Twist Ties & Writing: ROW80 Update

The perfect toy. A huge smile on my child's face.

"Mommy, mommy, can I please have it. Please!"

Patience and childhood don't often mix. (Heck, patience and being an adult don't love each other either. At least for me.)

I tear open the box. Yank and pull to get the plastic out. Finally, success. Oh, but wait. Each piece is twist-tied into the plastic in some wickedly intricate maze. Dare I get scissors? Grand idea, but some of the twist-ties are so tightly bound that cutting could ruin the piece.

My children watch, anticipation mixed with frustration.

Fifteen minutes later, if I'm lucky, the small hairbrush and barrette finally break free. I dry the tears, both mine and my daughter's. My salivating child takes her bounty and runs. I'm left with clear rubber bands, twist-ties, plastic, box pieces, a strong desire for a stiff drink and... not one toy to play with.

And God help you if it's a birthday party or Christmas morning. This scenario gets played and replayed until I swear I'm going to write each and every toy company and ask what they have against the human race.

What does this have to do with my A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) Update? Or about the progress of my writing?

SO. Much.

I clear the time to write. Focus on the prize of continuing story. I sit down, open up the document, read through the last chapter or so, crack my knuckles, and get ready to write. The story is in my head, but trying to wrangle it from there unto the piece of paper is so much like twisting each of those ties round and round. You turn it one way to realize it's getting too tight, then you go the other direction and free it, only to find there are four more twist-ties holding it in place.

Characters fight with me. Words fail me, or sometimes come at me so fast I can't capture them. Scenes unfold in my head, so clear. But I have to translate them into words so a reader can see the same replay. More twist-ties.

And, yes, I do see writing in most any day-to-day activity (and being a mom, especially).

Do you ever catch your stories creeping into the oddest, or most mundane, moments of day-to-day life?

ROW80 Update

Writing: Monday we spent eight hours in the car. But I used my Tuesday. 2,123 words, split between a couple of projects. Now I need to focus on unwrapping one story at a time, and not getting so excited by ideas that I flutter from project to project. Phone rings... ah, let's write on the YA. Laundry signal beeps. Ooh, back to women's fiction.

Editing: Had an unexpected, and interesting, project come up. Finished. Now back to my backlog. Slowly making progress. Tomorrow is editing day.

Blogging: Daily here. Blogathon wraps up tomorrow, but then I'm onto the Author Blog Challenge. Mom in Love with Fiction has suffered this week, but those words needed to go to the WIP.

Social Media: Overwhelmed. Challenges are wonderful, inspiring me in so many ways. But they also bring many wonderful bloggers into my life. Now if only I had more hours in a day.

Reading: Finished a book and started another. Reviews to come.

Exercise: I'm proud to say I will take this goal off the next Round. I've been so dedicated to exercise that it's become like eating. I can't imagine not doing it. If it starts to wane, I can always add the goal back in. Success.

Pacing: A Guest Post by author, MK Graff

I'm so excited to have M. K. Graff, affectionately known as Marni, visiting today to talk about pacing. Marni is a friend and writing cohort of my mother's, and she's fast become a friend to me. I love her spirit, style, and writing. 

I found this post quite informative, and I hope you do as well.

Enjoy!

*****

“Variety of pace without loss of impetus is characteristic

of every good novel I can think of.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Heavy words for a writer to live up to, and this quote from Le Guin shows writers how important pacing is to your work. Pacing is like a dam that forges and slows the speed at which a novel moves. Learning how to operate that dam is one of the most important tasks an author has to learn to keep his readers turning pages. Without mastering this, we end up writing stories that lack momentum, might feel uneven, become anticlimactic, or even seem melodramatic.

Here are five tips for understanding and developing this important plot skill.
 
1. Length matters: Length controls your story’s momentum. Short scenes and chapters, coupled with terse sentences and snappy dialogue will all contribute to a feeling of intensity and speed. In the reverse, long scenes and leisurely sentences or extended dialogue passages tend to ground the story with a sense of place and time. This is perhaps the simplest way to control your pacing. As your story nears the tense scenes, learn to condense everything. Limit the length of your scenes to 500-800 words. Stop your scenes at important moments.  Change back and forth between POV. See how it works?

2. Vary pacing. As important as the high-tension action scenes are, it’s even more important to vary your pacing with slow, introspective scenes. You need those slow scenes to give both your characters and your readers the chance to catch their breaths. The most exciting of scenes lose intensity if not balanced with moments of deliberate quiet. Think calm before and after the storm.

