Taos Toolbox workshop

This summer, I attended the Taos Toolbox workshop, a 2-week SF/F writing workshop in Angel Fire, New Mexico, run by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress.

It was a good but tough two weeks, very busy in a beautiful location. There were 18 of us and we each got to submit two pieces--a 10k piece the first week, and a 5k piece the second. So, naturally, we spent most of our days in workshop, responding to our peers' work, and then evenings mostly reading work for the next day.

Walter and Nancy were compassionate, funny, interesting, and exacting. They didn't pussyfoot around or pat us on the back often, but they made sure we knew when we'd succeeded. I appreciated their senses of humor and their focus on problem-solving when our writing didn't meet the mark.

We also had guest speakers throughout our time there, who came to speak about different areas of expertise and the writing life. While we were all looking forward to George R. R. Martin and I really enjoyed meeting him, the most helpful guest speaker for me was E.M. Tippetts, an indie-publishing guru with lots of practical strategies for launching a book or series as a self-published author. Her talk was so practical, so jam-packed with information, and I came away inspired to try self-publishing someday.

Taos is also billed as a graduate workshop but I’m not sure I’d agree. I'd compare it more to technical or professional school. The workshop is more geared towards commercial writers and making your work sellable, than it is about honing a creative aesthetic. To that end, we learned a lot of very practical writerly advice, some of it truisms or plot formulas that writers have likely heard before. But what really helped was being forced to put it into practice via critiques and writing exercises. Honestly, I wish there'd been a little more writing exercises or structured time for writing, but I do feel like I've developed a more judicious eye for my own work and the work of others. The two weeks felt like learning to write from muscle memory. It was almost as if our instructors said, "Oh, you think you know this writing truism? Then do it, over and over." At the end of two weeks, I came away with specific writing maxims much more ingrained in my process than before.

The aspect that sets Taos apart from the two other big summer workshops (Clarion and Odyssey) is that it's much more novel focused. Most people in our group were workshopping the beginnings of novels, and I took the first segment of Jurassic Unicorn. While we got line edits on what we submitted, we also had a lot of chances to talk larger plot, and I even got to sit down with Walter and get his feedback on my plot revisions at the end of the two weeks. I came away feeling much stronger about the shape of the Jurassic Unicorn plot.

Things I learned:

I learned about letting your readers know what to expect from your work right away.

I learned about plotting.

I learned about making an ending as strong as a beginning.

I learned about active, atmospheric description.

I learned about the ups and downs of the publishing world, and strategies to adapt to a changing market.

I learned to be tougher in my criticisms of others, and more exacting in what I demand from myself. After Taos, I can look back at stories I thought were finished and already I can see where they drag, are bloated, are convoluted.

And I learned that the tough thing about criticism is separating taste from technique. Technique, you can change. You can improve. But if your vision doesn’t match someone else’s taste, there’s not much you can do except shrug and say “well, you’re not my audience." 

This was what happened to me, with Jurassic Unicorn--it was not to several people's taste, which kinda crushed me while I was there. But I've bounced back from that now and am focused on changing the things about my technique that I can, while staying true to my original vision for the book. 

Hands down the best part of Taos was making friends in the SF/F world. I'm so excited that I connected with folks there, people that I will be able to share work with and learn from for a long time. 

In Which I Reveal That I am a Panther (and other writing things)

Last month I applied for some summer writing workshops and one of them required that I send a chapter of my novel, along with a detailed (2-3 page) novel outline.

This is gonna sound like Writer 101, but I hadn't really written a detailed novel outline yet. I had been working from a three-act structure outline (a great breakdown of this, and other plot structures, on Janice Hardy's blog here), but as far as a scene-by-scene outline ... nope. Didn't have one.

I'm a panther; this baby is my book.

This is fine. Writers often divide into plotters and pantsers--people who plan ahead of time, or people who write by the seat of their pants. I'm kind of in-between. I had the major beats charted out but when it came to writing the bits that connected those beats, I was a pantser. Note: my computer wants to autocorrect that to "panther," so that is my new official writing type.

When I wrote this detailed outline, I realized a couple things.

First, SO MUCH HAPPENS IN MY BOOK. It is kind of breathtaking all the shit that goes down. Which, on the one hand, is good. Fun, action-packed, complex novel, right? On the other hand ... holy wow there are like 4 major plotlines that I need to weave together so that events, themes, motivations, etc. converge at just the right moment.

Second, I have so much to gain from a scene-by-scene analysis of my book that I'm stunned and slightly guilt-ridden that I didn't do it earlier. How much stronger would my book be if I knew how scene 23 connects back to what's already happened, how it moves the plotlines forward, and how it sets up for events that will happen later?

But there's no sense in beating myself up for what I didn't do yet. This is my first novel; I'm learning.

