. She is 'artificially' influencing them as much as they are her! (I put 'artificially' in quotes because it's not: it's only one aspect of her physical charm, same as being a vampire is for the men)

Thus, my conclusion is that Sookie, Eric and Bill are all on a level playing field; they're all using supernatural lures, which cancels that factor out. The chaotic bit is irrelevant, and, in the end, it will come down to each of the characters' choices. Fooled you, huh? We do have free will.

Hibernation

Winter is losing its grasp on Oz. I slept with the window open last night, ah fresh air! It also feels like I'm coming out of hibernation, recovering from writing my first book, related synopses, query letters etc. It has been anything but a restful sleep, however. I've been reading books on the first five pages (and other topics) to get some ideas for trapping one of those snarly, Tasmanian devil-like agents. All that stuff is percolating in my subconscious along with a chapter 1 rewrite, notes jumping out onto the page of their own accord from time to time.

In order to let my subconscious do its work, I've plowed ahead with my second book and I'm now 70 pages in. Almost 1/3 of the way through the first draft, wow. Sometimes I think it's writing itself. It's very different from my first book, which was supernatural suspense. This one's fantasy detective, with a man-hating/man-loving heroine, and I'm reveling in the snappy dialogue, fast pace and custom built world. There's elves and dwarfs and a few other recognisable species--to make it fun--but all with my own twist. I even have some scenes in mind for another, very different, epic fantasy to follow this one.

I've read that, on average, it is an author's 5th or 6th book that finally gets published. I'm not just going to spew out crap to meet that quota, though--I want everything I write to be the best it can be. It's the only way to learn. Nose going back to the grindstone now...