writing

A Matter of Perspective

At this point, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything on social media, but I was astonished recently to learn that a big hot take in book circles on social media is people who refuse to read books written in first-person narration because they don’t like being told what they’re doing and don’t like reading about doing things that they don’t agree with. It seems someone is confused by what first-person narration means.

I’m sure most people reading this are okay with first person, since most of my books are written that way, but I need to get this off my chest, and maybe this will give you some ammunition if you run into someone talking like that.

First-person narration is when the narrator is a character in the story, so it uses first-person pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” “my,” etc. This does not mean that you are the “I” in the story. It’s someone else telling you a story about what happened to them. It’s like if a friend sent you an e-mail about the crazy thing that just happened to her. You wouldn’t think those things were happening to you because it was told from the perspective of “I.” You are seeing things through that character’s perspective because they’re the one telling the story, but you, yourself, are not becoming that character. I like that conversational and confessional tone to this kind of narration, that sense that you’re sitting with a friend, hearing the story, or else reading a letter. In fact, a lot of early novels were written in first person because they were in the form of letters. I’ve joked about 19th century Inception with the layers, where the book is a letter written to someone about a story someone told that narrator, who learned the story from a letter they received.

For the stories in which you do become the narrator, that’s second-person narration, the “you” books. You see this in the “choose your own adventure” type of stories, where you’re meant to take the role of the main character and aren’t given many details about who this character is, then the story unfolds based on choices you make. It also shows up in more literary stories that are meant to immerse you in a particular setting and type of person so that you experience it as the character as you read.

Third-person narration is probably the most common style of narration in genre fiction. That’s the books that describe the action with words like “he,” “she,” and “they.” Most of the current books are in third-person limited perspective or “close third.” This is very similar to first-person, aside from the pronouns, because you’re in the head of the viewpoint character and the narration may even reflect their voice. If the perspective switches to another character, it’s usually in a different scene or chapter. It’s generally called head hopping if the story switches close perspectives within a scene because it forces the reader to rapidly move from one character’s head to another.

The main difference between first and close third, aside from the pronouns, is the narrator character’s awareness. The first-person narrator knows they’re telling a story, so they choose what to tell and how to tell it. That’s why first person is commonly used for unreliable narrator stories in which the narrator selectively leaves out or skews information so that the reader has an inaccurate view of events. The close third-person narrator doesn’t know they’re a character in a story. They’re just going through their life, and the reader is hitching a ride in their brain, so they’re privy to the character’s feelings and secrets, even if that character wouldn’t choose to tell anyone.

You may also see third-person omniscient narration, in which the narrator sees and knows all and can dip into all the characters’ heads. I think of this as “storyteller voice” because the narrator may not be an active participant in the story, but they have a viewpoint and opinions. It’s almost like first-person, except the narrator isn’t involved in the story. Jane Austen’s books are like this. They’re very much told from Jane’s perspective, so we get her views and opinions on all the characters as she tells us what’s going on in the heads of many of the characters. Terry Pratchett also used this kind of narration, even with footnotes to explain things. He was telling us this story, and he knew what was going on with everyone.

So, if you’re worried about being forced to become a main character you don’t agree with when you read “I” books, you can relax. You aren’t the main character. You’re listening to someone else’s story.

My Books, Publicity

Public Appearance

This weekend I’ll be shifting into “author” mode for the first time in years as I do my first public author event since before the pandemic, the Rocktown Author Festival at the library in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

My work has two key modes. In writer mode, I sit at home in sweatpants, shorts, or other comfy clothes, no makeup, hair in a ponytail or messy bun, and write. I tend to get reclusive when I’m in my book cave. My words are saved for the book rather than for socializing. Author mode is when I go out in public as an author to meet with readers, speak, do booksignings, etc. That involves dressing up, wearing makeup, doing my hair, and being all bubbly and outgoing. I’ve had a few virtual “author mode” events during this time when I appeared on camera, but I haven’t been out in the world that way.

