Writing Love Stories For Dummies (Like Me)

This week's blog-post-brainstorming started with a good, old-fashioned dither. I'm still researching Tibet, you see, so - hmm, how to say this nicely - my current process is REALLY EFFING BORING.

Not that the research is boring; not at all. As I've mentioned, I love research (most of the time). It's just that telling you about that process is rather akin to forcing you to sit through a dull lecture by a professor who sounds like the teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

So, I dithered. And then I thought: WAIT! I'm not just researching Tibet; I've also been researching love stories!

Why? Well, part of my advice to people when they're struggling with plot (besides go back to your characters, of course) is to look for some way to frame the plot; some plot-skeleton to hang your story-flesh off of, if you'll excuse the unsettling metaphor. This can be literal - when I was writing Cloudland, I used Joseph Campbell's monomyth - or it can be thematic. You know, some kind of writing prompt, or jumping-off point, like, in the month of April I'll write blog posts for every letter of the alphabet. Or something.

For this WIP, since a) it's about love, and b) it follows souls through multiple lifetimes, I thought I might be able to structure each lifetime around one of the Great Love Story Plots.

Except, erm, I didn't know what they were. What?? I've never claimed to be an expert on writing romance. Far from it, actually. This is where all of you romance writers point at me, and laugh, as well you should. But I really did do some research on it.

So, for all of you non-romance writers, who, like me, freeze in panic when they have to write a love story, I want to share the most helpful thing I found in my research thus far: a fantastic old blog post by one Margo Berendson, listing her idea of the 13 standard love story plots, with examples for each.

For those who don't have time to click on the link, here's a little user's guide to the love plots I'm going to mention, quoted from her blog:

• Reluctant love: "where two people are forced by circumstances into a betrothal or marriage. Sometimes both are reluctant partners; sometimes one is willing, the other reluctant. As the reluctant one comes to know her partner better, they genuinely fall in love"
• Love Torn Apart: "the opposite of a happily-ever after, where love reigns for a while, but then is torn apart by circumstances" 
• Love Forsaken: "a pair of lovers where one rejects the other (usually because of unequal status or to honor the family), and then regrets it"
• You're the Last Person I'd Ever Love: "two characters start out disliking each other, often quite intensely, and then fall in love as they get to know each other better"
• Forbidden Love: "Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paris and Helen" and so on. 

If you found those helpful, I highly recommend checking out the original post. Just sayin'.

Anyway, thanks to that post, I'm off and running, and GOD does it feel good to have a sense of the overall structure of this monstrosity that I'm working on. And because I'm me, and I am incapable of doing anything simply, I want to combine these plots to make new stories. Yes, one lover might be headed towards an arranged marriage, and therefore a reluctant love plot, but suddenly another character arrives in the story, of the wrong race or gender or social class (or all of the above), and now we have a forbidden love story, with a dash of love triangle and great potential for love torn apart. And THAT is fun to write.

For example, I'm thinking my Ancient Greek story will combine jealous love and love torn apart (yes, I made the first one up, but I like it. Think crazy jealousy ruining everything, like in Othello), and my modern London story will be an amalgamation of you're the last person I'd ever love and love forsaken, with a possible, unusual, modern twist on forbidden love.

Silly? Maybe, but it's working, and I'll take that over dignity any time.

Putting the 'Stuck' Back in Process

This blog is about the process of writing a novel. It says so, right up at the top of the page. And I'm writing a novel. Yup, I sure am. Sometimes when I write about writing, it's informative; sometimes it's neurotic; sometimes it's inspirational in intent; sometimes it's a little bit crazy; and sometimes it's just plain stuck.

Yes. I admit it: I'm stuck. I've been bashing my own motto to death and doing major character development as well as runaway research in the hopes of someday, maybe, unearthing a PLOT, but to not much avail.

Or, to no avail.

I'm still in Ancient Greece - Tibet, India, Australia, London, and New York are just gonna have to wait. Here's the set-up of the Greek plot thus far, in a little nutshell:

Boy loves god. God isn't into it. Boy convinces god to be into it. They begin a love affair. 

