Why I Write: Michelle Krys

A while ago (note: before I got a literary agent and way before my book deal), I was having a particularly stressful writing day. You know the kind: everything you write is crap, you can’t think of any good ideas, there isn’t enough coffee in the world to keep you awake, and then just when you think of a brilliant idea, you realize it’s the plot of Twilight. Etc, etc.

So there I was huffing and puffing at the laptop when my husband passed by the room. He asked me ‘Why do you even write if you hate it so much?’

Well. I guessed I wasn’t exactly the picture of a woman enjoying herself…

That got me to thinking. Why do I write? I’d never slept less in my life. Free time was never relaxing, and there was always something I needed to do, if not for my book then for my blog, Twitter, or Facebook (not to mention the many writing forums I belonged to). My unfortunate family had to suffer through me accosting them with plot ideas at all hours of the day and night, and my friends hardly saw me at all. And dammit, I was two seasons behind on True Blood!

I put the laptop away. I was going to Take A Break. For two weeks! There was no need to stress myself out the way I was. Writing was supposed to be fun, and if it wasn’t anymore, I just wasn’t going to do it.

Yeah!

The first night went swimmingly. I watched a movie with my husband and ate a delicious plate of cheesy nachos—my favorite. I only thought about my plot a little (read: a lot)

The next day I went to Chapters and bought a new YA book that I’d wanted to read for ages; I’d make a tea and read it in a hot bath that evening—it was going to be great!

While driving home a song came on the radio. As I terribly sang along, a scene unfolded in my head. A great scene for my book! Then I remembered, oh yeah…I’m on a break.

The drive home continued. I passed the high school near my house and spotted a group of teens hanging out by the bus stop. One of the girls looked just like how I imagined my main character, with a lion’s mane of curly blonde hair and sporting a pair of mean army boots. It gave me a thousand ideas on how I could improve the descriptions of my main character. Except, oh yeah, I was on a break.

Dinner time came. As the onions sautéed on the stove, I thought longingly about my book. I decided, what the hell, I’d just read over the last chapter I’d written, just to remind me how crappy it was and encourage me on my path of Breakage. Only it wasn’t as bad as I recalled. In fact, it was maybe/possibly/kind of good…

A disturbing find.

I put my son to bed and poured myself a hot bath, my new book in hand. The book didn’t disappoint. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was amazing! (I wish I could remember which amazing book exactly it was). So why, then, couldn’t I enjoy it? With every amazing sentence I read, I found myself actually getting more and more anxious. I didn’t get it. I’d always continued reading while I wrote my books, and never had I been borderline angry whilst enjoying myself. Then it struck me: because reading a great book was the ultimate challenge for me to be a better writer.

I couldn’t fight it anymore. I got out of the bath and pulled out the laptop.

Some break that was.

So why do I write, you ask? Because that song was great. Because that teenager wore a cool outfit. Because that book was amazing. Because it only appears I hate writing. Because I actually love it with all my heart. And because I have to.

Note: It’s much easier to remember why I write now. I just look over my shoulder at the book deal tacked to my corkboard J

Michelle Krys is the author of the YA urban fantasy, 'The Witch Hunter's Bible', tentatively slated for publication with Delacorte/Random House Spring 2014. She is represented by Adriann Ranta at Wolf Literary.

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Making it Believable- Freefall by Mindi Scott

Hello there lovelies, this is Roxo from TheBeautifulOnes. I am very glad to be doing this post here with the Tangled girls.

So I am going to show you how to make characters believable, from Mindi Scott's beautiful debut, Freefall. She actually is going to have her second book, Live Through This published in the fall, so, check it out, she has beautiful prose.

In case you didn't read Freefall,(you totally should), here's a quick synopsis:

Seth has been the first to see his best friend dead. And the way he had died wasn't exactly dignifying. Neither was Seth's life. It's a slap in the face for him, facing death like that. He realizes that he should better wake up and start over. It's easy to say, but much harder to do; until he meets Rosetta and he finds out that other people have issues as well. Together, they learn to overcome them.

This is, in short, the plot of Freefall. The book has a very strong and credible male POV, a thing you rarely find in Young Adult fiction these days, especially now that most of it has female main characters.

As a writer of non-paranormal I was delightful to find out there's no magic around, and as I breathed the book in, I tried to learn as much as I could from the craft.

*

I will be starting at the beginning of the novel and provide examples. I'm going to try my best not to give away any spoilers.

The books starts with a party, and even though we are not explicitly told, the reader can infer that Seth has a troubled mind. There are hints to disclose his torment and his right from the very beginning:

The room I was trying not to go into was exactly where I kept ending up; the stuff I was trying not to drink was exactly what I'd been chugging all night.

The suggestion is simple and to the point, so the reader can easily understand the character. The male voice is clearly distinguishable from the somewhat more poetic and connotative discourse of the female characters.

As the story continues, the male voice becomes more and more distinct, as we learn how he puts up with the real problems in life of a messed-up teenager.

**

The back door slid across its track.

Open: loud music/ laughing/ talking.

Closed: muffled music/ laughing/ talking

As writers, we should know everything in a scene.