This is also my first author event in this area. I used to be a regular at science fiction conventions, writing conferences, and library events in Texas, but they don’t know me at all here, so I was pleased that I was selected for this festival. Maybe I’ll meet people who’ll get me on the list for other events. One nice thing about starting over in a new place is that no one will have seen my “author” clothes so I don’t have to buy anything new to avoid repeating an outfit with the same audience. I still haven’t decided exactly what to wear because the weather is being crazy and the forecast keeps changing, so I don’t know if I’ll need spring/summer clothes or cold-weather clothes, and I don’t know if the library will be overly heated or air conditioned when it doesn’t need it. I don’t have a lot of cold-weather “author” clothes because most of the conventions I went to were in the summer/early fall and my books from big publishers all had warm-weather release dates, so my booksignings tended to be in May, June, and July.

I’ve had to dig around to find where I put my promo materials when I moved, and I may have to get some new pens, as any that I was using to sign books are now more than six years old. I’d almost forgotten what preparation I had to do for an event. There’s no speaking involved in this, so I don’t have to prepare a talk. It’s mostly a book fair situation, where I’ll be selling and signing books. I’m set up so I can take credit card payments on my phone. I need to make a checklist of anything else I need to do.

I’ve had mixed results with this kind of thing in the past. I’ve had times when I sold out of books and had a constant stream of people wanting autographs. And I’ve had times when I sat there for hours with nobody coming by. I figure at the very least I’ll meet some other local authors and librarians. I have a couple of slices of chocolate cheesecake in the freezer, so I’m ready to either celebrate or console myself afterward.

If you’re in the western Virginia area, stop by sometime between 10 and 3 on Saturday. You don’t even have to buy books. You can bring something for me to sign and just chat.

Life

My Quirky Home

As I approach the one-year anniversary of living in this house (I closed on April 9, but the first night I spent here was on the 21st), I’m gradually coming to terms with some of its quirks and with some of the issues of having a house like this.

For one thing, I have a basement. This is the first time I’ve lived in a house with a basement since I was a kid living in Germany. There it was damp but cool. Here, it can get pretty humid, even when it’s hot. I learned last year that a dehumidifier is a good idea, especially during the times of year when it’s too warm for the heater but too cool for the air conditioner. Mine seems to pull about 3/4 of a gallon of water out of the air every other day or so, even when it’s not humid at all. This is essentially distilled water, so I’m using it to water plants. I can’t imagine what it will do when it actually gets humid, but by then I’ll be running the air conditioner. I learned during the past couple of summers that I have to adjust my idea of a good thermostat setting and can’t set it where I would have in Texas. Sometimes, I need to just put on a sweater and run the AC to get the humidity out so things don’t mildew.

The basement itself is kind of weird because it’s actually upstairs from my first floor. My house is built into the side of a hill. The front half of the downstairs is the ground floor, where the front door is. Then you go up a step into the basement, which is the back half of the downstairs and the part that’s mostly underground. It’s not a finished basement. The floor is concrete, and it looks like the walls were encapsulated and sprayed with foam insulation by the people who restored the house. I don’t know what it was like before. The utilities in there are new. They were still installing the connections for the laundry when I first looked at the house. Then the upstairs is the second story in front and the ground floor in back. The back door to the house is upstairs. This is the only house on the street like this. For the rest of them, they built them up on the hill, with retaining walls to hold in the hillside and stairs from the street level to the house. My neighbors’ ground floors are just about level with my upstairs.

I think there may once have been a back kitchen door, as well. When the house was restored/remodeled, they took out the wall that cut the downstairs room in half. There used to be a separate kitchen and living/dining room. The chimney for the coal or wood stove that was apparently used for cooking and heating is still there, though there’s nothing attached to it now, and they took out the wall that was there to open the space up, putting in a bar instead. There’s a bit of concrete slab on the side of the house by the kitchen that looks like a small porch, though there’s no door there. It’s behind the refrigerator, but there’s an electrical outlet that’s at the height for a refrigerator on the wall beside it, and the window for the kitchen is a different size from all the other windows in the house, without the wood framing that’s on all the other windows. My guess is that there used to be a back door behind where the fridge is now for bringing in coal or wood for the stove, the refrigerator went on the wall beside it, and there was a different window in a different place. The siding is relatively new (though not part of the remodel), so there’s no trace of the old door from the exterior, other than what looks like a side porch that has no door. The neighbors who saw the kitchen before the recent remodel said it was very different and it’s good that it’s totally new. That part of the house was gutted, so the kitchen is what you’d get with new construction. I’ve added an island because there was a lot of floor space that wasn’t very useful, and now I have more counter and storage space that I can reposition as needed because it’s on wheels. I’ve also bought a small chest freezer since, as a single person, I generally have to buy packages that are larger than I need at the moment, so I need to freeze a lot of stuff.

