Nancy Drew Too » decisions

National Novel Writing Month: Whodunit?

Natasha — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:41:05 +0000

I’m thinking about November and National Novel Writing Month. (Who reading this blog isn’t?)

Last year I started NaNoWriMo with a page or two of scribbled notes and little else. Now, almost a year later, I’ve still got an unfinished draft with some decent characters and snazzy scenes, as well as a bunch of dead ends and ho-hum characters yawning ‘so what?’

I didn’t have a clear sense of where I was going with the manuscript when I started (which I thought would be okay, given the ‘road trip’ nature of the thing) and consequently, I haven’t gotten there – wherever and whatever there is – yet. I’m not ready to give up on Tap Dancing at the County Fair, but I’d sure like to approach this year’s NaNoWriMo with a better sense of direction.

And I’d like your help.

There are a couple of paths I might take. First is to build this novel on the goals and some of the story segments (this and this) I started in Merrilee Faber’s Creativity Workshop. I want to explore these questions in more depth: Why do people break the rules/break the law? What happens – good and bad – when they do?

I want to answer these questions journeying through the heart of darkness, A/K/A suburbia. So the role of ‘place’ is important. I’ve got a tentative title: cul-de-sac. I love that the literal translation is ‘bottom of the bag,’ which seems apt to me.

As I see it now, this would be a battle between revenge and redemption playing out in the ‘burbs by those seemingly normal folks who pass for our neighbors. Originally I thought about a mythic journey although that may be too much to ask of my brain cells in their current state.

But. I want to have a much clearer roadmap before starting. I’d like to have some semblance of a plot – a beginning, middle, end. I’m not too worried about character or dialogue, since they come relatively easily to me (at least in comparison to plot), but I’d like to build some kind of structure so that I’ll know how and where this thang is supposed to end before November 1 arrives and I start writing it.

Which leads me to Plan B.

How about writing a mystery? (What do you see at the top of my blog, in bright green letters?) I love reading them, how about trying to write one? I do think following a formula, laid out in advance of writing, works for a mystery – even though I’m not so sure it’s appropriate for a more literary, character-driven piece (which is what I was thinking originally with Plan A).

I took the ed2go mystery writing course a couple of years ago, and maybe the timing was wrong. It just didn’t do it for me. But I found The Classic 12-Chapter Mystery Formula yesterday, and found myself nodding – not nodding off – as I read it. It made sense to me!

So now what?

Should I focus on a whodunit and follow a genre formula?

As I was typing the above questions – cue ‘Twilight Zone’ theme music here (yes, I’m that old) – I got my daily Writer’s Digest email titled The Dos and Don’ts of Combining Genres. I’m generally of the there-are-no-coincidences school of thought, so I found this pretty interesting timing.

How about Plan C?

Can I pack my angst-filled suburban characters into a murder mystery formula and still end up with something semi-literary? And occasionally even funny?

On the one hand, it doesn’t seem so ‘creative’ to fill in the blanks of a prescribed formula. On the other hand, who am I kidding? I can’t seem to pull a compelling plot out of my brain on my own, no way no how. Maybe the structure of a formula is just what I need.

Any thoughts on this? Anyone familiar with the 12-Chapter Mystery Formula? Or the Dos and Don’ts article?

Do they make sense? Do I make sense?

Should I stick with my original somewhat vague goals and the revenge/redemption conflict? If so, what are some good resources so I won’t spend November and beyond going around and around in circles?

Should I leave Shirley and her crew stewing in the suburbs while I dust off my Nancy Drew persona? Or should I bring them along for the ride in Nancy’s blue roadster? If so, any good ideas for how to bring this stuff together? Angst and a couple of yucks?

Am I considering too much? Or too little? Am I making any sense?

I’d love to know what you think. And what I should do come November. Thanks.

Ms. Natasha. In the study. With the keyboard.

CW — the final stretch

Natasha — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:14:59 +0000

The Creativity Workshop is coming to an official end – and this is where those graduation speech sentiments come into play: the end of something meaningful, but more importantly, the launch pad for something newer, more exciting, bigger. blah blah blah.