What's really exciting is that I can suddenly see, like I'm Sherlock hallucinating diagrams in mid-air, how to make my book so much better. It's already good, but I'm about to make it kick-ass. And I can't wait.

Character Troubles

I'm gearing up to teach a course called Introduction to Literary Interpretation this fall. It's a class for beginning literature majors, to introduce them to major concepts like "genre" and technical terms like "synedoche." One of the concepts we have to cover is "character"--round characters, flat characters, stock characters, unreliable narrators, archetypes, etc, and what qualities make characters relatable, likeable, or compelling.

There's always some shred of hope that what I'm teaching will bleed into my own writing. If I'm teaching about great characters, maybe it will make it easier to write a great character, right? Wrong. It is not easy to write a great character, and the more I try, the more fake and cobbled-together it feels.

I'm not generally a fan of fluffy, touchy-feely, "become one with the universe" "just let the muse flow" "listen to your book, and your book will tell you what to write" kind of advice. I'm more of the belief that writing is hard work and that you have to sit down and move your fingers around your keyboard day in and day out to be successful at it. But I'm starting to feel like a character has some sort of intangible reality outside (or inside?) of my own brain, because I am finding it so difficult to write Miranda.

Miranda is the main character of #JurassicUnicorn. And even though I have complete control over every aspect of her personality--each facet of her being is something that I have consciously put there--she feels real, and solid, and immovable to me. 

This wouldn't be a bad thing if she didn't also bore the hell out of me.

I have written 94 double-spaced pages of #JurassicUnicorn. Just over 26,000 words. Not that much, really, considering that people who complete NaNoWriMo write 50,000 words in a month. (Last November, when I did NaNoWriMo, I only wrote 15,000.)  But also nothing to sneeze at. And I'm not losing interest in the book. I feel confident in its potential.

But my main character is just dragging me down. 

A lot of it is that I have this idea of Miranda as an inflexible, literal-minded person who opens up over the course of the story. She’s a scientist by vocation and by nature; she sees the world as a puzzle to be solved and believes that every question has an answer. In this way, she is an optimist. But I haven’t written her very optimistically, which may be part of the problem. She’s fundamentally sad. Her outlook on life is kind of dreary. She is very introverted and perhaps a bit of a misanthrope. At the beginning of the book, she really only loves two people: her brother and the unicorn she has created.  I think that maybe this is why I find her boring; it’s hard for me to relate to someone joyless.

Part of the reason I've written her this way is that I want her to have a major emotional shift associated with her brush with the supernatural. She has a religious experience, the first in her life, and it changes her. But I also don’t want to paint her as a dour, sad atheist who needs God to be happy, because I don’t believe that message myself. (Nor do I believe that all scientists are introverts, or that all introverts are misanthropes, etc.)

And I can change that about her. She doesn’t have to be that way. It feels like she inhabits a corner of my mind, a dark, dour presence, but that presence is an illusion. She isn't real. 

Hashtag Jurassic Unicorn

This summer, I'm spending a good amount of my time writing a book I've had in mind for, oh, about seven years. Codename: Jurassic Unicorn.

I've never yet finished a novel. I started one last November, my Kraken Killer project, and was really pumped about it. But for that one, I had a compelling character, setting, and situation, but no plot. I'll come back to it someday; I'm still in love with the aspects of it that grabbed me at first. But Wil thinks my first novel idea is more marketable and won't end up pigeonholing me as a "fantasy writer," per se--and he's probably right. (Not that the working title "Jurassic Unicorn" sends that message ... not at all.)

The problem with Jurassic Unicorn right now is that I have a plot, a situation, and a great setting, but I don't *get* my main character yet. Harvanna was a force to be reckoned with; Miranda is a cipher. She's a brick wall, and I'm not sure if I'm projecting too much of my own life onto her, or not enough. At any rate, I got some good advice today in my writer's group that will help me get to know her better and flesh her out more on the page.

My biggest problem is perfectionism. With short stories, it's not such a problem. The entire story is something you can grasp, you can manipulate, you can fix it. It's a watch with five moving parts as opposed to a thousand. I can finish a draft of a story, read it, see the problems, and say, "Cool--I'll do this, and this, and this, and then it'll be better." And granted, the second draft may not be ready either, but it's noticeably better. I've made progress. I have checked boxes off my list.

A novel is a different beast entirely. Each thing you change means seventeen other things have to be changed. I've finished three chapters (about 15,000 words so far) and I don't like them very much. I like moments in them, but I can see the cracks and they're gaping, and widening quickly the more I write. I can't stand that these cracks are there; it's almost a physical sensation of discomfort, like trying not to scratch an itch, holding myself back from returning to those early chapters to fix the problems rather than doing what everybody tells me I need to do: keep writing.

And I know they're right. I'm not a sculptor, chiseling David out of a pre-existing block of marble. I have to make my own block of marble out of thin air.

So I have to keep going. Despite the discomfort. Despite hating what I'm writing.