3. Paying attention to details builds all-important momentum. Slow motion is often used in film to denote that something tremendously dramatic is happening. To mirror this technique in your own writing, slow it way down by piling on the smaller details. There’s a shooting in your scene. To get the full impact of this event, take your time and describe every step in detail: the look on the gunman’s face as he fires, the recoil of the gun, the flash of the barrel, the horror the sees on the victim’s face, and finally the impact of the bullet and the spreading red stain across the victim’s shirt.

4. Control your tell vs. show ratio. Now do the reverse and don’t linger on a scene, but shock your readers by announcing it and then plunge them into the action after that gun is fired. Instead of taking the time to show the details, you can thrust the gunshot upon the reader simply by telling him it happened and go on from there.

5. Manipulate sentence structure. Controlling the ebb and flow of your sentence structure with the use of clauses, longer versus shorter sentences, and brief versus involved paragraphs contribute to the pacing. This is a subtle but effective technique and also  applies to the length of the words you choose: long=slow, short=fast. For those intense scenes, cut back on the beautiful, long-winded passages and slap your reader upside the head with staccato structure. Short sentences and snappy nouns and verbs convey urgency, whereas long, measured sentences offer moments of introspection and build-up.

It all sounds easy; the trick is to get the balance right.

About M. K. Graff

Marni Graff is the author of the Nora Tierney mystery series, set in the UK. The Blue Virgin is set in Oxford and introduces Nora, an American writer living in England. She becomes involved in a murder investigation to clear her best friend as a suspect, to the chagrin of DI Declan Barnes. The Green Remains follows Nora’s move to Cumbria where she’s awaiting the publication of her first children’s book and the birth of her first child. When Nora stumbles across the corpse at the edge of Lake Windermere, she realizes she recognizes the dead man. Then her friend and illustrator, Simon Ramsey, is implicated in the murder of the heir to Clarendon Hall, and Nora swings into sleuth mode.

Graff is also co-author of Writing in a Changing World, a primer on writing groups and critique techniques. She writes a weekly mystery book review at Auntie M Writes. A member of Sisters in Crime, Graff runs the NC Writers Read program in Belhaven and founded the group Coastal Carolina Mystery Writers. She has also published poetry, last seen in Amelia Earhart: A Tribute; her creative nonfiction has most recently appeared in Southern Women’s Review. Her books can be bought at Amazon or at Bridal Path Press.

*****

Thanks, Marni! And it was such a pleasure seeing you at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. One of the highlights!

You can check out my review of Marni's The Blue Virgin here (4 stars).

Do you have a trick to keep pacing balanced in your writing?

A Picture of Words: Blogathon Theme Day

Another Blogathon theme day...

Our fearless leader, Michelle Rafter, suggested everyone post a Wordle graphic today. I've cheated a bit, because I find Tagxedo a much easier to use.

Interesting.

I used my blog address to load words into the graphic. Clearly, I talk a lot about writing, books, my Mom, depression (but only in relation to my novel, Depression Cookies, so don't worry), blogging, ROW (as in A Round of Words in 80 Days), and words.

And how perfect that "Blogathon" ended up front and center.

Hope all my Blogathon buddies are doing well, and enjoying the holiday weekend.

I want to take a minute to acknowledge everyone in the military and a special thank you to all the ones who gave their lives so that we here in the United States could know freedom and opportunity.

Another graphic...

What words were highlighted in your graphic?

Quotable Week: ROW80 & #writemotivation Updates

I found some quotes this week to illustrate my writing progress.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. 

Ray Bradbury

I've been a bit drunk on life this week. Earlier in the week, I had to have a spot of basal cell carcinoma taken off my arm. The stitches were really bothering me, and long sessions of typing weren't going well. I outlined some chapters and took some notes. But it's not so easy to calculate that into wordcount.

This weekend we are having some family fun in Charlotte, North Carolina with my husband's brother and family. I've brought out the laptop to do this post, but then it's going away again. I promised the kids. (Okay, I admit it... it's a holiday weekend, and I want to have some fun, too.)

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. 

Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

As I was taking notes, more thoughts would come. Thankfully the stitches were in my left arm, so I could write all I wanted. Kicking it old school. It's just hard to hurl words onto paper, because I couldn't keep up. I have a lot of chicken scratch to decipher. And the stitches don't come out for another week.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. 

