Update

Only a brief update today.  During the past week, Life threw me for a loop and prevented me from writing much.  This happens sometimes.

How to deal with it?  In order to write authentically about life, people and situations, it’s a writer’s responsibility to live life.  Although I was not writing much this week, everything I experienced has become part of what I bring to my writing.  I was able to write in my journal and record my experiences and feelings, describe where I was and how I got there.  It’s all down on the page.

What’s next?  Monday begins a new week.  I begin again on Monday with the writing.  My current schedule: I write nonfiction on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; and fiction on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  So the next time I’ll work on the Perceval Shadow rewrite is next Tuesday.  I expect to finish the first chapter.

I am also behind in marketing the nonfiction.  I need to revamp my webpage at Publishers Marketplace to include it and set up a webpage at MediaBistro, then update my page at ITW.

More next week…..

Credit: Walt Disney

 

And So It Begins….

Excitement today.  Like falling in love or catching sight of prey?  A physical high this morning as I worked on the rewrite of chapter one.  Yes, this week I began the rewrite of Perceval’s Shadow, the second novel in the Perceval series.

The trick to doing a rewrite of a first draft is not to think about the entire story but to break it into sections.  Break those sections into chapters.  Break the chapters into sections.  Otherwise, a project like this could easily overwhelm — each chapter has its needs, each character has his or her needs.  Fortunately, I have a solid, strong structure so I don’t have to worry about that.

It also helps to have goals for each rewrite.  For this rewrite, the first,   my goals are:

• Plug any story holes.
• Develop characters more.  The foundations are there for each primary and secondary character but I’ve discovered from the assessment read-through that I need to develop Evan’s relationship with his “cousin” as well as develop each new character.  I’ll actually add a chapter because of this work.
• Enrich description and language.

I also need to do some more research on Buenos Aires which I can do on the internet.

My excitement this morning?  I feel that I am sinking into Evan and his world again, my imagination playing with the issues that have arisen and giving me ideas to resolve them.  Good ideas.  While I dressed this morning, I thought of two scenes for the chapter I need to add, and realized too that Evan needed to have a cell phone in Buenos Aires.  Why did I think before that it made sense for him not to have a cell phone?  Weird.  And that new chapter?  Five days ago I hadn’t a clue where to start or what needed to be in it.

Chapter One: I changed the beginning.  I wanted more action right away, instead of description, and to set the location.  In the most recent draft of the first novel, I developed Evan’s voice more, and I need to get back into it, so I’m using this chapter for that and taking my time.  He’s with a musician — family for him — for the first half of the chapter, relaxed, having fun, feeling safe.

A question about how much review to have — when I read other series and sequels, this kind of information tends to make me impatient for the writer to get on with the present story.  However, I recognize that it’s actually important for the reader to be reminded of the world in which Evan lives.  It’s not the past and it’s not today.  I’ll also need to remind readers of Perceval’s secret, i.e. what happened at the end of the first novel that will haunt Evan throughout this story.

I’m weaving the information about the current state of the world into his conversation with the musician.  They’re running on the streets of Buenos Aires after a concert, unwinding, friends talking about what’s next for each of them.  Evan will travel to Toronto to conduct there but he still lives in Vienna.  I’m still working on the crucial parts of his secret that need inclusion.

Revision work is hard work.  It’s 90% of creative writing.  But…it’s exciting to me and an absolute blast!

 

Writing and Composing

The assessment read-through for Perceval’s Shadow has shown me the amount of work that I’ll need to do on this second novel.  Also, Evan’s composer friend, Owen te Kumara, steps into a more prominent place in his life in this novel which means that I need to remind myself what composers do.

Composers write music.  As I described in my post How Does a Composer Know What to Write?, a composer’s writing process mirrors a writer’s in many ways.  Learning music is like learning a language, actually a foreign language, with an alphabet, notation system, vocabulary, grammar, syntax and common usage.  You need to know the rules and how they work by following them before you can break them.

Owen te Kumara has presented me with an interesting challenge.  I need to know what’s going on in his head in order to write him.  I’m not a composer, but I’ve had some experience composing music back in my college days.  I was terrible at it.  So my concern now is that I’ll be terrible at developing Owen as a composer.

He’s a secondary character.  Do I really need to worry about this?  Yes.  I’m of the school that believes friends reflect back on the person, i.e. Evan’s friends reveal a lot about who he is as a person.  I think of Owen as a projection, on an emotional level, for several characters, including Evan.  And I wanted to juxtapose a creator-composer with a re-creator-conductor in music.

Since finishing the assessment read-through, I’ve been mulling this thing with Owen, dodging its mental needling.  Composers don’t have to worry about creating and developing characters!  Well, except when they use words that they set to music as in opera or songs.  Music without words is a highly subjective experience for the listener, but a novel gives the reader a wealth of information and a story from the writer.

I want to think of Owen, and then compose him, like a musical motif that is stated in its original form in Perceval’s Secret then develops in Perceval’s Shadow.  It’s not that Owen has a lot of page time, but the time he has is important, as I’ve seen during the read-through.  He begins as a G-major chord, then goes to D-minor and works his way back to G-major.  He’s not a dissonant personality but soft, a sponge for life, sounds, experiences and emotions.  He’s a father, too, and this is a new detail.  The big question in the second novel: will Owen accept what happened in the first novel and find the strength to move on?  It is in this question that Owen mirrors the other characters whether obviously or not.

