Video Q&A From the Shutdown Release Party!

Want so see what I'm like IRL? Wish you could come to a signing but don't live in Minneapolis? Voila, problem solved: at my most recent signing, I had the hubby tape the Q&A session, for your viewing pleasure extraordinaire!

On Writing What You Know

I’ve been thinking about the kinds of stories I want to write lately – both because I wrote my first book outside the Glitch world in December and am looking towards my next few projects, and because I’m editing Shutdown, the last Glitch book (a book that I was really able to sink into and take the characters some intense and cool places, emotionally).

I guess that’s what I’ve really been thinking about: how to write stories that emotionally, readers can relate to or think, ‘hey, I’ve felt like that,’ even if I’m writing impossible and outlandish plots.

I often think the best books are ones where you can almost feel authors struggling with something on the page, whether it be a big question about life (see Gabrielle Zevin’s Elsewhere), or teenagers with cancer (John Green’s TFIOS), or grief (Nelson’s The Sky is Everywhere, McNamara’s Lovely Dark and Deep, Courtney Summers’ Fall For Anything), or an experience of being the mean girl (Summers’ Some Girls Are), or thinking about temptation and good and evil (like the ring in LOTR), or exploring an existential crisis about what it means to be human (Marion’s Warm Bodies), etc.

So because I’m trying to write emotionally resonating characters, and one way to do that is to write what you know, like Flannery O’Conner, my stories are often going to have physically broken people. People with the wooden legs or deadly allergies or other health problems that neither medicine nor magic can fix.

Any resolutions to these problems are going to be hard fought for, and will most likely leave the character very different than when they first started out, sometimes very battered. This is certainly true of Shutdown, when one character veered off in ways I didn’t expect. I had an idea of where the character would end up back when I wrote the synopsis two years ago, but the journey getting there was far more arduous than I first expected. The character dramatically changed as I wrote them, because I realized there was no way these circumstances wouldn’t change the person. I’ve experienced the way that life can dump things on you that you can’t escape, whether you see them coming or not. You can’t run away and you can’t pretend your entire life hasn’t changed. So you find ways to cope with it, both good and bad.

In the book I just wrote and the one I’m thinking of writing next, I’m tackling—in a very sideways manner—the way that circumstances and physical disability can intrude on your plans and dreams. And then letting it fly and watching how my characters react. In one book, the main character reacts by being furious about his situation, in the other, the MC is so accepting of her bad circumstances at first that she doesn’t fight back against them at all. In both cases, the illnesses are somewhat supernatural, but I’m exploring some things that very much resonate with me in real life, with the debilitating chronic illness I’ve fought with for eleven years. Anger and acceptance are kind of constant warring states in my head. I can write these characters so easily, because I know how it feels.

But these obviously aren’t just stories for sick people alone—in fact, I don’t think most people will even see this as a subplot when they read the books. Still, the question I most want to explore through my writing (and my life really) is: how do we find peace and joy through difficult life circumstances? Because this at least is universal—you will have difficult circumstances in your life, no matter if you are fifteen or fifty. You will encounter conflict and sometimes, you will suffer.

This is all the inside track though, the things going on in my head as I wrote. As I mentioned a moment ago, I don’t think any of this is explicit, you might not pick up on these underlying themes in these books unless you’ve read this blog post and remember it. After all, in addition to wrestling with these problems that create internal conflict for my characters, they are also all falling in love. Because well, in addition to wanting to explore some meaty life questions for myself, I’m also just a sucker for romance J

Anyway, all of this is a tool I’ve used to help me dig deeper with my characters. Too often we think that ‘write what you know’ just means we should write about external experiences we’ve had in our lives. Um yeah, if I stuck to that, I'd be writing stories no one wants to read about sitting on a couch for hours on end! But I’m learning that using ‘write what you know’ can really ratchet up your characters by infusing them with the emotional and mental dilemmas you yourself have wrestled with.

Looking Back & Looking Ahead

So New Year’s is a time of looking both back and forward. Back on the year that past, forward to what’s coming next.

 

Looking back: 2012 was a wicked f’ing crap-ton of a hard year, physically, emotionally, and work-wise. I experienced more health problems than ever before in my life, but I also wrote two books and took them through most of the editing stages, then for fun wrote another book entirely in December. I lost my love for writing, then powered through and eventually gained it back again. I faced deadlines and met each one. I’ve learned SO FREAKING MUCH about writing this year. It was a crash course, a dump-you-in-the-deep-end-and-hope-you-don’t-drown course, but I finally figured out how to swim (though there were a couple of times I was sure I was gonna drown). Btw, if you know a debut author, give them a hug, because the debut year all on it's own is a crazy intense and stressful thing.

Let’s see, what else? My eating habits have changed entirely due to the Meniere’s disease, so I consume only trace amounts of salt every day, drink no coffee, and drink no alcohol. I live pretty much like a little nun, sans the headdress and plus pink hair.

And best of all, I’m happy.

Looking forward: Lots of uncertainties that will make me crazy if I let them. The second and third book of the Glitch trilogy will be out this year (Override in Feb, Shutdown in July). But will they all sell well? Will readers like them? Will my agent like the new book I just wrote, and will my editor want to acquire it? Will this one exciting thing happen or won’t it, and will I be okay if it doesn’t?

