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!

 

The Blizzard

Image thanks to Chris at icanhascheezeburger.com

What’s it with blizzards anyway?  The wind whips the snow into whiteout sounding like sand against my windows and my imagination ramps up into overdrive.  Not that I’m complaining.  But with a blizzard?  Why not with sunshine and clear skies?

So what does it mean to me, the writer, that we’re socked in by a blizzard today.  SNOW DAY!!!!  Time to play!  The imagination loves to play, to create, to have fun.  Early today, she had already come up with a tantalizing character for a children’s book, the title, and the very first scene, along with a timeline for writing it next year.

A little later, I decided to work on fiction today, specifically a short story that needs a rewrite.  It had a problem that I couldn’t figure out.  But today was the perfect day to drag it out and ask myself what the problem was and how to fix it.  The answer came fast, whizzing through my brain’s circuits from the imagination to the intellect.  It’s so simple, I’m astonished I didn’t think of it sooner.  I spent the rest of the morning working out the details and began the rewrite.   Most of the original story will remain, too.

This blizzard has triggered also a lot of memories of past snow days, both in childhood and as an adult.  Precious gifts – memories – when they come as specific gems, fully formed in the mind, and they’re things not remembered in a long time.  Memories feed the imagination with emotion and visual images, sounds and smells.  Memory fuels the writing process, mostly subconsciously but sometimes consciously.  Seeing the snow this morning triggered the snow day memories which took me straight to a childhood place and enabled my imagination to play with thoughts of being a kid, of kids I know, of stories I’ve written for kids in the past, and that led to one specific kid who invites me to his birthday party every year — my Scientist friend’s oldest son.  Another element popped in: I reread Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time a couple weeks ago, which had also triggered a lot of childhood memories.

So it all came together because of the blizzard and having a snow day: the snow, children’s science fiction, and the protagonist of the story.  I added a character that popped into my mind as I was thinking about the “tesseract” concept from L’Engle’s book.  Now I have two characters, a situation and a scene, but not a story.  Why?  No conflict yet.

The next step was to write down everything I’d thought of, which triggered more ideas that I wrote down also.  This could be the beginning of a fun children’s science fiction/fantasy story, or it could end up being a dead-end. My imagination will let me know eventually.

In the meantime, I have that short story rewrite to finish….

Creative Process

My scientist friend forwarded to me a questionnaire from Minnesota Public Radio a couple weeks ago.  My usual response to questionnaires is deletion, but this one was for a project about creativity and the creative process in all aspects of life, not only in the creative arts.  That really piqued my interest, so I filled it out, sent it in.  The first effect I noticed was more e-mails from MPR Public Insight Network asking for my response/reaction to current news topics.  Interesting.  They are building a network of sources from the general population, not only from experts in specific fields.  Then yesterday I received a phone call from a pleasant-voiced MPR intern who wanted to ask me more questions about my creative process for my writing.  He was also interested in how my creative process translated to other aspects of my life, i.e. my job search.  I like this! 

Human beings are highly creative, sentient creatures.  The human mind wants to play (think and create) all the time, except when asleep, and then its play continues in a different way that helps to re-energize it and our bodies.  For people who hate to be bored (me), boredom is worse than physical torture (well, not really, but almost).  So what does the mind do?  Daydreams.  Fantasizes.  Dissociates and/or hallucinates.  Or finds something more productive to do.  The mind does creativity.  What we call imagination is the energy force behind the mind that fuels the mind’s play.  The mind loves to create things — ideas, dreams, words, jokes, pictures, stories, languages, music, every gadget and invention ever made (including those that ended up in the trash).  It eats problems for lunch.  I don’t think humans appreciate their minds nearly as much as they could. 

Is there a process to this creativity?  Sure.  But it can differ from person to person, situation to situation.  The creativity required to send a person to the moon is a bit different than writing a story about a man living on the moon.  They have one thing in common: imagination.  I suspect that my scientist friend is just as creative as I am, but she needs to apply it to different things than I do and in different ways.  But this is certain: the creative process inhabits everthing humans do (except maybe anything that results in carpal tunnel syndrome).

