Here to Create

Soooooo almost exactly a month ago I said I was committing to writing 1000 words a day. I had been writing that much pretty regularly and didn’t think it would be hard to keep going.  But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. When I’m really moving on a piece, I can write 1000 words in half an hour or less. But I’ve discovered that when I’m editing one story and revising another and don’t know what to work on next, my free-writing tends to peter out around 600 words.  Hmm.  So instead of giving up and calling myself a failure, I’m just scaling back a little.  I can do 500 words a day.  Really.  And if my word count keeps dropping, surely I can do 250 words a day.  But I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Though I write fantasy, I have several stories that take place in the contemporary world.  My characters have jobs, enjoy their weekends off, and observe U.S. holidays.  But it can be hard to keep track of the date and the day of the week when my characters are running from one crisis to the next.

One of the features I liked best about Liquid Story Binder XE was the Journal, which allowed me to enter a brief summary of a character’s activities on each day of a calendar.  This kept me from having characters take days off from work with no explanation or merrily skipping Thanksgiving with no comment.

Since I’ve now moved on to SuperNotecard, which has a less useful timeline function, I started using Google Calendar to keep track of my characters’ lives.  While I prefer to use as few separate programs as possible, one of the advantages of Google Calendar is that it’s available anytime I have wifi and a browser open.  Calendars can be printed, if you’re the type who needs to look at a hard copy.  And by using a separate calendar from my personal one, I can keep it from cluttering things up.  I can even use multiple color-coded calendars for characters with different timelines.  Also, for stories that require a more detailed level of knowledge, the agenda view makes it easy to look at the character’s actions hour by hour.

I’m all about using free, easily available tools when they get the job done. I’m using Google Calendar because I already had a Google account, but I’m sure there are several other online calendars that would work the same way.

What free tools do you use to make your writing easier?

Yes, books can be dangerous. Just ask school boards nationwide. But what I’m talking about is more insidious and also based in reality. You see, for every book I re-read, that’s one less new book I have time for. Obvious, I know, but still shocking when I realize just how far behind I am on current releases, not to mention classics and everything in between.

Reading the latest and greatest didn’t used to seem like a big deal, but the deeper I get into writing, the more obvious it is that I need to have a much more thorough knowledge of my chosen genre. For instance, the list of Nebula and Norton nominees just came out, and I’ve read shockingly few of them. Some of them are in my physical or virtual to-be-read piles and some I’d never heard of. I had the same experience a while ago when reading a thread on classic fantasy on the Absolute Write forums. I hadn’t heard of most of the books being discussed. So now I have a Barnes and Noble wishlist called “Fantasy I Should Have Already Read”, and I try to add one or two from that list to every order.

But I’m still re-reading, because it’s such a crutch for me. Retreating into an old favorite is like cuddling with my favorite blankie as a kid. It’s soft and comfortable and fits easily into the space I’ve already made for it. A lot of re-reading is about revisiting states of mind, whether that’s relief that a character’s painful life isn’t mine or awe at the delicious twist of a writer’s words.

Another reason I re-read is that I don’t trust my memory, especially when it comes to the earlier books in a series. Sometimes it’s because I tear through a book too fast and finish it at four a.m. when my eyes are glued permanently open. Often it’s because, as a writer, I’m so conscious of the way the smallest details impact the story. If there’s a critical detail in book one that will dramatically unfold in book two, then I want to remember it so I can have all the fun of making wild predictions as I read. Unfortunately, that means I still haven’t read the latest Harry Dresden book, nearly a year after it came out. I feel like I should re-read the first ten or whatever books, because I read them so fast I have a hard time differentiating one from the others.

But I also re-read to learn the craft of writing. When the first thrill of the story is over (though the best writers make me feel that thrill again and again), I have the space in my head to figure out why I love this character so much it hurts or why that plot makes me skip ahead to the best parts instead of being caught up by the whole story. Learning a craft is about studying the masters, and I do take that seriously. But I’m not sure anyone needs to read The Complete Sherlock Holmes twenty times. (And I’m not even exaggerating.)

Obviously, the solution is to re-read sometimes and read new stuff other times. To encourage myself, I’ve made an effort to buy more books lately instead of relying on the library. Partly this is because I’ve grown more conscious of writing as business and want to support my favorite authors. Partly it’s so I always have new books on hand and no excuses.