We have it in our minds, we press pause and everything freezes. That is when we detach from the window we're watching, and go investigate the surroundings of the scene in our head. We should see all the details: the lines across one's t-shirt, the way a hair stands out, unyielding to stay in place, one character's frown and another fidgeting with his keys. We should know what color the sky is at every moment and whether the cars are loud or if there's shouting in the streets. We must feel the smell of exhaust and taste the food we're feeding our characters. 

But they wouldn't perceive it all. They would only see things according to their personality. A sensible girl would notice the fresh air and the soft grass under her toes, Seth McCoy notices the factors that disturb his silence.

*

To make her laugh again, I said, “All right. Fine. Be that way.”

It didn't work at all; I sounded like a dickhead.

What makes Mindi Scott's male voice believable is exactly situations like this one. As much as we love sarcastic comments and awesome dialogue, it doesn't happen in real life. This does: awkward, out of line responses, bad jokes and even worse attempts to fix the situation.

The approach here depends very much on the type of novel you want to write, and I have to admit it is risky to take this path, as people read to distance themselves from real, crappy life. Even with this risk, though, you have to make sure the dialogue sounds real. It helps if you read it aloud.

*

Another thing that makes us (well, me, at least) wonder in books is the sudden change a character makes. While that might work well in the whole plot and offer us an example worth reading, Seth's change is slow. Actually, the whole book is about this one change.

Imagine him saying: “I am going to stop drinking right now!”. For the rest of the novel we would have seen him fighting with the decision. But Mindi Scott has another technique. Check it out:

I wanted to try not drinking for a while and see where it went.

It's just like real life. You're never going to start running every day if you make a New Year's Resolution. But it might become a habit if one day in April, you might go for a run in the park, just to clear our mind. And then you realize you like it and then you go the next day, and the one after it, and you turn it into a habit.

My point is that you should imagine if what your character does is something you, or any person would do in real life. A strong character might do sudden changes, of course, but the motivation should be very well pointed out, and just as strong.

*

We weren't much closer than we'd been before,[...]. I breathed in her flowery shampoo until we'd dropped all the golf balls in. Then I reluctantly stood and helped her up.

This description sounds really natural, right?

My basic point is, to make something believable you have to examine it very well in real life, note all the details, extract the meaningful ones for your character and put it in words so that rendering it, the feeling remains the same.

I don't think there is a book to tell you exactly how to write, how to put down word by word. Good writing is maintaining the emotion, no matter of how it is written.

So that was it. Leave your suggestions in the comments. Tell me, what do you do to make characters feel true?

Lovsies, Roxo!

How to Save a WIP: Getting Stuck in a Corner

Last week, Kristi Cook told us how she tends to write herself into a corner. Today, Kathleen Foucart tells how she writes herself out of the corner!

I have tried being a plotter. I buy books on structure, I fill out beat sheets and read copious blog posts on plotting. In my head, these are the tools I will use to write faster first drafts. There’s just one problem: my writing-brain won’t cooperate.

I think part of this is based on the fact that I don’t consciously “pick” my next WIP. My last two projects started from me typing the wrong sentence in another WIP, realizing it didn’t fit there, opening a new document, and having a completely different character & story come pouring out. I’ll know nothing of the plot. All I know of the MC is what happening in that particular sentence that I’m writing. The stories I have a plan for prior to writing tend not to get written.

Now, what I do isn’t entirely “pantsing.” Once I’m in the thick of the book (usually after about 10,000 words) I have a better idea of what’s going on, where I need to take the MC and what their “ever after” will be like. This is also where things start to go wrong-- because I want a pretty draft. Who doesn’t? Who wants to write things they’ll just cut? So I start to plot. And that’s where I stall out.

Let me be clear here: I’m talking about a first draft. I don’t edit recursively (much) because for me that’s a sticky trap of perfectionism that added at least a year to writing my MFA thesis. I might fix a few typos, a name I changed, etc., but generally, IMO, a first draft is for going forward.

So what do I do when attempting to plot stalls out my brain? I write myself into corners. I write total crap. My characters sit around drinking coffee and eating cereal. I once sent characters towel shopping (FWIW I didn’t finish that particular book). I’ll let the characters lie around and talk, or send them into the forest with no idea how they’ll get back out. I realize that to a lot of writers, this sounds insane. Why would I do that to myself?

I’ve finally come to admit that I’m both a pantser and an over-writer. I write huge first drafts because my brain needs connecting scenes, random dialogue, learning how my characters take their coffee or when they get up in the morning. I need to write myself into random corners-- be they boring corners or “oh, crap, how the hell am I going to get them back out of that???” corners. I can edit out those scenes in the next draft (something I’m working on now, actually), but to make the connections my brain needs to create a cohesive story, I have to have them there to start with.

Basically, this quote sums up how I’ve come to view my first-draft process:

“...I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for 'nodes', as I think of them -- story or character details that have lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that.” ~ Tad Williams

 
So if you’re a fellow pantser, take heart. Writing yourself into a corner will not necessarily kill your WIP. In fact, it just might save it. Who knows where your imagination will take you if you let it off the leash? It could be to the perfect answer your subconscious has been working on the whole time. (And if not, you can still edit brilliantly!)

Kathleen Foucart is a YA writer on the path to publication. According to last count, she owns 2,460 books in an 1100 square-foot house that she also sharse with her husband and Great Dane. She lives in Southwest Virginia, has an MFA in Children's Literature from Hollins University and went to undergrad at Virginia Tech. You can find her on her blog and on twitter.