Against the Grain

Note: Please excuse the late post. We had a thunderstorm yesterday that messed with our Internet connection.

I turned in my last assignment Monday for my Popular Fiction class. In less than a week I’ll be done with school (“uni” I have to remember to say here) and I can get back to working full-time on my book. The next few months will be filled with query letter writing as well. I’m excited!

But the last two weeks have been pulling-teeth difficult. All semester we had weekly assignments of 700 words, about 3 double-spaced manuscript pages, each week. And each week we did something new – crime fiction, detective fiction, an adventure story, romance (my only easy week!), science fiction, and fantasy. In the last assignment, I could not for the life of me think of a fantasy piece. (The sci-fi piece was also difficult until I decided to make it silly.)

On the day the fantasy piece was due, I finally came up with an idea and started writing. What a shocker to see something amazing come alive on the pages! I was so excited about what I wrote, I didn’t care if the class critique tore it to pieces. I loved it. And my classmates loved it too. I decided to take a gamble and use the fantasy – not the romance – for my major 5000-word piece.

Not long after that the trouble began. I’m a novelist not a short story writer. If the piece was going to be the beginning of a novel, you had to also include a half-page synopsis. So I needed to figure out what was going to happen to this girl. And I needed to change her name. And I needed to find a name for the other guy. And the villain. And I needed to figure out what the villain wanted and why. And on and on and on.

The way I write, 5000 words is nearly two chapters. In the first two chapters, I’m used to setting up a lot of information for the rest of the book. So in my mind, I needed to figure out most of the book’s storyline before I knew what the first two chapters should even be about. By now, I only had four days until the piece was due. Talk about tension and internal conflict!

One or two of my writing friends said, relax and write what comes to you! Play! This is the time when the book should be the most fun. You get to find out what happens as you go along. Uh, yeah, but I’m going to get graded on it! This can’t be a normal first draft!

So I planned and plotted as best I could, but there came a point when I had to get the words on the page. Any words. And then I had to polish them and make them appear to make sense, make them seem to flow and carry the reader to a new and interesting place. In four days.

I printed out my final assignment half an hour before I had to catch the bus to class. There were some problems. Why was the main good guy helping the girl without knowing her story? Especially if she came from where he suspected she came from? How did she know about him and how powerful he is? Why did she decide he would be her best chance of finding her brother? How did she know where to look for him? My husband (who reads fantasy and for the first time in twenty years liked something I’d written) told me the fight scene was way too short and I needed more descriptions. So much more work needed to be done, but I had to turn it in.

So one of the things I’ve learned after taking Popular Fiction for 14 weeks is that you can be pleasantly surprised if you go against the grain and try something outside of your comfort zone. I had no idea I could write fantasy. On the other hand, when I look at my absolute best pieces of work historically, they are all kind of an urban fantasy story – this world but with something else, too. That’s another good thing I learned that I can begin to explore in more depth.

But I also learned that there are some things that are less about comfort zones and more about how you think. My writing routine is to do a huge amount of thinking, writing pages of notes, drawing pictures and making associations. When I have a fairly firm foundation and the basic frame is laid out, then I start writing. At that point, the writing will generally go fairly fast. (All of the previous –ly adjectives are placeholders for caveats to that “rule.” LOL!) Looking back, this has been my process since grade school. Going against the grain in this respect will only yield frustration.

Whether you’re doing NaNo or not, I encourage you to push yourself enough that you find the areas where you are flexible and could try something new. And also find out where the studs are in your walls, the immovable towers of strength that hold your ideas – and your writing routines – together. As I learn the difference in those two areas in my writing, I’m finding myself in a growth spurt as a writer.

Side note: I’m excited to tell you that you can now sign up for my online class, Going the Distance: Goal Setting and Time Management for the Writer. The 4-week class starts January 10, 2011.