J.R.L. Bennett

So, long story short: there’ll be more personal blog posts this year.

The key to good writing is to be emotionally engaged. That’s something I have a lot of trouble with and am actively trying to overcome.

I stopped writing for my blog for almost a year - I never stopped writing posts, but I stopped doing anything with them. I hit a low period and questioned everything I did and why. I wasn't sure what I wanted this to blog be. A blog for writing tips? Eh, there’s thousands of those - besides I’m sure my few readers have noticed that my writing tips come with rather lengthy side stories. A public profile to pull potential publishers? I’m nowhere polished or professional enough for something like that (I am however, well-versed in alliteration).

The Ouroboros often symbolizes self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself...in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

I know the first draft is supposed to be word vomit. The one thing that’s pushed during writing competitions is to just write. No self-editing because self-editing breeds stagnation. The point is just to have something on the page. A groundwork of ideas, characters, and one-liners to return to with a fresher perspective. I’ve tried the word vomit style and I’m quickly learning that it’s always more trouble than it’s worth.

My Problem with Word Vomit

I have two great sins in my writing: 

I’m too formal, which makes my prose distant, and 

I regularly resort to passive voice. 

I’ve said it before that I’m a bit of a planner and I’m surprised it took me so long to realize that just spilling words onto a page wouldn’t work for me.

Word vomit is meant to just to put the words on the page. You’re supposed to worry about spelling mistakes and stylistic changes later. You’re meant to create a skeleton that you slowly add layers to in the editing phase. It’s an apt metaphor if you think about it. You start with the bones of the work (the first draft) and then you deal with the guts and all the gruesome elements (the revisions). Finally after several drafts, you add the skin (polishing up the grammar and fixing the format). You keep working until it’s no longer a macabre outline but something you can take out and show off. Maybe you’ve created a monster but at least it’s something you can show your friends.

I don’t like having my first draft be a piles of bones. I need something more substantial, more meat on those bones. I’m a competitive person so I invariably end up comparing my unfinished first draft to a best-selling published novel. Let’s just say, my writing just doesn’t compare when I do that.  

As a result, I find it easiest to allow myself a 1-sentence rewrite. I write, I look at the sentence, and I quickly decide whether or not it works. It can be an addition or a deletion but something is done.  It becomes a cyclical process, like the ouroboros. I write and I revise at the same time. Write. Edit. Repeat. This way I have something that wards off the ‘everything sucks and this is terrible’ stage for a while longer.

Now this doesn’t mean complete sentence revision. What this means is that I target the obvious spelling and grammar problems. If I write something that I know is a continuity error earlier in the story then I will go back to where the problem originates.

Since I know what my writing problems are. I use this to eliminate passive words and adjectives as I write. By just slapping words onto a page you’re at least setting up the tone or the idea of the novel. If you take an extra moment and look at the sentence, you’ll know immediately if it feels off. Often in the process of eliminating 1 passive word, I’ll find myself adding several, stronger words. My changes aren’t perfect, it’s the first draft, nothing is perfect. But through this I am forced to constantly be reminded about passive words and tricky phrases.

For example:

Original sentence: “Penny had stilled, I saw her eyes widen as she latched onto the idea.”

Immediately, I noticed the sentence was no longer showing Penny’s actions outright, but rather focussed on the narrator's interpretation of Penny’s actions. I didn’t want there to be any confusion, any hint of an unreliable narrator,

“Penny stilled, her eyes widened as she latched onto the idea”

Still not a great sentence, but it’s marginally better than what it was.

The 10K Slump

When I write a word vomit first draft I end up overwhelmed. With every novel I hit something I call the 10K slump. After about 10K of written words, you’ve set-up of the novel. The actual form of the novel now starts and you can adequately determine whether or not you have enough content to turn this scratching-post of ideas into a fully-fledged novel.

At 10K I always hit the wall. If I utilize the word-vomit, Jackson Pollack, style first draft all I see is the continuity errors, the half written scenes, and the spelling mistakes. This is the make or break point for me. This is where I decide if I toss out what I written as a failed venture or if I grit my teeth and keep on.  I’m currently participating Camp NaNoWriMo. I hit the 10K slump last week and spent three days reading what I had written and obsessing. I looked at the outline, I looked at the text, nothing was good.