Read-throughs function like a sieve.  They allow the basic stuff through while catching the clunky stuff for me to work on.  I’ve been surprised by how much is already there and surprised by how much needs to be fleshed out.  Do composers deal with this sort of thing?  I would guess that yes, they write down ideas and then need to flesh them out, develop them, breathe life into them before letting them die or rest.  I wonder if a musical idea has ever talked back to a composer, told him just what he needed to do or disapproved of the direction he had the musical idea going?

While I worked on the first draft of Perceval’s Secret, when it was called Shadow Lovers, I used to have vivid dreams at night about the characters.  They’d tell me their names, where they lived, what they wanted in the story.  Evan Quinn terrified me because he’s a conductor and I knew very little about a conductor’s life.  I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that my imagination found a way to get through to me — the dreams at night — to help me with Evan and his life for that novel. Evan would not shut up.

Owen, please talk to me….

Choosing and Using Pens

Editing on a computer saves an incredible amount of time, but I’ve found that writing a first draft can result in less than stellar writing on the computer.  It works for essays, for example, but not for screenplays.  I write my journal in a college-ruled notebook with pen.  When I need to work something out on paper, I’ve found that using a pen rather than a computer and monitor works best.  Why? And what kind of pen?  Does it matter?

First of all, yes, what kind of pen does matter to me.  The color of the ink matters to me.  How the pen feels in my hand matters, as does the smoothness of the flow of ink onto the paper.  I used to have a cheap fountain pen that my brother gave to me when I was in high school.  I loved that pen.  I used it for years, until the nib no longer worked.  So, I went in search of a replacement.  Fountain pens are hard to find nowadays.  I wanted one just like my old one, and I didn’t want to pay more than, say, $5 for it.  Ha!  The cheapest fountain pens I could find were in the $15-$20 range.  In a fit of frustration, I bought two and stocked up on ink cartridges.  I tried to write with these pens but it just wasn’t the same.  One was two heavy, one was too fat.  Then they both stopped working — the ink stopped flowing smoothly and evenly.  Today, they lay in my desk somewhere, neglected and probably bone dry.

After the fountain pen fiasco, I began experimenting with gel ink pens.  I used to love the Pentel Rolling Writer pens, and they came in a wonderful variety of colors, including purple and green, my two favorite colors.  But then Pentel stopped making them and their ballpoint pens just do not cut it.  They feel clunky and too big in my hand.  The flow of ink tends to be choppy and reluctant.  I want a pen whose ink flows with my thoughts and my hand across the paper.  Smooth and abundant, rich dark color, and if it has an ink scent, so much the better.

Currently, my favorite ballpoint is a Papermate Eagle stick pen, medium point, in a vibrant sky blue.  Other ballpoints that I use and like include Bic round sticks, Papermate Flexgrip Ultra, Papermate Flexgrip Elite, Papermate Pro-Fit and Papermate ComfortMate Grip, all medium points, in blue, black, green, red and purple.  For gel ink pens, I’m still experimenting a lot, but I’ve enjoyed Pentel’s EnerGel medium point in purple and black, Uniball Signo in blue and black, and Bic gel ink in blue.  And of course, Flair pens in LOTS of colors.

Color can reflect mood, in my journal for example, or serious business when I use blue or black.  For me, black is the most dramatic color.  I love black gel ink pens.  I use purple and green pens quite a lot, and tend to reserve red pens for financial or health matters.  The feel of the pen in my hand is important — how heavy it is, how easy to grip, how comfortable.  I tend to prefer small, light pens with comfort grips of some sort because I write by pen a lot.

My handwriting has evolved over time.  If I look at my journals from high school, my handwriting tends toward small and slanted one way on one day, another the next day.  After college, I attended business school and learned shorthand which radically changed my regular handwriting.  Now it tends toward a mix of cursive and printing rather than all cursive, and not very consistent.  My signature has remained remarkably similar, however.

When do I prefer to use a pen for my writing instead of the computer?  First, whenever I need to slow down my thinking to work something out.  I usually write the first draft of screenplays using pen and paper.  The first drafts of advertising copy, business letters, or anything else that requires slow and deep thought.  Handwriting tends to slow down the brain, allows the brain to mull over the words as they appear on the paper.  I think love letters should always be handwritten.  I write my journal by hand instead of on the computer in order to be reflective, to really examine my day or whatever problem I’m working through.

Pens are as much a shopping weakness as books, CDs and DVDs for me.  Whenever I need office supplies and pens are on my list, I need to give myself a maximum number that I can afford to buy that day and stick to it or I’d go way over budget.  I love to have boxes and boxes of pens in my closet, lots of different kinds, so I can pick and choose like crayons in a box for drawing a picture.  My pens are drawing pictures, but in words.

So far, I’ve been heartened that office supply stores, Target, etc. still sell all kinds of pens in spite of the popularity of computers of all kinds.  My love for pens can endure for many more years…..