I'm very happy with this so far. A reluctant god who has sworn off love affairs, plus a smitten and utterly determined (and mildly narcissistic) mortal, makes for good fun conflict.

So the mortal wins, and they get together.... And then what??

I know it's not going to work out (sorry, but it's not). First of all, Greek gods are about as capable of fidelity in love affairs as - as - well, crap, my metaphors are failing me, but let's just say THEY'RE NOT CAPABLE AT ALL. Second, as I've mentioned before, despite their own major failings in the monogamy department, Greek gods don't deal well with lovers who cheat on them. Third, neither one of these people is really emotionally capable of true intimacy.

This is all good, right? Lots of potential conflicts, right? I KNOW! I read that and I think, "so what's the problem?"

The problem is that I can't for the life of me figure out exactly how things get messed up, or why. Does Apollo cheat on his mortal? Does the mortal cheat on him? Why? And if so, with who, and then what? Does Artemis somehow get involved? She keeps popping up in my brainstorming, but won't tell me why. It's annoying.

I was expounding on this on Twitter today - ok, fine, I was complaining - and the wise and very smart L.G. Smith advised me to "Time to take something precious from them [my characters]. If they have nothing to fight against, they're too comfortable."

This tickled something in my head... but I'm not yet sure what it is. I think she's putting me on the right track. Maybe. I hope. Certainly a love affair wouldn't be comfortable for either one of them - in fact, my instinct is that it's the intimacy itself that takes something away from them, even though they both thought it was what they wanted. I just don't quite have it yet. You know - the thing that gets taken away, and what they do in response.

Is this a case of the thing a person wants the most is the thing that frightens them the most? Or a case of the thing a person wants the most is the worst thing for them?

I don't know yet.

I know. I know. I presented an irritating problem, complained about it for a while, and then neglected to resolve it. This is not what I would call satisfying writing.

And yet, it's precisely the kind of grind that constitutes 'daily work' for a writer. You bang your head against your desk; the banging jars loose a brilliant idea; you follow that idea only to find out it's bunk; you bang your head some more and pull your hair, and problem-solve out loud, and write lots and lots of brainstorming ideas that start with "what if" and end in question marks. Rinse, wash, repeat.

I'm not complaining - or, well, I'm complaining only a little. I love this work. I just love it more when I have solutions to my problems, rather than just large stubborn problems that sit on my desk and taunt me.

So, that's where I am today. Not much of a thrilling inside look, perhaps, but a true one. Thanks for sticking with me.

And suggestions, of course, are more than welcome.

Seriously.

To Pants or To Plot: That Is The Question

A little while ago (ok, fine, like a month ago, but as I noted shortly thereafter, I've stopped making promises about what I write about next on this blog, because I have the attention span of a drugged, concussed goldfish when it comes to planning my blog posts) I promised that I would talk some more about this theme that's been popping in some comments: pantsers vs. plotters. For those crafty readers who are keeping track of the subjects of my posts (and why would you do such a foolish thing?), you'll notice that this is my way of digging myself out of the pit of editing - also known as being certifiably crazypants, or wallowing in massive insecurity - and emerge back into the world of crafting a novel. You know, the stuff you do long before editors appear with giant red markers and destroy your darling words help you make your work better.

A pantser, by the way, is a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer. In short, that's someone who does the polar opposite of what I do when I'm writing. The writer L.G. Smith describes the pantser process on her blog (which is fantastic, and which you should follow like I do): "I'm mostly a pantser, meaning I don't plan out my novels in advance of writing them. I tend to jump in the deep end and see how long it takes me to either drown or swim. Knock on wood, I've managed to swim back to shore with my last two novels."

Essentially, what this means is that a pantser writer doesn't need an outline or need help with a plot skeleton, because she doesn't have a skeleton at all. She has a big glommy viscous mass of ideas, sort of like a giant jellyfish, that she plops onto a page, and plucks words and scenes and characters out of with magic elf-fingers and crafts into a beautiful story with a few waves of her mysterious magic elf-wand, and if by some small, weird chance there are problems with the story or basic things that just don't make sense, she pushes on through her jellyfish-idea-pile and sorts that little unimportant stuff out later.

At least, this is how I imagine it works.