The living room isn’t of much use as a living room. It was definitely built before the age of television. I guess it would have worked as a kind of sitting room/parlor, and they might have put a kitchen table where I have the kitchen island, so they didn’t need to use the front room as a dining room. I have the chaise lounge that wouldn’t fit through the door of any other room in there, and that’s where I put the dining room. I use one of the upstairs rooms as a living room. It’s designated as a bedroom in the floor plan that went with the listing, but I don’t think it’s been used as a bedroom for a long time. The door to the room has been removed, there’s no clothes rail in the closet, and there’s a sliding glass door to the deck. I don’t know if the deck is original to the house or if it was added later, and I don’t know if there was always an exterior door in that room. It’s a little odd having the living room on a different floor from the kitchen, but I’m getting used to it. I put my old microwave (there’s one built into the kitchen) in the spare room so I can reheat tea or even make microwave popcorn without going downstairs. I love that living room and looking out at the yard from my seat on the sofa. It’s snug, but it works for me.

I’d thought the lack of closet space would be a problem, but it seems to be working out okay. Most of my tops are knits, so I can fold them instead of hang them, and I’ve turned a bookcase into a wardrobe with fabric bins that fit on the shelves. Since I am who I am, that bookcase does have some books on it, as well.

I think I’m eventually going to get different blinds for my bedroom windows. The window frames are a slightly odd size, so one size of blind was about half an inch too big. I thought I could make the smaller size work, since it covers the glass part of the window, but since it has to hang over the lower part of the window that you can raise and lower, it leaves a gap on the sides on the upper part of the window, and in the summer when it starts getting light around 5 in the morning, that’s annoying. I may go with something that fits over the window rather than inside the window, and I have some ideas. For now, I have some lined curtains that I can throw over the curtain rods that hold the lace curtains, and that deals with the worst of the light.

I had to get used to not having a landline phone. There isn’t even a phone jack. There’s a connection box from Bell Atlantic on the outside of the house, but it doesn’t lead to anything in the house (I think the phone jack must have been in the part of the kitchen that was gutted and remodeled, probably one of those old phones that hung on the wall). So I joined the 21st century and just use my cell phone. My old cordless phone system with two handsets connects to the cell phone via Bluetooth, and my house is small enough that my cell phone is always in range, so now I have handsets up and downstairs that ring when I get a call and I don’t have to find the cell phone or run up or down the stairs to answer. I have fiber optic Internet, so I have my phone set to run over the wi-fi so I don’t have to deal with cellular reception at home.

It took me a while to get my office the way I wanted it. I found a small desk that’s on wheels and that can raise and lower, but I found that I couldn’t get it to lower enough to be comfortable, and the keyboard drawer that was at the right level didn’t pull out enough to put my laptop on it. I also needed more desk space than it offered, so I found another desk that’s pretty much like a hospital tray table. I can lower it enough to type comfortably, and it raises if I ever want to do the standing desk thing. The other desk works as a “desk” for other work, and the keyboard shelf is good for keeping my planner and reference notebooks handy. I found a gaming chair that has good lumbar support that I can adjust, so now I can sit comfortably at my desk to type.

A lot of the windows don’t have screens, but I found some that you can slot in from the inside, and they work pretty well. I’ve got one of those magic mesh things for the door that leads to the deck, so I can go in and out with my hands full.

There’s still some fine-tuning to do to get the house exactly the way I want it, and I have a lot of work to do in the yard, but I’m getting closer to ideal in my cozy little cottage full of quirks. One thing I find amusing is that my house pretty much looks like what you get when a child draws a picture of a house. It’s got the pointy roof, two windows upstairs, two windows and a door downstairs, and a chimney sticking out of the middle of the roof. It’s like I was drawing pictures of my future home when I was a child drawing pictures of houses.

writing

Endings

The hardest part of most books for me is the ending. I’m seldom entirely satisfied with the way my books end. Some of that is because I’m usually getting tired and eager to just get it over with by the time I get to writing the last couple of chapters, so I tend to rush through them. The first draft is often just at the level of “and then they beat the bad guys, the end” so that I can be done. And that’s if I even know what the ending is at all.