Vladimir Nabakov

The pages on my WIP haven't seen any new words, but I'm feeling the story. I don't want it to escape, so I'll sit down on Tuesday and type until my arm falls off.

The rest of the A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW80) update:

Reading: Finished a book on the drive down to Charlotte. My first Sarah Dessen book. Loved it! Reminded me so much of the Judy Blume books I read as a teenager. Now, I'm reading Michael J. Fox's book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. Already I can tell I need to focus much more on the positive in my day to day life.

Blogging: Daily here and 3x on Mom in Love with Fiction. In case you missed it, I talked about a real-life lesson on self-published authors versus traditional ones this week. Check it out. My experience made me feel so fortunate to be a writer.

Editing: Did some on the car ride down. The sore arm didn't help with editing, since I do it all on the computer.

Exercise: Still running a minimum of 3x a week. Just making sure I have lots of sunscreen on. A bit of a slide on the sugar intake. Something about long car trips makes avoiding Snickers bars near to impossible.

#writemotivation Update

1. Write a minimum of five days a week for a total of 2,500 words on my works in progress.
Hours of writing. Didn't attempt to count the words (see saga above).

2. Get current novel, Depression Cookies, up on Smashwords by month's end.Ran into some formatting difficulties. So bummed. Still hoping to have it up soon. It's looking like June. What started as sadness, turned to irritation, and now it's slowly boiling to angry. I don't like to be angry. *insert calming breaths here*

3. Read a book every 10 days, plus at least one craft book in the month of May.Finished a book in one car trip, and one-third done with another. Ahead of goal.

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday weekend!

Community and Knowledge Go Hand in Hand: ReRun Saturday

Last year's Blogathon was a huge kickstart for this blog. Prior to it, I had blogged very little and had no clue what I was doing or wanted to do.

The following post originally ran 5/29/11 as the first Blogathon was winding down. Just after, I share some things I learned this year.

*****

originally posted 5/29/11

When I committed to WordCount Blogathon’s challenge to write a post-a-day-in-May, my goal was to focus on our blog and my writing. After two years of heavy writing for Depression Cookies and a cross-country move, I lost my energy. Now I feel renewed. Initially I was going to set a 500-word-a-day goal for writing starting in June, but now I know I can do much more.

But this knowledge was only the tip of the iceberg. This is my feeble attempt to quantify what I’ve learned:

How to better define what I want our blog to be: our blog started as a way to promote and discuss our novel, Depression Cookies. Now, thanks to seeing so many wonderfully diverse blogs, I realize Mom and I have so much more to say. We are a mother-daughter team who wrote a mother-daughter book . . . there's a wealth of topics for us to cover.

Respecting Copyrighted material: Don't get me wrong, I would never steal another's thoughts or hard work for my own use. Still, I didn't get the nuances of using images or "selected pieces" of blog posts. Now I do. When I wanted to pass along some great information from a discussion I attended, I contacted the speaker and asked if I could paraphrase what I learned. She was thrilled and I've formed a bond with her. I wouldn't have thought to contact her before.

Simply Ask: I never thought to do guest post exchanges and contact other people for help! I've found it only improves my blog to have others' thoughts and opinions featured, and I've been astounded by how many people are willing to do this if you simply ask.

Twitter: Before Blogathon, I had only dipped my toe into the pool of Twitter. Basically, I signed up kicking and screaming. I'm still a Twitter-newbie, but I'm starting to appreciate what it has to offer.

Links: It never dawned on me to put links within my posts. Such a rookie mistake.

Community: I am a better blogger when surrounded by a community of bloggers. You get what you give. I’m updating my Blogs We Love sidebar come June 1 to reflect this new and growing community. I became a better mother when I surrounded myself with mothers, the same has been true of blogging.

Then there’s the invaluable advice I’ve received on Feedburner, Google alerts, blog stats, freelance writing, writing techniques and inspirations, and the list goes on and on.

Thank you Blogathon bloggers and our ring-leader, Michelle Rafter. Although it's been a crash course, I now have reliable sources to use as I continue to learn.

*****

This year, I've also learned...

Time Management
There are only so many hours in the day. No matter how many new blogs I'd love to read, I simply can't. I tried to sample several Blogathon blogs and visit old favorites from last year. I hope to visit even more in June.

And, unlike last year, I wrote most of my posts ahead of time. I didn't even know how to schedule a post last year.