It takes me a long time to figure out a character’s voice. For my current novel, I switched to a 3rd person POV, which meant I needed to remember how to write that style. I have two POV characters, I didn’t find their voices until last night, 18K into the novel.

This means that the 18K that came before is total crap.

If I stuck to the word vomit approach. I would have stopped writing. Given up immediately and starting working on something that didn’t plague me as much. But I was already past the 10K point. There were some parts that weren’t entirely terrible and parts I knew could be cleaned up in editing. Because I took that a few moments and did minor editing as I wrote, I knew the project wasn’t a complete waste.

There are mistakes I can’t help but make. I have this bad habit of typing the same error over and over again, until it’s a Groundhog Day of poor spelling. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I know what specific words, or grammar rules, get me into trouble. But it’s a long slow process to fix errors on my own, without relying on spellcheck or other editors to do it for me.

It took me 3 years to spell ‘judgment’ correctly. It wasn’t a word I typed much in my daily life, it wasn’t even a word I thought about. So it was especially embarrassing when I found out, at my law office, that it was a word that I consistently spelled incorrectly, always adding an extra ‘e’. Worse, it wasn't even technically a spelling mistake! It’s an accepted spelling of the word but  it wasn't accepted practice at my work.

At my old firm, we entered lawyer dockets (which are a daily breakdowns of time spent on file-work) into an old accounting system from the 80s. How did I know it was from the 80s? There was acid green font on black background and the letters were squared and pixelated. You could only Tab from field to field. Judging by the reactions of the accounting staff during my training, pressing enter was likely to cause the apocalypse. The biggest challenge was if you completed a docket, there was no way to edit it. Errors could only fixed at the end of the month, when the prebills were sent out to the lawyers and then combed for mistakes.

So every week at work I would enter dockets, trying to be both careful and quick. The problem was that, not only is it it a monotonous job, lawyers use initialisms instead of writing out full phrases. Each lawyer has their own shorthand. Eventually you learn the standard phrases that are used by lawyers in order to save time, in fact most times it’s the same 5 or 6 phrases reused over and over again. Ideally this repetition made it easier, since you could just turn off your brain and type. The problem was once you made a mistake you were doomed to repeat it.  We had one phrase that would pop up every week: “sent email to client about judgment”. Without fail, I would have a spelling mistake. That extra ‘e’ always slipped into the word ‘judgment’ unnoticed. I couldn't even see the mistake anymore. Judgement. Judgement. Judgement. Judge-ment.

It’s a small error, one easily corrected in Word after-the-fact, but it’s one that I would make without fail. It took years before I consistently spelled it correctly. We've moved onto to newer and shinier accounting software, one that actually spellchecks, but I've become wary of my own abilities. I've learned to embrace my paranoia, because there are times when I’m typing quickly and I accidentally substitute words that should never be substituted. Sometimes these words are easily mixed up:

compliant ≠ complaint

definitely ≠ defiantly

Then there are the other words, the ones that are soo close on the keyboard, that you may not even notice the mistake:

whole ≠ whore

Yes, I've mentioned this mistake before. But imagine the panic of realizing you've typed the word ‘whore’ instead of the benign ‘whole’. Trust me, that’s not a mistake you want your bosses to remember.

We rely too much on that red wavy line underneath our words. It tells us that we've made a mistake so we don’t focus on the other words in the document. You stop reading and just scan from red wiggle to red wiggle. If you know your predisposition toward certain errors it can help you self-edit in the future. You can’t, and shouldn't, rely on a machine to do your editing for you. There’s been tons of articles about the evils of spellcheck. I don’t want to be part of that chorus. Writers, of any type, need to be aware of their words and their own errors. It took me 3 years to identify and rectify one spelling mistake. But doing so, made me much more aware of my own blunders.

I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by

- Dilbert

I always got my work done in school. I’m not saying this as a bragging point, but that I didn’t realize that it was optional.