I used to have a bad habit of outlining up to a point, and then when I wasn’t sure how to end the story, I’d give up and start writing, with the idea that I’d figure it out by the time I got there. I usually didn’t, which meant I spent a lot of time rewriting once I did figure out an ending because I needed to set up the ending. Writing series makes it even harder because I need to decide how much to wrap up and how much to carry over to the next book.

When I do know the ending before I start writing, when that scene is clear, it’s so much easier to write the book and I do a lot less rewriting, so I’m forcing myself to work on the outline until I know the ending before I start writing. Or even figure out the ending before outlining the rest of the book. That’s where I am now with a book I’ve been developing. I had no idea where to end it, which made it nearly impossible to outline the rest of the story. Without knowing the end, I didn’t know the characters’ goals or what they would do to achieve them that would lead to that point. Earlier this week, I finally figured out an ending I love, so now I’m working to outline the rest of the book in a way that leads to that ending.

But what makes a good ending? I’ve been trying to think of my favorite endings, the ones that make me close a book with a sigh and a smile, maybe wiping away a few tears or else trying to get my heart rate under control. I’ve joked about the George Lucas ending, which has a 1-2-3 format — usually a big, cathartic moment (like blowing up the Death Star), then hugs (the reunion when Luke and Han make it back to the rebel base), then some kind of concluding moment (the medal ceremony). It’s not in all the movies, but it does seem to show up in the ones that end triumphantly.

There’s a popular romance writer who indulges in a bit of emotional manipulation. Her books leave you with a tear in your eye, which gives you the sense that this was a really good book that hit you emotionally. But once when I was reading one of her books on an airplane and had to put it in my bag before I got to the end, when I was at a point I otherwise wouldn’t have put the book down until it was done, I figured out her trick. Just before the romantic happy ending when the hero and heroine get over their issues and declare their love, there’s always something sad that happens — usually an older person dies, a kid gets sick/injured, an animal almost dies (but not dies because killing an animal in a romance novel can kill your career) — or else something good and emotional happens — the sick kid or animal miraculously recovers. This incident usually has very little to do with the main plot, aside from involving a character who’s been around during the book. This big, emotional scene means you have tears already in your eyes for that romantic ending and when you finish reading the book, which makes you feel like the book was great. When I had to stop reading just after that emotional part and didn’t pick the book up again until I got through the airport and made it to my destination, so the emotion was gone, the romantic happy ending hit differently and I had a much flatter impression of the book. Normally, you’d be close enough to the end that you were definitely going to read it straight through, but it didn’t work when I was forced to stop reading. I looked back at her other books and realized she did this all the time. I started thinking of it as the “throw the kid under a bus ending.” I don’t think I’m going to try that in my writing, but it’s an interesting idea to make sure readers end the book feeling really engaged with it.

I mostly want to feel like the main character has been transformed in some way or has achieved something. I want the villain and any other annoying characters to get some kind of comeuppance. For a series, I prefer to have at least something in the story wrapped up while enough is left hanging to make me want the next book right away. For a standalone book, I want that sense of “ah, this is just the way things are supposed to be.” But even while I like things wrapped up, I also like a sense that these characters will go on with their lives and do more stuff, even if I don’t get to see it. If my imagination has something to work with, the book is more likely to linger in my mind. I don’t want all the details about their future, so I’m not a fan of those romance epilogues in which the wedding happens or the baby is born. I’d rather imagine that for myself.

What kind of endings do you like?

Life

Surprises

As of yesterday, I’ve owned my house for a year. The first year was focused on getting the house set up and in order, and now I’m turning my attention to the yard.

According to the neighbors, the man who used to own the house before abandoning it had landscaped the lawn extensively. Then it was left to run wild for years. The people I bought it from, who’d restored the house, mostly just mowed down the lawn before putting it on the market. It went wild with weeds in the summer, but now that I’ve cleared out a lot of the weeds and am seeing what it’s really like in the spring, I’m getting a lot of surprises.