I haven’t come up with the perfect new to old ratio, because that would be a little crazy even for me, but every time I look at an old book and think how nice it would be to re-read it, I’m going to think about what I really want. Do I want a medieval fantasy setting like The Lord of the Rings? A character like Phaedra from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books who challenges and engages? A plot like any of Jim Butcher’s books that grabs me by the throat and leaves me gasping at the end? Something in Roger Zelazny’s style? Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s relatively easy to find a book to cure my craving. Not to mention the books by my favorite authors (Zelazny) that I have accumulated but not yet read.

So am I completely crazy? Is anyone else this conflicted about re-reading? Or does everyone else read a book, shelve it, and move on to the next?

It’s the famous question every writer hears over and over, even unpublished ones like me. A few days before my first NaNo, I told my mother-in-law that I didn’t have a story yet, but I wasn’t worried, something would come. And it did, the night before, so I wrote out a couple of paragraphs about the plot and the next morning I started writing. Easy as that.

(Of course, it wasn’t that great an idea to start with and got tweaked a lot on the way and is unreadable now, but it was also the first novel I’d ever completed, so the way the idea came about wasn’t really what crippled it. Ideas are easy. Expressing ideas is hard. Maybe that’s why copyright law only applies to expression.)

Whenever I hear someone wish she could come up with ideas that easily, I’d like to offer some advice, but the concept of having no ideas sort of baffles me. Ideas are a result of thinking, and if you’re not thinking? Well, I have bad news: you’re dead. Except vampires think. Sometimes even zombies think. Hmm. Anyway, if you can think, you can create. Simple as that. Of course, the process of developing ideas into stories takes practice, and that’s where most people fall along the wayside. But you can’t really practice without an idea to start with.

Finding story ideas is about being open to possibilities and then being willing to seize the baby idea before the little wriggly thing can escape. So for SWORD AND KNIFE, I started my thinking about the story with one line of dialog:

“Once, by the gods, and I thought you were dead.”

I don’t remember where that line came from, except it was one of things my brain produced when I let it loose to freewrite. But then I took the next step, pushing to see who these people were, what they were talking about, and what was behind their words. I had a strong feeling that it was one man talking to another, and they were talking about a betrayal of trust. The language suggested a medieval fantasy setting. Well then, who are they and what are they doing? What was their relationship that they would still be together after this betrayal? What was the betrayal? And so on. Good writing begins by asking a lot of questions.

The line never made it into the story itself, because it doesn’t fit the character’s voice and there are no gods in their world, among other reasons. But the idea of betrayal became one of the underpinnings of the story. It’s the theme that runs throughout and informs the plots and subplots, as well as the relationships of the main characters with each other and with secondary characters. All from one line and the willingness to ask questions.

So the next time you’re fretting because you have no good ideas, just relax. And then pick something that intrigues you, whether it’s a scrap of dialog, a half-formed character, or a setting. And then push. Ask why? How? Just keep asking questions until the story emerges. Really, that’s all there is to it. Until you sit down to write. Then you have a whole other set of problems. But asking questions will get you started.

So what’s your process? Something similar or totally different? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde compares to nothing I’ve ever read before, in a way that was very welcome. I picked it up because I read Fforde’s Big Idea piece on Scalzi’s blog and liked his idea of focusing on what happens after the apocalypse. In fact, the characters just call it The Something That Happened and don’t know why their lives are different from the Previous. And they don’t know much about the Previous either, thanks to scheduled Leapbacks that remove knowledge and relics from the past, some of them as simple as multi-speed bicycles. I could go on forever about the worldbuilding, because it completely fascinated me.

I have to talk about the color specifically though. Color is everything in this world. People are divided into social ranks according to what colors they can see. Who they marry is largely determined by what their combined color ratings will do for their offspring. For instance, Eddie Russet, the protagonist, is a Red trying to marry into the Oxbloods, an old Red family that wants to increase their red percentage. It’s crazy-sounding, but with a little thought it’s not that different from marrying for money or some other kind of prestige.

Despite the fixation on color, Eddie’s world is very black and white. He lives in a rigid society that is completely dedicated to the Rules. He knows his duty and he does it, both as a member of society and as a young man looking for the best marriage. But he soon finds out that there’s a lot more underneath his orderly world than he ever guessed.  And he finds that he’s willing to risk more than he realized to find out the truth.

Shades of Grey is a meticulously constructed book that was a fascinating exploration of a very different kind of post-apocalyptic world and the decisions we face when we confronted with a shift in worldview.  I’m looking forward to the sequels, and I think I need to check out some of Fforde’s other work as well.

Update: Also, if you like the book, definitely check out the Shades of Grey website.  Barcoded animals! Lincoln green! You’ll just have to read the book to truly get it.