My response to most of these is to limit my expectations and expect the worst. I know that sounds bad. I’m not actually a pessimist, but I prefer to expect the worst rather than hope for something so hard and then have the hope stomped on (especially after a year of lots of stompage!) Then if the good thing happens, I’m happily surprised. And when good things come, they feel more like grace, like things I didn’t deserve but was given anyway, and I feel a deep and profound gratitude. And when bad things come, I do lots of meditation and try to turn my sights back only on the day in front of me, which is the only thing I can control, and let the future worry about itself.

Up directly ahead on the docket is editing the book I just finished today, all the way up until edits for Shutdown come back from my editor. Then I’ll hand off New Book to agent man to see what he thinks, and lose myself in Shutdown edits for several weeks. Then turn those in, and go back to editing New Book with whatever thoughts and critiques agent man gives.

At least this is how I envision it working, but I’m certainly familiar enough with how life likes to intervene in our nicely laid little plans.

Either way, 2013 ought to be a far less stressful year than 2012, and I’m looking forward to good times ahead.

What are you looking forward to this year?

Anatomy of a Second Draft

I’m in the middle of a massive round of edits on SHUTDOWN, Bk 3 of the Glitch trilogy. This is always the biggest round of edits for me – the second draft. My first drafts usually clock in a little over 60 thousand words and are very rough. So the second draft means a lot of re-envisioning and lots of rewriting and lots of fitting together the puzzle pieces of both the plot and the emotional arc of the story . I’ve been working on this revision for a month now, it’s up to 90k words, and think I’ve got about two weeks to go.

 

So want to know my process on the all important second draft? Here we go!

The Edit Letter
I start out reading and rereading the edit letter from my editor. I print it out, then underline, highlight, write possible fixes in the margin, and generally scribble and mangle the seven pages until they are very well worn. Then for a couple of days I do a lot of sitting and staring off into space. I’ll bust out my pen and notebook and scratch out what I think are the biggest problems, then slowly problem-solve possible solutions. Then I sketch out the emotional map, and how each chapter is slowly building toward the climax at the end.

Because second drafts are so daunting and entail so much work for me, I always want to tackle the biggest and scariest problems first so I can get them out of the way. I break up the book into chunks (this latest book broke neatly into three organic pieces), and then I finally get to the actual writing.

Chunk #1. The Middle
For this draft, I worked on the middle first because it was where a lot of the heavy emotional story was, and I think that’s the heart of any novel. I’d been so focused on fitting together the larger story elements, that the emotional and romantic story had not come off AT ALL in my first draft. So I cut and rewrote my way all through the middle section. All the while, I kept checking each chapter against the map of the emotional arc, tweaking and making sure it had the perfect growing momentum. As daunting as this section was to rewrite, it was also the one I had the most fun with. The emotional and romantic center of any book is always my favorite, both as a reader and a writer. I’d put on moody emotional violin music and absolutely lose myself in the scenes and conversations. I love, that even in such a stressful time as doing intense revisions on a deadline, those magical writing moments can still happen.

Chunk #2. The Ending

Next I tackled the ending, which I was VERY afraid of. Because here’s the thing about this trilogy—I won’t say I bit off more than I could chew, but it has been very difficult dealing with the huge scope I set out for myself when I outlined the series. I thought, oh, by the end of the trilogy I’ll have the fate of the world standing in my MC’s hands. Uh. Yeah. That makes for a lot of moving parts, and throughout the trilogy I’ve learned my strengths and weaknesses. Writing action scenes can be a weakness for me. I have to work twice as hard on those scenes. And the last third of book 3 is action, action, action. But when I actually got to it, it went much quicker than I thought it would. After brainstorming all the fixes to the problems, it wasn’t that daunting at all.

Chunk #3. The Beginning
Then I jumped back to the beginning, and worked till I met up with the middle section. This meant lots more action scenes I had to fix, and lots of work making sure I was both setting up this book as it's own entity, and tying it to the two previous books.

Cohesion Read-through

At this point, I breathe a giant sigh of relief. I’ve done most of the heavy lifting and fixed all the scariest things. Next comes the read-throughs of hundred page chunks, working chronologically this time and smoothing out transitions, language issues, and making sure it’s a cohesive read. I also send out portions to my beta partners at this point to get outside eyes on it.

The Things To-Fix List

But also I end up finding tons of problems as I read that are added to my Things To Fix list, a separate document I always keep open in addition to my manuscript document. The Things to Fix document is vital. These will be weird things ranging from: oh, check the spelling of that name, to, make sure this emotional arc is clear from chapters 10-13, or, in that conversation with all the officials, have them bring up this particular point that is a plant for something that happens at the end.

After I finish the cohesion readthrough, then I start tackling the list. At this point I also sit down again with the edit letter and see if there are problems my editor brought up that I still haven’t sufficiently fixed. That’s where I’m at right now. I try to be brutal with myself and ask myself if I’ve really fixed the problem. My temptation, after straining at this for a month already, is to just burn through the list and slap on some quick fixes that I know will need to be fixed in the next draft.

I’ve done that in the past, but this time around I’m trying to shoulder most of the work in these early drafts. When you’re on a super quick production schedule like I am (books releasing every 5-6 months), I’ve realized there might not always be as much time later as I want to fix things. Now is when I should be taking the time to dig into the guts of this thing, set its broken bones, and make it as solid as I can before turning in the next draft.