For one thing, there are a lot of bulbs that didn’t get a chance to bloom last year because they were mowed down just as they were coming up. This year, the yard is full of tulips and daffodils. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of blooms. Part of that may be because the greenery was cut down last year. I’ve learned that bulbs essentially “recharge” after blooming by using the greenery as fuel, so you’re not supposed to cut back the leaves after the blooms fade. The bulbs got their cycles messed up last year by having the greenery mowed down as soon as it came up. The bulbs also need to be divided because they’ve been allowed to just grow and spread, so they’re in huge, tight clumps. After the greenery dies off, I’ll have to dig up some and move them around.

Then there was the field of something from bulbs. The greenery came up, and it looked kind of like grass, but thicker and more tubular, and when I pulled up some of it along with a weed I was digging up, I could see that it was bulbs, not roots, but I wasn’t sure what it would be. Last Sunday, it bloomed, and I had a field of these white flowers, which my phone identified as Star of Bethlehem. There are other clumps of these all around the yard. I also have fields of wild violets. I had some daylilies last year, but it looks like I’ll have even more this year.

A mass of star-shaped white flowers, with a few violets around them.
Suddenly on Easter Sunday afternoon, a field of these flowers popped up.

I’ve figured out what the leaves of the worst weeds, the ones with sticker burrs, look like, so I’m trying to dig them all up before they go to seed and produce the stickers. That alone makes the lawn look a lot better. Aside from that, my main project this spring is to move my front walk, which is in the wrong place for my traffic pattern — as I discovered when I was shoveling a walk in the snow and realized it was nowhere near the actual walk. Moving the walkway will create a flower bed. I hope to gradually turn the whole yard into a cottage garden, but that may happen a patch at a time.

Fortunately, I’m in a thinking phase of work, and I’ve found that pulling weeds is almost as good as taking a shower for encouraging creativity.

Books

A Book I Found on the Sidewalk

I’m a big fan of portal fantasy, in which a person from our world visits a fantasy/magical world, and I recently read a really fun take on the subgenre.

First, I apparently have to give a disclaimer, since I got a review copy of the book. But I didn’t get it from the publisher. A few weeks ago, I was walking home from church, and not far from my house I came across a couple of boxes set out on the sidewalk with a sign saying “Free.” The boxes were full of books, mostly fantasy review copies, and this book was in there. I did manage to restrain myself and only got about four books, in part because I was walking and had to carry them the rest of the way, which involves a hill, and in part because I didn’t want to be greedy. The fun thing about this is that it seems that the boxes hadn’t been out long, as they were still full. There had been a brunch after church, and then they asked for help with the dishes, so I stayed to help. That meant I was more than an hour later than normal, and the boxes wouldn’t have been out yet if I hadn’t stayed to help, so I guess I was rewarded for having helped with the dishes.

The book in question is This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews. A woman from our world wakes up in the world of one of her favorite fantasy series (think Game of Thrones — it’s grimdark fantasy and the series remains unfinished), with no idea how she got there. But she’s not just in the world of the books. She appears to be in the story of the books, near the beginning of the first book. She has absolutely nothing to start with, but she has a huge advantage in this world. She knows what will happen, when, and where, and she knows the innermost thoughts, history, and deepest secrets for a number of the major players in the kingdom. She sets out to capitalize on this knowledge to move up in the world and get some kind of security, but as she gets to know the people there, she can’t bear the thought of letting all the bad things she knows are coming happen to these people, so she puts her knowledge to use to try to intervene. But the more she changes, the less accurate her knowledge will be. And there are characters whose head she never got into in the books because they weren’t POV characters, so there are secrets she isn’t in on.