I used to write this way, so you would think that I would know how it works, but considering the fact that I always ended up sobbing on the floor by my computer, banging my head against giant unsolvable plot problems and begging my characters to cooperate, I think it's safe to say that I have no freaking clue.

I do not understand how people use this non-process and make it work; or, to continue with L.G. Smith's metaphor, how they don't end up drowning in an immense confusing ocean of a plot hole.

But they do. They write novels and get them published, and the novels are pretty amazing, and I'm willing to bet that they don't sob through the entire process. I admire these writers the way I would admire a pink fairy armadillo: with a lot of amazement and disbelief, and also a big dose of jealousy, because who doesn't want a cute little pink shell of their very own???

And then there are people like me: the plotters (a word which looks and sounds suspiciously like "plodders"). The anal-retentive, neurotic, process-driven people who make outlines for fun and derive great satisfaction from organizing their books by subject matter, then alphabetical order by author within each subject.

Am I just describing myself? Oh...

I've already detailed how my process works in a series of posts, but here's an overview: 1) get a seed, 2) develop and research it, 3) psychoanalyze the hell out of your characters, 4) develop a basic story based on those characters, 5) create a plot skeleton, 6) flesh out the skeleton, 7) write each scene on the outline until you have a complete draft, 8) REJOICE AND DO GREAT DANCES OF CELEBRATION TO THE GODS OF WRITING, and then 9) edit and edit and edit and edit and edit and....

You know, I'm really glad I wrote out my process like that, in a mini-outline, because now I see at least two or three things I haven't written blogs posts about yet! Now I have new ideas! And I know what to write! Let me just jot down my ideas so I don't forget about them -

See how that works?

Deep and Plotty Thoughts

Ok, plot: step two! At least, that's what I was planning to write about this week. I kind of ended up with something different. Or not. Never mind, just keep reading - you'll see what I mean.

So, it's ironic: I chose to talk about plot last week using Chuck Wendig's excellent definition, which says (in essence) that plot comes directly from the characters. And I meant that. I really did. It's just that when it was time for me to figure out what the hell was actually going to happen in Cloudland, I got a little bit lost.

Ok, fine. I got a lot lost. Like, wandering aimlessly around the woods on a cloudy, moonless night with no compass or map, lost (and I should point out here that I am really terrible at directions, even when I DO have a map. I'm the person who has to turn maps around so that they face the way I'm heading, because otherwise I can't read them.)

Yeah, I knew who my characters were, and I knew what they wanted, but I didn't know how to turn that into real, actual events. So, my plot didn't so much come from my characters...at least not directly. As I said last week, I asked for help from a dead guy. And it was the best thing I could have done.

No, I didn't learn how to commune with ghosts (although that would have been a lot cooler); I started re-reading Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Joseph Campbell was "an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion" (thanks, Wikipedia). He developed the theory that myths from all around the world share the same basic structure, which he called the monomyth, or the Hero's Journey. In his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell lays out the structure of this monomyth, and illustrates how a vast majority of ancient and modern stories fit this structure. It's way too much to lay out in this post, but suffice it to say that if you were to look at Campbell's structure, and compare it to a hell of a lot of books, movies, and myths, you'd be able to see that they pretty much follow it, with a few changes here and there. The most commonly cited example of this is Star Wars, but there are a ton more.

Before I continue, I should note that there are some people out there who don't like Joseph Campbell or his theories very much. Since I'm not writing a blog about comparative mythology or Mr. Campbell, I'm not going to delve too much into the criticism; if you're interested, you can check out a summary of it here. Essentially, the critiques say that making myths 'universal' destroys the uniqueness and the intended lessons of each myth; that defining and following a specified structure leads to way too many predictable, cookie-cutter books and movies (see: all blockbuster Hollywood movies and the three-act structure); and so on.

I don't disagree with any of this. I just think it all misses the central message and value of Campbell's work, which is why I ignored the criticism and used the Hero's Journey as a jumping-off point when I was trying to come up with a structure for Cloudland.

