Category Archives: I might be a writer

Writing has consumed my life haha! When did I start the book, yesterday, Wednesday? I can’t even remember.

Last November, Scott Westerfeld gave writing tips on every odd numbered day, and his wife did the same for every even numbered day. I finished his this morning and need to move on over to hers.

One of the things that Scott recommends is having a timeline. This is to help you keep track of what day of the week your characters are in, or even the month or the season, lest your character end up going to school six days in a row. A lot of the tips sounded really great, but all the writing tips I ever read usually revolve around being able to look at your work. Whether it be graphs or color coded charts or names written in bold, they are all things to help you keep organized.

After I had lost interest in the last book I had started to write, I took a different approach with this one. I just wrote. It’s so raw and skeletal, with tons of mistakes, but the words are finding a home on paper? screen? haha!

I hadn’t done any brainstorming like I did with the last one. I had a possible idea for the story, but didn’t have a definite plot. I had just decided to start writing and see where the characters led me. I read on Scott’s blog this morning about writing yourself out of the corner. Don’t think yourself out of a jam, write yourself out of it. I realized that was exactly what I had been doing.

After walking away from the computer for a minute, a possible plot flooded my brain. I let the idea dance around a bit, and then opened a brainstorming document. It’s just one paragraph, unlike the fragmented ideas I had written down with the last book. It just got the idea a bit organized. It doesn’t have all the dates and other important little data in it. That’s what my timeline is for.

I did take Scott’s advice and start a timeline. I looked back over my chapters and jotted down quick notes about what day it was, who’s point of view it was, important dates like birthdays, just small details like that. It doesn’t take much, and I don’t need any fancy color coding, just lines of text under the chapter heading. I’ll continue to fill in the timeline after I write each chapter, to keep it all straight as I go, and to be able to look back on during revision. I haven’t written an outline because frankly, I think that would complicate things for me. Jumping between text documents and finding my place would be rather daunting, and truth be told, how can I write an outline when the characters haven’t told me where they’re going yet?

After every chapter, I was saving a draft in gmail. What better place to back up my writing? This was working ok, but there was no real easy way to jump to a particular chapter. It’s nice having all the text in one document because I can highlight the whole thing and check word count. Over 11,500 words already!

I came up with the idea to create a private blog, just for the book. It’s barking perfect! I copied each chapter into it’s own post labeled by chapter. The book appears backward by chapter, but I can just jump to the last heading and navigate by heading in reverse order.

This will come in handy later when I incorporate another of Scott’s tips. Read your work backward. That’s to take you out of context and really catch any phrasing errors. He actually recommends reading backward by paragraph as well. That won’t be intil the revision process, but having the book in a blog is going to be quite helpful.

Now that I’ve gotten some of the organizational stuff taken care of, I can really get back to focusing on the bare bones of the novel. It’s so fun creating it. It’ll be even better to get to the fine tuning stage.

I just have to remember not to forget about life. 😉 I had really planned on getting some vacuuming done today but, it’ll wait haha! Jayden seems to be the only thing taking priority right now. I’m sure this little phase will pass, or maybe it won’t? Maybe this is what happens when a potential author is really on to something.

I’ll be referencing three people in this post and I don’t have the brain spoons to go locate links, but guess what? They’re in my blog roll. Ha! Sooo, if you’re curious, scroll down and find Joni, Stormcrow and Scott Westerfeld. I think Scott’s blog is ‘Wester blog’. Ok, got my plugs in, kinda.

Joni, who I always call JayNoi, inspired me a long time ago to think about writing. She posts writing tips quite often on her blog and she got me in to that free writing course I took. During that course, I developed two characters, a plot and a few settings. I got so excited about the story that I’d just open up a text document and start brainstorming. I wrote scenes for the class. I had dialogue. I had conflict. I explored the senses. I had the general idea of what I wanted to write and I thought it was pretty cool. I got pretty good feedback in the class and the two friends I shared the ideas with thought it was awesome.

The ideas for the novel were inspired after I read ‘Uglies’ by Scott Westerfeld. Stormcrow had reviewed the audio book on his blog and after I read it, I had to download the book. I was instantly hooked and promptly read ‘Pretties’ and ‘Specials’. The creative freedom Westerfeld had by choosing to write in the future is what really excited me. So I decided that’s what I’d do and the few scenes I wrote were set in the future. I also picked a genre I was really familiar with. Crime. I had read a lot of crime novels. James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell and several others who lived in my mystery box of audio books. I loved crime novels, so of course that’s what I’d write. Right? Hmmm.

After I finished the writing course, I tried sitting down and working on my new story idea with my characters living in my brain patiently waiting to be born into the story.

I struggled with how to start the novel. I wrote a prelude to explain the futuristic ideas. I started with a plane ride for my main character. As if the plane crashed before reaching its destination, so went the novel. I never went back to it. Suddenly the thought of trying to figure out the crimes, the crime scenes, the forensics and the Bureaucracy all mixed with the idiosyncrasies of my characters became so overwhelming that I basically put the laptop in the freezer and ran screaming.

The idea to write a novel has never left me however, especially the more books I read. I find that if the book is really good I’ll restart it and really pay attention to the details now that I know the story. I’ll make a mental note of how something was described, or how a few words in a dialogue made me feel, how a character seemed to reach in to my soul and remind me of something I experienced years ago.

Are these crime novels I’m talking about? No. They are books for teens. Scott Westerfeld’s books to be exact.

A few nights ago I googled him and discovered his blog. I read through a comment thread at what the teens were saying and I loved their enthusiasm! I started finding youtube videos of Scott and I believe it was in one of these where he talked about how exciting it is to write for teens. I was inspired. I realized that I don’t even enjoy reading crime novels anymore. Why would I want to write one?

What if I plucked my main character out of her FBI roll and made her a high school student? Why not just create a new character? Well because I love her. I created her. I love her name. I love who she is. I want to explore who she is as a sixteen year old.

So my possible novel idea has taken on a whole new timeline and plot. It’s all changed except for her. The chaos I created for the crime novel is being completely and totally transformed into a new chaos, one I truly understand. Instead of opening up a document and brainstorming, I opened up a document and wrote the opening scene. I’m letting the ideas stay marinating in my brain, waiting for me to pluck a piece out and taste it, see if its ready, decide whether to throw it in the story yet or let it simmer.

I already made the mistake of going back and re-reading and fixing typos. Arg, don’t do that! Just write it, Ro. Get it out there.

We’ll see what happens. I think my character is excited. I feel it. She’s found her place and it’s much more comfortable than the last one. Maybe this time next year I’ll be looking in to how to find an editor. You never know, right?