This is a book for everyone who’s read or watched something and wanted to shout at the characters to do or not do something, as our heroine has the chance to jump into that world and do so. I had a ton of fun reading this book, though it got intense enough at times that I had to put the book down for a moment, or I couldn’t read it right before bedtime. The characters are interesting and endearing, and though the fantasy world is clearly inspired by things like Game of Thrones, it ends up being unique — it’s close enough that we can understand the heroine’s relationship to the story and get a sense of the situation she’s in, but as the story progresses it shapes up to be its own thing. It’s very satisfying to have someone go into that kind of world and point out how messed up it is and how it needs to be fixed. And given that the heroine has long brown hair, is an Army brat, and lives in Austin (and I get the impression she went to the University of Texas), it’s very easy for me to identify with her.

There is an epilogue that’s a huge cliffhanger, so if that bothers you, stop reading before the epilogue until the next book is ready for publication. Given the level of hype this book is getting, I think a sequel is pretty much a given. I’d been hearing about it even before I found an advance copy on the sidewalk.

And, for once, I managed to read an advance copy before the book came out, though I didn’t finish it until a few days after the publication date. I had an advance copy of A Game of Thrones months before publication, and it took me nearly a decade to actually read it (I started it before the publication date but noped out after a couple of chapters).

Now to read the rest of the books I picked up. There were several that I’d heard of and was planning to read, so it was a real joy to just find them. I should probably try to meet whoever lives in that house because we seem to have similar reading taste, though I’m afraid this person may be moving because there’s been other stuff like bookcases set out with “Free” signs. At least, I think it’s the same house. That stretch of houses is the Victorian version of a suburban development, with several in a row that are more or less the same, and I’m not sure which was the house with the books.

Life

Spring Break

This is my crazy week for choir, so I’ve decided to consider it something of a spring break. I can work, but I’m not holding myself to any quotas or expectations.

I had a choir rehearsal last night, getting home at 9:30. Then I have to sing for services on Thursday night, Friday mid-day, Saturday night, and Sunday morning.

There are a couple of pieces we’re singing that aren’t getting much rehearsal since the choir does them every year, but either I’ve never sung them before or I’m singing a new part this year, so I have to put in some practice on my own to learn them. One is the Hallelujah Chorus. I could sing the soprano part from memory without rehearsal, but I’m having to learn the alto part. Fortunately, this was a very popular piece for all those “cellphone choirs” from early in the pandemic, so there are a lot of rehearsal videos out there that focus on each part. There are a couple of spots with tricky rhythms, but otherwise, I think I can do this one. The first run past the tricky parts last night I got lost, but then I realized that the way the choir was arranged meant all the former sopranos now singing alto were together and all the “real” altos were together (because of another piece with a first and second alto split), so I couldn’t count on just following the people around me. The next time we went past that part I made myself stay focused and keep counting, and I got through it okay, and the others around me seemed to key off me.

The other piece is for the Saturday night Easter Vigil service. It’s going to be a smaller choir, since it wasn’t mandatory. I signed up because I’ve never seen this service before and thought it would be interesting to see. It’s a 16th century piece, in Latin, a capella, and really fast. We got a run-through last night and will rehearse it again on Saturday. It’s one they apparently do just about every year, so I’m diving in the deep end here while a lot of others have it memorized. I’m going to have to put in some extra work to keep up with it. It’s not a Latin text I’ve sung before in other settings, so I need to get used to the words while I’m also learning the notes. I’ve got a recording, but I haven’t found one that isolates the alto part, and the recording goes at performance tempo. I’ll have to sit at the piano to work on this one.

Meanwhile, Saturday is Fiber Fest at the Frontier Culture Museum, so that will be a busy day. It’s a fun festival with sheepdog demonstrations, shearing, other fiber arts stuff, and vendors to shop at. I may let myself buy some good yarn for knitting. I’ll be picking up some material for books, I’m sure. I’ll eventually get around to spring in Rydding Village, so there will be shearing.

Since Friday morning will be kind of crazy, I’m giving myself the day off and won’t be posting then. Even if I wrote a post, I’d probably forget to post it in the frenzy of getting myself together and heading to the church in time to rehearse before the noon service. I’m just declaring that whole day a holiday and will be spending the afternoon doing some cooking to have handy for the weekend. The idea will be to have breakfast and dinner food ready to just heat up during the weekend. I can heat breakfast before heading out on Easter morning, then heat lunch when I get home, and then I can collapse.