Importance of a Genuine Challenge Host
I've learned, from doing other challenges in the past year, to appreciate Michelle Rafter even more (and her lovely helpers. You rock, Jan Udlock. Thanks to Jackie Dishner and Jennifer Willis, too). She's not out to sell you anything, instead choosing to help us all find our way along the blogging path.

Challenging Myself
Whether it's Haiku or looking at my blog objectively (If I started blogging today, I would...), I learn by challenging myself and trying new things. 

Again, thank you to Michelle and all the wonderful Blogathon bloggers.

What did you learn this Blogathon?

(Now if I could just learn more HTML code. And someone PLEASE tell me why I get the occasional paragraph with different line spacing! UGH! See 2nd paragraph of this post.)

New Neighbors: Self-Published and Traditionally Published Authors

Yesterday I highlighted some wonderful moments of my Gaithersburg Book Festival weekend. Today I wanted to use my experience to highlight traditional versus self-publishing.

Years ago, there was a definite, and too often deserved, bias against self-published books. Traditional books had the benefit of professional editing, designer book covers, distribution, and marketing.

Fast forward to today. Marketing dollars are only spent on proven authors, and more specifically, the Stephen Kings of the book world. All authors can be on Amazon and other online retailers and professional editing and designer book covers are available to both.

Case in point on marketing... my booth was right next to Kathryn Johnson's, award-winning author of over 40 novels, and traditionally published. I met Kathryn Johnson when she came to my Damascus, Maryland book club to discuss The Gentleman Poet (which I gave 4.5 stars here).

A lovely lady, but there she was right next to me, a self-published author. We sold a similar amount of books, and she had several showcased compared to my one. She was delightful and very neighborly.

Then, I turned around. Right behind me was... my book, Depression Cookies! I almost fainted. A local bookseller, Novel Places, agreed to carry my book and they chose to bring it to the book festival to highlight a local author. Imagine my delight and surprise.

I was standing talking to the owner, and thanking him for bringing my book (he even sold one!), when Eleanor Brown walked up to thank him for carrying her book, Weird Sisters, a traditionally published New York Times Bestseller.

I've been eyeing this book for months (she had me at the title!), so I bought it. She signed it and took this picture with me. She even asked for my business card after we talked about books for awhile.

Not for one moment did I feel less of an author with either of these lovely women. Or at the fair. People asked about my book and my journey, but not who my publisher was.

An absolutely amazing experience. I'm honored to be an author, and a self-published one at that.

Do you think the divide between self-published and traditionally published authors is narrowing?

Out of the Closet and Giddy as a School Girl

This past Saturday, I had a booth at the Gaithersburg Book Festival for the second year in a row. Unlike last year, I split a booth with a local chapter of the Maryland Writers' Association. What a difference. It freed me up to visit some of the speakers and other booths.

First up, Melissa Foster.

Pardon me while I embrace the squealing inner teenager for a moment. I honestly felt giddy and nervous about finally meeting Melissa Foster in person. I've known her in the online universe for almost a year, and she's an amazing author and person. She does so much for the writing and reading community through World Literary Cafe and The Women's Nest.

I attended Melissa's presentation and book reading. She read from Come Back to Me, her latest novel and one I absolutely loved: my review, Come Back to Me, Melissa Foster (5 stars). After, she made a point to come over and talk to me, and fellow blogger and book lover, Kristin, from Kritter's Ramblings.

My online writing community has become so important to me. I don't know what I'd do without their support, encouragement, and inspiration. To meet Melissa in person... priceless. Kristen, too!

Now to find a way to meet my Blogathon, ROW80, Writers' Platform-Building Campaign and other blogger/writer buddies!

And the good day just kept on going. Next up, I was able to hear M.K. Graff, otherwise known as Marni, speak about her new book, The Green Remains. Marni is a friend of my family, and it was great to see her again. I really enjoyed her first book, The Blue Virgin: The Blue Virgin, MK Graff (4 stars).

I also wrangled her into writing a guest post. Catch her great post about Pacing here on Tuesday, May 29. I hope to have a review up of The Green Remains soon, too.

One of the best things I ever did was come out of the closet, being an isolated writer was never for me.

In case I haven't said it lately...

Thank you to everyone who stops by this blog and encourages me to keep on keeping on. It means the world to me.

For fun, if you could meet ANY author in person (living or dead), who would it be? Me: I'd want to meet Pearl S. Buck and Judy Blume.

*****

Check back here tomorrow for more insight from the book festival. Hint: I found it very interesting who I was sitting right next to in the booth area.