When it came to school deadlines, I always handed my work in on-time. There was varying degrees of quality of course, but I never pleaded an extension and I never handed in work early. Deadlines were hard, fast, immovable objects.

I was terrible at remembering them. There were many caffeine-fueled late nights because a deadline crept up on me. I would attempt to schedule everything in my agenda, but I always relied on the peer pressure of my friends to keep me on-track. I can easily say that I spent most of my education learning that there is a marked difference between:

writing something down,

remembering something, and

actually completing the task.

Those are tasks that I still struggle with. Which is why I find it funny that I’m not only in charge of setting deadlines at my work, I’m also in charge of updating them and making sure that they are completed.

Law firms work on a “bring-forward” (“BF”) system, a calendaring system meant to show upcoming deadlines that you can update and keep track of. The deadlines that I monitor aren’t just a daily or weekly, they span months and hundreds of clients. Dates and timelines become unwieldy when keeping track of as little as what needs to get done today, tomorrow, and next week.

I’m proud to say that (so far!!) we’ve never missed a deadline at work—though there were a couple times we came close. When deadlines become your job, you quickly learn that you need to love them. You need to get a little obsessive. Not only do we use a firm calendaring software but I also create weekly deadline charts and a daily list. There are times when I wake up in the middle night remembering a task that didn’t update.

For my work life, I’ve pretty much mastered the art of completing deadlines. When it comes to extracurriculars like my writing, not so much. I’ve tried different types of goal setting: time-based, word counts, dailies. The trouble is sticking with what works. I am the most consistent and the most efficient when working with some sort of peer pressure. This is why NaNo and other monthly challenges work best, as there is an element of public shaming if you don’t complete your daily goal. That’s not to say people are trolling your profile and watching your updates but having your progress graphed online creates a form of accountability.

Writing programs like Scrivener have session goals that can be set up so you can track your progress, but without outside encouragement, and no penalty in opening the program but leaving the screen blank, I don’t work as hard nor as well. I can set all the deadlines I like, but if I’m not doing the work then they’re useless.

I’m lucky to have friends that are interested in writing and reading. The casual “how’s that book coming along” burns a fire under me more than any online chart could. I want to reach my goals so that I have something my friends can read and experience. Having editors and readers affects my schedule, knowing that they are waiting for the next draft forces me to become a little more obsessive about completing writing deadlines. What I’ve found most important is something that should have been apparent from the start. Not everything needs to be a big deadline. It doesn’t always have to be writing a chapter, sometimes the deadline can be as small as re-reading you work or doing a grammar check. What’s critical is staying engaged with your work. The moment you let one deadline slip by, the more likely you are to let more get by you.

When I was younger, maybe about 10 or 11, I kept a bug-out bag tucked in the back of my closet. I didn’t call it that, of course, I’m not a hard-boiled detective. It was my Fire/Earthquake survival bag, filled with only the most important clothing and books.

I tend to over prepare. There never was an earthquake, or a fire, or a miscreant who breaks into the house for the sole purpose of kidnapping little girls. But I kept still kept the bag packed. When I got a little older and the most important aspects of my life shifted from the material to the personal (books, writing, and photos instead of clothes and dolls) I mapped out extensive scenarios where I would grab my prized possession and be able to slip out of my room well before lava could burst through the door.

I don’t know if I could still call it being over-prepared. Perhaps I’m a tad neurotic, maychance a little obsessive.

I was talking about book planning with friends, both of whom I trying to rope into finishing stories and start publishing them, and I was surprised how strange my planning processes looked to them.

I’m not a mathematical person, but I like breaking down my work into concrete numbers. There’s something satisfying about having a goal and being able to surpass it. This is why I love using a yearly spreadsheet to keep track of my writing.

When planning out my writing there are two important things I take into account: word count and deadlines.

For my last novel I started by breaking down the planning like so:

Total Novel Word Count: 75-80K

Chapter Word Count (Est.): 4-5K

Start Date: August 5, 2013

Goal End Date: November 30, 2013

Knowing that I wanted 4-5K chapter lengths allowed me to further break down the structure of the novel. I already knew the Urban Fantasy genre well which meant  I knew what tropes needed to work with to appeal to readers. I also played around with a mix of the 5-Act Structure and the 8-Act Structure.

