Writing

Patience and Paintings

I’ve talked about patience before, but it’s blindsided me again this week and I thought I’d talk about it again.

I so badly want to be finished editing RBRP, I can taste the finish line, especially with twitter contests and PitchWars and WriteonCon and conferences and more more more fabulous books being published. I so badly want to be there.

But I am not finished line editing yet.

It’s so hard to be patient. SO hard to be patient to make RBRP the quality I know it can be.
Eagle for pre Animal ModuleAnd it reminds me so much of painting.

Again, I’ve mentioned this before, but with watercolor–ESPECIALLY with watercolor–you need a tremendous amount of patience.

When you lay down a layer of paint (called a wash), it has to completely dry before the next layer. Otherwise you end up with ugly squiggly marks called blossoms. You also have to plan out the painting, because removing mistakes is really hard to do. You have to incorporate them or scrub them out, which is not guaranteed to work.

Patience guarantees a higher quality of art.

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My #1 Secret For Being Productive: Guest Post by Randy Ingermanson

(I think this is a great advice that can be used in any area of life, not just for those who are managing a writing schedule)

schedule
original photo found here: http://goo.gl/LpQM4o

People ask me all the time how I get so much done. There’s an easy answer, but it’s not very helpful. The easy answer is that I “put the big rocks in first.”

I’m sure everybody has heard the parable about the guy who puts a bunch of big rocks into a bucket. The bucket looks full, but it isn’t, because he then pours in a bunch of gravel around the big rocks. The bucket now looks full, but it still isn’t, because he then pours in a bunch of sand around the gravel. The bucket now looks really full, but it isn’t, because he then pours in some water that soaks into the sand. And now the bucket is finally, really full. The moral of the story is to put the big rocks in first.

Yeah, yeah, sure, nice parable.

But how do you do that, in practical terms?

Here’s what I do:

1) Every morning, my first task is open up my Business Journal and make a list of the Big Rocks for the day. These are the main categories of tasks I’ll be working on. Typically, these are things like the following:
* Admin
* Writing
* Web site
* Marketing
* Day Job

2) If any of the Big Rocks have some obvious smaller subtasks, then I list those subtasks. In rare cases, I may need to break down the subtasks into even smaller tasks, but generally there’s no reason to go that deep.

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How to Tackle the Editing Beast Part 1

aspiring_novelists
photo found here: http://goo.gl/meCuuR

When I saw this picture, I burst out laughing. Yup, the main part of writing is editing. Not nearly as fun as the romantic notion of the caffeine-fit typing attack we’ve all grown up thinking writers experienced. But it’s still my favorite part because I can finally mold something worthwhile 🙂

I’ve been staring at my editing to-do list on this RBRP book for about a month now. Each time I start editing I have to remind myself that when I’m facing a massive project, the most manageable way to tackle the blasted thing is to break it down into manageable chunks.

I half the editing beast by focusing on the big picture stuff first, like character development and building tension, then the small details like sentence structure and word choices. Here’s what I’ve been doing for the big picture edits for the past several weeks:

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Let Your Brain Play (with a roadtrip!)

Creative people are notorious for getting wrapped up in their work. Especially when we love what we do. I know I’ve missed coffee dates and meals when in the middle of writing an exciting scene or am almost done with a painting. The worst is when I put off going to the bathroom because I’m on a roll. How sad is that? (Yes, there were a couple close calls. But I’m a grown childless woman. Accidents don’t happen at my stage in life.)

After a while of being sucked in, we may notice our work has become a little stagnant. Our paintings don’t have the unique perspective as they used to. Our novels don’t have the voice or plot lines we strive for.

We pull our heads out of our work to figure out what the crap is going on. And we realize we’ve become so wrapped up in creating perfect scenery we forgot to actually go visit some scenery. Or we tried so hard to perfect that snappy line of dialogue we haven’t entered dialogue with another person in a long time.

Our brains need space to play, especially as creative people. We forget to splash in puddles, squish mud between our fingers, listen to the waves crashing, or even try a new flavor of tea. We need to experience life in order to be inspired by it. Without playtime, our creative work can become colorless and rote.

Which is why I’m taking a road trip.

Road_trip
Original photo found here: http://goo.gl/8fMPb3
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How to Create Your Novel’s Logline

I recently read a post by Laura Drake on Writers in the Storm about a hassle-free way to create a logline for your story. (If you’re wondering what in sand buckets a logline is, it’s the short big picture byline used to sum up your work of genius. Think: mini synopsis.)

How_to_create_logline
Original photo found here: http://goo.gl/3X3Qak

I thought hey, my sci-fi novel I’m currently editing is in need of a logline. And I reallllly suck at coming up with one by myself. Let’s figure out how to create one together.

There are formulas to come up with loglines:

 

  • At Filmmaking101 Joe Lam says it must have 5 parts:  Protagonist, genre, inner conflict, outer conflict, and climax.
  • Blake Snyder in his book Save the Cat! says:  It must contain a type of hero, the antagonist, the hero’s primal goal and it must have irony.
  • Some say, all you need is a character with a goal and a conflict.

All those work. They’ll give you a perfectly workable logline. A workmanlike logline.

 

But to me, that’s only a place to start.

 

THEN you need to add what Margie Lawson calls,

 

*Sparkle Factor* 

 

*Rubs hands together* Let’s do this.

I’m looking at Joe Lam’s 5 part list. . . and getting overwhelmed. So I’ll jump to Blake Snyder’s list. Irony? On demand? I have a hard enough time getting the bare bones down, which leaves me with the last of the bullet points: character, goal, conflict. (I’m answering this according to the New Adult sci-fi/fantasy manuscript I’m currently editing.)

Character: 22 year-old Breaker Gershom. (a description of the character is always more useful than the name because you learn more about them). This becomes >> a 22 year-old amputee who built his own prosthetic

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