Well, yeah…

I belong to a women’s group that meets monthly on the Tuesday night closest to the full moon. Last night we did one of those rituals where you pull a seemingly random card out of a deck, read what the accompanying guidebook says about the card, and make connections to your own life.

We used The Celtic Tree Oracle: A System of Divination. The cards themselves are beautifully rendered – each depicting a different tree that represents a certain mythic concept described more fully in the text.

Sometimes I’m pretty prosaic, so my first thought was, “Oh, good, trees. I’ve been writing about trees.” My first Creativity Workshop story turned out to be a love story – between a house and a tree. My last CW story, Timbre – the one I’m working on right now – focuses on people cutting down trees in a suburban neighborhood. It’s a hate story, I suppose.

I pulled the Ash card. In Celtic cosmology, the Cosmic Ash “connects the three circles of existence… which can be variously interpreted as past, present and future, or as confusion, balance and creative force.”

I’m not so sure yet about balance, but I’ve certainly moved from confusion to creative force – and back again – with my writing in general, and through the challenges of this workshop in particular.

“The Ash can be seen as spanning both microcosm and macrocosm, the little world and the great world… Since the Ash itself carries ‘keys’ (winged fruits), choosing this card is a key to a more universal comprehension of how all things are linked, everything being connected; earthly and spiritual; yourself and the cosmos; lowest and highest. Your deeds form part of a far greater, even endless, chain of events, and your own inner pathways have their reaction in the outer world.”

This resonates with my belief in and respect for the interdependent web of all existence so I’m nodding and smiling while reading/typing the above quote.

But the prosaic kicks in again, and these words stand out in flashing lights for me: Deeds ==> chain of events. Inner pathways ==> reaction in the outer world.

I suppose these are obvious to everyone else, but right here and right now, they are the focusing guideposts I need for completing Timbre and moving forward. What can cutting down a backyard tree set in motion? What can refusing to cut a backyard tree set in motion? Who is affected, and how? How can I entice you, the reader, to care about it?

I see a more nuanced, original story evolving from a fallen tree as part of a cosmic chain of events that reverberates through the universe — or at least through the cul de sac. The story is getting deeper, richer and I can see roots (sorry!) of a larger, interconnected web of — what? deception, possibly, nastiness, most definitely — growing beneath the surface.

So, yes, I will finish this final CW story. And, yes, I will move forward with a tangle of ideas that wiil, I hope, weave themselves into a larger narrative, a bigger universe. NaNoWriMo 2010, can you hear me?

I just looked back at my original intent for this final segment of the Creativity Workshop:

Taking the mythic journey through the heart of darkness, er, suburbia.

I am so there.

::w00t::

[And another shout-out for the fabulous Merrilee Faber for getting this whole inspirational writing workshop rolling. Thank you, and thanks to everyone who slogged along for the journey. It’s been real. ]

Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules!

Natasha — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:48:15 +0000

I’ve always loved Kim Carnes’ voice and this song — even though this isn’t the best version of it, it’s the only one I could find on YouTube. And, uh, Kim is 65 years old here and looks, IMHO, absolutely fabulous, so there’s something to be said for breaking the rules.

Which brings me to the main point(s) of this post:

Ten rules for writing fiction: Part One and Ten rules for writing fiction: Part Two. The Guardian asked thirty writers for their writing do’s and don’ts. And here they are.

Thirty writers X ten rules each = 300 writing rules!!!

(Okay, not quite 300 as some of the writers didn’t come up with ten.) I loved reading all of them together to see the different perspectives, similarities and contradictions. I’m going to print out both articles and highlight the rules that spark my muse, see how and if that changes over time.

In keeping with the Six Word Memoir concept (oh, we really should start doing some of these sometime, too!), here’s my distillation of the rules.

Write — for and from your soul.

What do you think?

Road Trip 101, or the Wasatch Dairy Farm

Natasha — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:06:56 +0000

I’m back…..

A and I took a 2 ½ week road trip, during which I intended to post occasional nuggets from the road that wended its way up through North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, and then back down to North Carolina.