Yep, I used it, because I love it. I'll just admit that outright. I love Joseph Campbell, and I'm inspired by him, because he lays bare this essential commonality in the human unconscious: for reasons we don't know, and can't explain, there are motifs, symbols, and metaphors that appear over and over again in myths from all over the world. The people creating these myths didn't collaborate with each other, or read up on each other's Creation Myths, before making their own. They stumbled, seemingly by chance, on themes that are universal, that access something buried deeply within all of us. And that's freaking amazing. I love that. So I wanted to think about and find and access those common unconscious associations - I was writing a book about death, after all, and what is more universally human than the struggle to comprehend death?

Notice that I said I used his theories "as a jumping-off point". I was lost in the woods without a map (see? Human metaphors from the collective unconscious. Oh yeah, that's how I roll), and I needed a refresher on basic story structures, so I re-read some of Campbell's work and took off from there. Am I indebted to and inspired by his work? Absolutely. Did I follow the structure of the Hero's Journey to the letter, and use it as the exact skeleton for my book? Nope, not at all.

I studied the structure - which you can see all laid out and summed up here - and I thought about what it was accomplishing, and why it was used, and then I took the bits I liked and got rid of the ones I didn't, or that I didn't think would serve my story, and made up my own version of it. And then bam, just like that, I had the skeleton for my book.

The problem with skeletons, of course, is that they're made of bones. No muscle, no nerve, no skin; nothing meaty to sink your teeth into, and enjoy (unless you like bones without anything on them, in which case, have at it. I'll be over by the deli and salad bars, trying to find some real food).

What I'm saying is that plot isn't just structure; it's also the all of the details of that structure. Adding flesh to the skeleton, if you will.

Which I'll talk about.... next week.

Also next week - a few brief notes on what it means to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer, and why those writers probably think I'm completely out of my mind (which I might be).

Plot, And Other Four-Letter Words

I have a new favorite blog. Now, before you click the link, just be warned that it is NSFW. At all. And if you're offended by curse words, you should skip it. And if you don't like fantasy or sci-fi (and if you don't, why not??), you should perhaps avoid it. It's called Terrible Minds, and it's by rather prolific author Chuck Wendig, who does not at all need my help to market him because his blog is hopping with comments, but I don't care, because it's a great resource for writers, and it's hilarious, and thought-provoking, and well-written.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I'm supposed to be writing a blog that gives you an inside look into the process of writing a novel (I am, really; it says so in big bold letters at the top of the page!!!), and I have yet to even bring up that huge, nasty, complicated four-letter word. Oh yes, that's right: PLOT. Before I can talk about the complex process of creating it, I need to talk about what it is. In a blog post yesterday about stakes, Chuck has this to say about plot:

"Plot is people. Or, more specifically, plot is the result of characters making choices and acting on those choices. Or, even more specifically, plot is the expression of characters aware of the stakes and who form goals in response to those stakes (correctly or incorrectly) and who attempt to overcome conflicts in service to those goals." 

This is a fantastic way to define that nasty four-letter word. I like it because it puts characters front and center, instead of somewhere off to the side, which is something I've been harping on about for a while. The action in the story should directly come from who the characters are: what makes them tick, what drives them batty, and what they really, really want. In fact, one of the well-known ways to come up with a story idea in the first place is to think of a character, figure out what he wants most in life, and then prevent him from having it. Voila - conflict, tension, high stakes. There's the beginning of your story.

It's also, however, an extremely writer-ly way to define it, so for the sake of clarity I'll just quote Wikipedia, here, and say that plot "is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story". In other words, it's what happens in your story.

It's also way, way, way harder to create than it sounds like it should be.

Let's go back in time, shall we? I'm working on Cloudland. I have a seed, and I've tortured myself into developing it and fleshing it out. I have some non-robotic, seriously psychoanalyzed, lengthily discussed characters. So, ummm... now what?

Now, of course, they DO STUFF! Really interesting, compelling, conflict-filled STUFF! And all that stuff happens in a well-conceived order, with carefully crafted building of tension, until we hit a thrilling, nail-biting climax that leads us right into a satisfying, moving, perhaps even thought-provoking resolution. And it all gets created in one lovely blue-y purple-y poof of MAGIC!

Right?

Riiiiiiight.