I moved the day after Easter last year, so I spent the day getting the house ready and then getting my apartment ready for the movers (though Easter was much later last year, so I’m not at the year anniversary). This will sort of be my second Easter in this house. I wasn’t technically living here then, but I had lunch here and spent most of the day here. It’ll be nice to be able to just relax this year.

writing

Plotting and Structure

I’ve been developing a story idea, with a goal of starting to write after Easter. I don’t know if that will happen. I’ve got the main characters figured out and a good sense of the world, but I seem to be lacking a plot. I have a general sense of the main character’s inner growth arc and a big-picture goal, but I have no idea how to get there. I was feeling like I had a lot of the book figured out, but when I wrote down the scenes I knew, it was basically the first act before the story really gets going. The rest is a blank.

This is not a new problem for me. I don’t know how many first chapters I wrote before I actually managed to finish a book, but it took me more than ten years of playing at writing. I was great at coming up with situations and characters, but once I got the characters into those situations, I didn’t know where to go from there. There was a huge empty space between the character getting a mission or assignment and them succeeding in triumph.

I did manage to finish a few books before I started really learning how to plot, mostly because I was writing category romance, so there was a strictly defined structure built-in. It was all about the characters and situation. The conflict was built into the characters and situation, and you just had to go back and forth between attraction and conflict until they overcame the conflict. There wasn’t a lot of external plot.

I finally had an Aha! moment when I saw a workshop on the Hero’s Journey, and it started to make some kind of sense. Just knowing those major turning points helped me considerably. I was able to write Enchanted, Inc. based on that structure.

Since then, I’ve been kind of obsessed with learning about structure and figuring out the ways to put a plot together, but it can still be something of a challenge. Some books fall together easily. Some take a lot more work. Usually, the less focused I am to begin with, the harder it is to figure out a plot. I used to just work out the beginning (the part I usually know best) and have a vague outline and figure the rest would come to me as I started writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t work well for me when I try that. That’s when I have to do major rewrites of the sort where I scrap half the book and start over, or when I write the whole book, am never entirely happy with it, and my agent tells me it’s not something she thinks she can sell. I was the worst of both worlds between a “plotter” and a “pantser,” in that I couldn’t start writing without an outline, but the outline was so vague I didn’t have a lot of structure and got very lost, so I had to write the book to figure out what it was about, and then I had to rewrite it.

I’ve learned that the more detailed an outline I have and the more structure there is to that outline, the better the book ends up being for me. I can write it faster with less frustration and procrastination and I don’t have to do major revisions. I may still need to make changes, often adding or removing scenes, but the structure still mostly holds together. I do all that figuring out what the book is about and scrapping it and restructuring that in the outline rather than in the actual book.

That’s why I’m forcing myself to really think through this book and work out what the plot needs to be before I let myself start writing (well, I have written the first scene, but just because it came to me and I wanted to grab it before I forgot it). The more specific I get up front, the better the book ends up being. I still get ideas as I write and I can go with the flow, but I need that structural framework to begin with or it ends up being just a mess. So, that will be next week’s fun, in between choir rehearsals and services. If I have a good outline by the Monday after Easter, I’ll start writing. If not, then I’ll keep working on plotting.

writing life

Autobiography and Authors

One of the writing discussions I had with the guys who cut down my tree was about the role of the author in any written work. One of the guys asserted that all writing was ultimately autobiography because it was filtered through the author’s perspective. He seemed surprised that I didn’t disagree.

When someone wants to criticize an author, the term “Mary Sue” or “self insert” gets thrown around (particularly toward women). While it can be annoying to read something where it’s painfully obvious that the main character is a stand-in for the author, living out their fantasies and utterly insulated from all story logic, the truth is that just about all characters have some element of the author in them, since we’re the only person we have experience being from the inside out. Our frame of reference is the way we see the world and how we experience feelings, both physical and emotional. We can empathize and sympathize with others and try to put ourselves in their shoes, but we still have to imagine based on our own experiences.

The way I like to describe it is that I put myself in a blender, add some other things, and then a character is what comes out. Each character may draw on different aspects of myself and leave out aspects of myself and will add other things to it, but I’m still in there. I try not to identify so closely with any character that I let the universe warp around that person and create my own little fantasy bubble universe in which a character is the most special snowflake ever and gets all the good things that I’d like to have, but I can’t imagine how I could leave myself entirely out of a character if that character is going to have any dimension.