Well, the road trip to anywhere is paved with good intentions, I guess – but the funkiness of our travel laptop and the quirky, slow Internet access we encountered along the way blew the likelihood of blog posting right out the car window.

But here’s the real deal: I didn’t write one. single. word. during our entire trip. Not one. (Except for mileage logs and where and when we stopped along the way.) The closest I came to a literary experience was spending two days in Maine a half-mile from where Stephen King’s Pet Sematary was filmed.

While all the definitions of vacation fit the trip – seeing new places, visiting old friends and family, changing the pace and rhythm of life – this describes my vacation mindset the best: the act or instance of vacating.

That’s it. Old thoughts, ideas and words vacated my mind. They fled the premises and left all this empty space in my brain for – what?

New thoughts, new words, new directions. Paradigm shift? Planetary alignment? I’m still figuring out what happens when your brain empties out, hits ‘re-set’ and comes up with something different, something unexpected.

Yesterday I was telling a friend about our trip and she projected, “And I’ll bet it felt good to get home, too.”

Well, no, as a matter of fact.

We’d run out of clean clothes, so we were happy to use the washer and dryer. And Polly and Lola had stayed home with a house sitter, so it was great to see the furballs. But if we could figure out a way to travel with them comfortably in the summer, we’d be on the road again as soon as the clothes were dry.

Antsy. Restless.

So, uh, isn’t Tap Dancing at the County Fair supposed to be about a road trip toward self-knowledge? Am I living my novel right now, but without the distance or perspective to write it, or know how it should end?

I was emptying one of the travel bags I’d taken on the road, and found a pile of change in the bottom of one of its zippered pockets: four quarters and three pennies.

Plus this: a funny little metal coin with scalloped edges and a star cut out of the center. WASATCH DAIRY FARM it says on one side; “Good for *1* Quart of Milk” on the other.

Huh? I never heard of the Wasatch Dairy Farm. Neither did Google. The closest a search came up with was a town in Utah. I haven’t been to Utah since a road trip in the early 1970’s, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t visit any dairy farms then. And I bought the bag maybe ten years ago at a Crate & Barrel outlet store in Massachusetts. Where did this rural talisman come from?

So here I am, a couple of days after our road trip, filled with extreme wanderlust, thoughts and words careening around the empty caverns of my mind, waiting to be arranged or re-arranged into something approaching sense, or at least amusing nonsense.

Maybe it’s time to start writing.

And then head off again in search of that free quart of milk.

Self-publishing? e-book? huh?

Natasha — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:20:36 +0000

If you’re like me — trying to polish a work you hope, some day, some how, hordes (or at least a respectable handful) of people will read in a finished form — you’ve given some thought to self-publishing, either on paper or digitally. Yes? No? Maybe?

I urge you to read this front page (!) article, ‘Vanity’ Press Goes Digital, in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here are the first couple of sentences just to get you started:

Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying without success to persuade a New York publisher to print one of her books. In July, the 49-year-old mother of three decided to publish it herself, online.

Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer. In August, Amazon will publish a paperback version of her first novel, “A Scattered Life,” about a friendship triangle among three women in small-town Wisconsin.

Pique your interest? The article is definitely worth reading, no matter how you feel about e-books. I personally love the feel of paper and turning the pages of a well-loved book, underlining my favorite passages. But let’s face it: there’s something pretty cool about the instant gratification of absolutely needing to read A Certain Book RIGHT NOW and being able to download a weightless copy.

And admit it. It sure would be nice to have 36,000 readers, whether they’re hauling around stone tablets, papyrus, or a Kindle.

J.A. Konrath, a novelist whose blog A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing is crammed with practical information from the trenches, not an ivory tower, is quoted extensively in the article. His May 30 blog post, Steal This Ebook, starts a 30 day experiment to spread some of his published writing freely across the electronic ozone layer. Many of his books are already available, for free download, from his website.

Do these free downloads help or hurt sales of his books? That’s what he hopes to find out. The post and comments are provocative, evocative, and well worth reading. I particularly like this quote: “As a wise man once said, writers should fear obscurity, not piracy.”

So read the WSJ article and check out Joe Konrath’s blog.

Thoughts?