Planning out the structural beats that I wanted to hit allowed me to create a more detailed outline.

Set up/ Exposition Chapter 1  Chapter 2 

Rising Action/ First Major Conflict Chapter 3 Chapter 4

Potential Solution/Greater Conflict Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Resolution of Minor Problem/Complication for Primary Objective Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

The Last Argument/New Solution for Primary Objective Chapter 11 Chapter 12

Final Climax Chapter 13 Chapter 14

Resolution Chapter 15 Chapter 16

Wrap-up Chapter 17

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

Last week I had a Skype chat with a close-friend. It was a chat I was both dreading and anticipating.

Why? At the beginning of January I sent my novel to the first round of beta-readers. Sonya and Liz are close-friends of mine that I've worked with in the past, Liz edited my essays in University (that is, when I finished them ahead of schedule) and Sonya was my right-hand lady during the last NaNo. They know my quirks and my faults. Having them take the first glance at the completed draft was like putting the iron fist in a velvet glove - it would hurt, but I knew they'd try to soften the blow. 

Pressing the send button on that email  was probably one of the most nerve-wracking experience of my life. My fiction writing hasn't seen the light of day since my grade-school short stories (I mean beyond the fanfiction that's published in the bowels of the internet).

I spent December cleaning up as much grammar and spelling as I could. I added in some extra scenes and tried to look at the piece critically. I polished as much as I could, knowing that once the document was sent, it was out of my hands.

I asked both Sonya and Liz to primarily  focus on substantive and structural editing. Although I know the genre and I know the necessary beats to hit, I’m fairly biased when reading my own work. Having outsiders look at the progression of both the plot and characters was a huge boon. 

Sonya sent an email outlining the various scenes and character development that she had concerns with. Letting me know what elements worked and what needed more tweaking. Liz talked it out informally over Skype, focusing on the thematic and the overall structure. I loved having both of those interactions, I was able to sit down and address the problems formally with Sonya and hash-out my structure problems with Liz. 

It was interesting that they both had very similar critiques and both had the same suggestions for the potential follow-up. Which I hope bodes well for my novel.  Beyond the occasional plot/character slip-up (such as forgetting my main character had nephews not nieces), I need to develop the relationships a little more and finesse some descriptions. I’m drafting out new scenes to add and working on embellishing them before heading out to the next round of beta-reading/editing. They’ve agreed to do stylistic editing next to help me with some word choice and spelling errors that slipped by.

I’ve been a lurker for most of my life. I like to stand at the edge of conversations, somewhere off to the side, listening intently. I’m one of those slightly too quiet people that listen and remember everything from conversations even though I’ll downplay it later.  I like listening to conversations, finding out what makes people tick, listening to their backstories. Everyone is interesting, even when they think they aren’t.

I’m a lurker online as well; it’s no secret that I tend to fan-girl over certain things. One of the most interesting aspects of online fandom is the community that is built, having thousands of different voices focussed on one topic breeds interesting conversation. I like reading the variations and interpretations that can spawn in fandoms. I watch and read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, most of which has multiple writers and producers, which sometimes means if a storyline is hand-waved away (usually with liberal applications of deus ex machina/magic/reversing the polarity of the neutron flow) I’ll go online to read other people’s reactions and their interpretations and personal versions of events.

Most of these interpretations are ‘fanwank’ or ‘head-canon’- where online writers and artists expand on what was already created; taking information already provided by the creator and adding small details, smoothing over any inconsistencies that develop through multiple seasons/books/movies. They try to make sense of plotlines and character developments that seem out of character (“OOC”).

Almost everything centres on back story - not necessarily rewriting but expanding.

This expansion is where novice writers tend to stumble. They turn to melodrama when they should aim for restraint. You’ll notice it in beginner fanfiction when already developed characters all have a secret, super special back story. Every character suddenly has a monumental trauma: a lost love, a family secret, something that makes them extraordinary. It’s similar to when I was younger, I couldn’t just pretend to be a fairy (oh yes, I wore my ballet costume and everything) I had to be the Queen of the Fairies...who was cast out, forced to live in squalor with humans with invisible armies.