Even though characters, seed, and theme are essential, they don't create your plot for you, alas. I think I spent more time working on the plot than on anything else in the whole long brainstorming process, and that was a loooooong time. I had a few things to start with (after a great deal of brainstorming): 1) Jake and Sara were the main characters, and they were both going to lose a parent; 2) They were going to end up looking for their lost parents in a magical land in the clouds; and 3) They were going to have to confront, and deal with, the reality of their losses before the story could be resolved.

Awesome. So once again, now what? Besides extreme procrastination, of course. That's a given.

First: answer some questions.

1) Which parents, and how do they die?
- Jake's mom, and she dies in a car accident on a bridge over the Charles River, so that her body ends up in the water and is never recovered. This was important, because Jake is six, and therefore extremely literal. If there's no body, how can she be dead? And if she isn't dead, where is she, and how does he go about finding her? That's the entire impetus for the book - the inciting incident, if you want to use the technical term.
- Sara's dad, who dies after a battle with brain cancer that Sara's parents hid from her until about two weeks before his death. I came up with this specific death because I wanted a few things: a death very different from Jake's mom's (so no more accidents or sudden violence); a death that was sudden and unexpected enough that Sara would still have to deal with shock and denial; and finally, a death that involved some inherent tension and conflict with Sara's parents, because, well, honestly, because that would set her off and make a more interesting story.

2) and 3) What is the land in the clouds, what happens there, and how do Jake and Sara end up confronting the reality of their losses?
- If you think these three questions are enormous ones, you'd be right. The first question was a lot easier to answer. I spent quite a bit of time spinning my wheels and pulling at my hair as I tried to answer them, and in the end I wound up having to ask for help, from a very smart, fascinating, wise dead guy.

And you know what? He really helped me. I wouldn't have a plot if he hadn't.

More on that....next week.

(see: cliffhangers and other manipulative plot devices)

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

Do you all now have Pete Seeger singing that song in your head? Sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, I do, too. Stupid seed metaphors.

This all came about because I was thinking, if I'm going to write about writing, should I at least try to go in some sort of logical order? And then I thought, OK, then, where exactly does a novel start? The right answer is that there IS no right answer. It starts in dreams, or in a single word; it starts in a flash of an image, or one line of dialogue; it starts with life doing what life does, and periodically slamming you into the ground with stunning, breath-taking loss, or beauty, or joy. There's no telling what that one thing will be - the thing that catches flame, and flickers to life inside your head.

Which brought me to the seed metaphor. You know, little thing, flickering to life, etc? I'm saying there's always a seed of an idea. And it's always just that; just a seed. No one has an idea that springs instantly into a fully-formed bestselling novel from one's prolific head (unless one is a Greek god named Zeus, in which case, all bets are off). I get a flash of an idea, nothing more that a little seed, and then I have to plant that seed and water it and tend to it and weed it and then, inch by inch, I end up with a garden and with this dumb song stuck in my head. You get the idea.

There are, by the way, a ton of these seeds in my head at any given time, and only a few of them ever get developed. Some of them are waiting for a chance at my attention, and some of them are just really bad seeds (cue the opening sequence of that Macaulay Culkin movie, based on that older, much better movie).

In the case of my first novel, Cloudland, and Other Stories, the seed was loss. I knew I wanted to write a story about loss, or, more specifically, about the insane, heart-wrenching, terrible process of grieving. Then I got on a plane for various unimportant reasons, and looked out the window on that mind-boggling, reality-defying landscape of clouds - you know that one, when you're above the cloud-line and the entire horizon is filled with hills and valleys and plains and cities made entirely of clouds - and thought, I'm going to write a book about loss where the characters end up in this crazy, magical land of clouds. And there you go: the seed sprang to the front of my mind, and got my attention, and didn't let go.

That was, incidentally, eight and a half years ago. I didn't start actually WRITING said novel (or developing said garden, if I want to stick with the same tired metaphor, which I don't) until about four years ago. I don't know what the average amount of time for most people is - to write a novel, I mean - and I'd be glad to learn more if anyone knows, but I'm willing to bet that it's somewhere in that range.

So yeah, no Athena's leaping to life in nanoseconds, here.

So you have this seed. Then what?

More on that in another post.