My creative process is something I try not to think about too much.  It is what it is.  What I do think about is how to support it, help it, feed it.  And I listen very closely to what’s going on in my mind (which introverts, like me, are extremely good at doing and extroverts tend not to understand at all).  One of the things I do to help my process is to give it time.  Play takes time: quiet time, peaceful time, time to think, daydream, let the mind wander.  I keep pen and paper close so I can write notes as the ideas begin to flow. 

My imagination likes to work out to music.  I’ve discovered that my morning workouts, before I begin work at my desk, are a perfect opportunity to invite my imagination to solve writing problems for me.  I listen to classical music that I know intimately and love while I work out.  The music sets the tone, opens the doors and windows, and gets things moving.  I imagine that I’m talking with a person or group of people in the future, after I’ve solved the problem I’m working on.  They ask me how I identified the problem, why it was a problem, and then how I solved it.  This process has successfully resolved every writing problem that I’ve put through it.  I have complete confidence in my imagination. 

What’s your creative process?  How do you support and feed it?  Next time you have a problem that needs solving (start small if you’re not already used to working with your imagination), try imagining that you’re talking with someone in the future, after you’ve solved the problem, and they’re asking you about the problem and how you solved it.  Adapt this support for imagination to suit your own mind’s way of playing….

The Nitty-Gritty: Organizing the Perceval Series for Consistency, etc.

Since March 2008, I haven’t written much on the Perceval series of novels due to the interference of life concerns and issues.  These things happen.  Recently, ideas for the series started to trickle into my mind as if saying, OK, maybe it’s time to return to Evan’s story.  But I’m in the middle of a job search, and even as the desire to plunge back into Evan’s story wrestles with the need for money to pay the bills, I’ve recognized a need to at least write down the ideas and fill in the outlines of the last 3 novels so that when I return to them, I won’t be completely lost.  The first thing that goes is consistency….

Why, oh why am I writing a series?  It’s hard enough to insure consistency in character and details in one novel, much less in five.  The idea of writing Evan’s story as a series has felt inevitable to me and makes sense in terms of his development arc.  Each novel presents a different problem for him to solve on his journey to freedom.  That journey has interior and exterior paths, physical and emotional manifestations.  Evan meets a lot of different people along the way, some friends, some enemies.  I’ve discovered, too, that something he learns in novel 2 ends up playing a prominent role in the climax of the series in novel 5.

I can appreciate what J. K. Rowling must have gone through in maintaining consistency throughout her Harry Potter series.  I’m about halfway through my series and have already discovered that I need to do something to keep details consistent and characters straight.  Having one character change his identity was a brilliant idea but sometimes confuses me!

So far, my preferred method involves working files for each novel in which I keep notes about that novel, outlines incorporating important plot points and character details and research notes.  I have a character file in which I keep all my character prep work and a master character list with summaries and descriptions of each character, broken out by novel.  And then I have a master file for the entire series that holds outlines, geographical and political information and notes that pertain to Evan’s development arc and how various people and actions relate to it.  Each novel also has its own research file for things relevant only to that novel.  And I have a separate “future world” file in which I keep all my ravings and notes about Evan’s world, and my lengthy descriptions of America and Europe in 2048.

My impulse is not to worry about consistency too much until I have first drafts of all the novels.  I’ve laid the groundwork for staying on top of the consistency issue now, and that’s probably the most important thing.  I build each novel on the previous one, so Evan’s experience is cumulative and the world changes as he changes.  I think of the five novels as sections in one long novel.

The fun side of this challenge is being in the middle of my imagination’s way of creating.  For example, I have in my mind what the climax of the series is, which characters are involved and where it happens.  The location was unusual enough that I needed to set it up, i.e. how Evan or any of the characters might know about its existence.  It hit me one day while working on the first draft of novel 2 that I had a perfect opportunity in that story to set up the unusual location for the climax.  I was amazed that my imagination recognized the opportunity, saving me a lot of grief in the future, plus the fact that my imagination had already been playing with the climactic scenes for several weeks before I saw the opportunity.  I just love it when my imagination is having fun.  And I’m grateful.

Trust the process.  By trusting the process, it’s possible to let go and let the ideas and work flow.  When I need ideas for maintaining consistency through the five novels, I trust my imagination to be there for me…..