There was a recent example of indulgent backstories in The Walking Dead fandom. The character Daryl Dixon has become a fan favourite in the television show. He’s a loner, he’s proficient, gruff, and a little crass… basically designed to appeal to a wide audience. His backstory is easily summed up due to growing up with an overbearing, redneck brother and an abusive father.

Because fans enjoy his character, they read into his actions, assigning them to a head-canon that overtly explains how/why he reacts to certain situations. A common fan theory I’ve seen concerning his backstory, was what if….Daryl had a blonde younger sister who went missing/was kidnapped/was killed by their father? Yes, I suppose that would explain his hesitancy around women and his obsession with the search for Sofia. But why take a simple, realistic backstory and twist it into something more dramatic? Is an abusive family no longer considered dramatic enough?

Back story provides motivation for characters. It explains their reaction to events and how they approach and solve conflicts. In this, simplicity is key.

In original writing, should tendency for melodrama rear its ugly head it can, ultimately, destroy your work. Drama is interesting, it captures readers attentions, creates a hook, but melodrama is cloying. Melodrama is all about exaggerated emotions and stories; it’s creating a soap opera. Exaggerated emotions can be cathartic, but if they dominate the plot and the setting they become eye-rollingly boring. If you overdo/overwrite the drama it loses connection with the reader. You can have melodramatic characters, or melodramatic speeches, but personally, the greatest sin is a melodramatic plot.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet is the prime example of melodramatic character. She flails, sobs, and weeps throughout the text. Of course, in the novel Mrs. Bennet was meant to be an overwrought character, lending a brand of comedy to lighten up the plot and shed light into the actions of Lizzie and her family. There are times that it becomes difficult to read her character or watch her interpretation on film. She is DRAMA! And that becomes exhausting. But in the novel, she is just one character, a problem that can be pushed to the side when she is too overwrought.

When plot becomes melodramatic it’s more difficult to fix. When there are murders, kidnappings, forced marriages, torture, the tropes take over the plot. It’s no longer about the character but what sensational plot device is next. I can’t say these aren’t popular. Melodrama has been a part of novels, movies and TV since their inception. There is even a network devoted to melodrama (*ahem* Lifetime *ahem*). The problem is that for new and beginning authors, melodrama, especially poorly executed melodrama, is an easy and quick way to lose readership.

There is a difference between poignancy and melodrama; that difference lies in the execution of your work.

Another acid test for melodrama is the tendency to resort to violence, either emotional (catatonic seizures, gasps, screams, floods of tears, verbal confrontations) or physical (fisticuffs—or worse, depending on the caliber of melodrama and available firearms).

http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/10-tips-to-bypass-cliche-and-melodrama

 If drama is a perfume, then melodrama is your grandmother’s potpourri.

There is an easy way to limit the melodrama and that’s to cut rather than add. There’s a famous adage about jewelry: always take off one piece of jewelry before you leave the house. This applies to creating characters and plots as well. Consider your characters and plot, look at the back story you’ve created for each, if you feel an eye-roll while reading your work then you’ve probably strayed too far into melodrama.

There are always some quick solutions to look for when you’re looking to limit the melodrama:

watch for Mary Sues: the obvious protagonist

over use of adverbs instead of using ‘he/she said’

creating 3 pages of backstory for a one-off side character

character death or torture to fill up plot

Melodrama is meant to appeal to reader’s emotions, like I mentioned earlier this can be done through setting, character or plot. It creates sensationalism within the text and, if effective, it can resonate with the reader.  Too much drama doesn’t create pathos, it causes exhaustion. Tempering the melodrama is a key skill to acquire as a writer. Learning when to add a measure of normalcy or realism allows the reader to recharge and reengage with the text. Make mellow drama - not melodrama.

  Articles on Melodrama and How to Avoid it:

 http://www.writing-world.com/romance/melodrama.shtml

http://www.roniloren.com/fictiongroupiearchives/2011/2/4/oh-no-melodrama-avoiding-the-reader-eye-roll.html