But, as I said to the tree guys, the key to writing more interesting, varied characters is to make yourself a more interesting person. The more input you have, the more material you have to go into that blender to mix up with aspects of yourself. That means learning and experiencing. When I’m researching a character, I look for memoirs and autobiographies of people who’ve been in similar situations so I can learn about those situations from their perspective. It’ll still be filtered through me, but there’s other input, and adding that information to my head changes me a little because my view is broadened. I read a lot of biography and history, even when I’m not researching a specific book. I like to wander through the non-fiction section of the library and grab random books that catch my eye. I love YouTube because it’s full of people giving their perspectives on random things. It’s all more stuff to go into that blender.

You can talk to people who are different from you or have unusual professions (like the tree guys), go to different places, try doing new things (like taking a pottery class). To be a good writer, you have to be a lifelong learner. That’s a big part of the appeal for me. I like learning and absorbing information, going to new places and meeting new people — and then getting to consider it “work.”

Life

A Year of a House

Today is my one-year anniversary of finding my house, so I’ve now seen it through a full year.

It was actually a year ago last night that I first saw the listing, and I dismissed it. It just didn’t look viable — a 4-bedroom house in a bit more than 1,100 square feet (plus half basement). From the pictures in the listing, I couldn’t figure out how I’d arrange my furniture in the living room, and I didn’t need four bedrooms. But then my brain had other ideas, and I got no sleep that night as my brain arranged things. One of the bedrooms had sliding doors opening onto a deck. Why not use that as the living room? It’s a bit weird to have the kitchen and dining room downstairs and the living room up with the bedrooms, but why not? (It turns out that’s how the house was set up — there’s not even a door on the “bedroom” used as a living room) Then the downstairs could be the dining room and sort of a reception area. The house was old but the kitchen was new, and I really liked the deck.

The next morning, a year ago today, my Realtor contacted me while I was in the process of contacting her, and we set up the viewing later that morning. It was one of those “throw on clothes and run” situations, but the house was only a few blocks from where I was living. I’d never even looked at this part of town, mostly because there weren’t any listings. I didn’t know this street existed. The location was good, in walking distance of downtown and the parks but not on the main street. I loved the wooded back yard. And the moment I stepped into the house, I had the weird feeling that this was mine. It was an odd layout. The rooms were tiny, but I thought I could make it work. I had a vivid mental image of sitting on a couch in that living room, drinking tea and watching it rain or snow on the back yard (I got to do a lot of that this winter).

I wrestled with the decision for the rest of the day. It wasn’t at all what I’d envisioned as my house, so I was having to readjust my ideas and sit with the change, but the next day I told my Realtor I wanted to make an offer. It was accepted the next day. Now I almost can’t imagine living anywhere else. It’s like it was meant to be.

They’d had to do some re-grading of the lot and had put down grass seed under straw, and they’d mowed what was apparently a wild yard, so I didn’t get a good sense of what it was like at this time of year. This year I’m seeing that the yard is full of bulbs of some kind. The daffodils have started blooming, but I don’t know what else is out there yet. This was a particularly cold winter, with the cold weather lingering longer (we had snow last week and a few flurries Tuesday of this week), so spring may be delayed somewhat this year. It’ll be nice to be a lot less hectic in late March and April this year, since last year was a whirlwind. I had the house inspection the week after I first saw the house, then closed on the house in early April and started moving stuff over before the furniture got moved in late April and I cleared out the apartment during the rest of that month. I actually started packing right after I got off the phone with the Realtor when she told me I got the house. I figured I was going to be moving sooner or later, so I might as well box up books.

Now I’m settled. I’m still making adjustments as I get used to being in the house and figure out what I need, but it’s getting there. Next up will be trying to get ahead of the yard as spring sets in and the plants wake up. I let the yard get pretty wild last summer, but now I can identify the weeds I want to get rid of before they get big, and I’m going to add some plants.

I’m looking forward to a whole year without moving. It was around this time two years ago that I started making firm plans to move here. I found out about the apartment in late March and was here in May, so that was a blur. It’s nice to be settled.