On Trying to Write Short(er) Again

I'm on my way to New York City today, to read at Lady Jane's Salon, hang with Ron Hogan and Megan Hart, and have lunch with my editor.

As one does.

All of this means that my post is going up a little late. Airplanes and blogging don't always play nicely together.

Our topic this week is why we prefer to write long or short.

I actually like both, which should come as a surprise to no one, since I'm always the fence-sitter in all things. I started out writing short - essays and short stories  - and these days I write long. Sometimes I write *really* long. The Talon of the Hawk came in at over 130,000 words. All of my Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms books are at least 110,000 words.

Writing short was great for me, especially to begin with. I'm not capable of pre-plotting, so writing short let me write and entire story in one sitting, while I held it and all its threads in my head. I also had little time to fit in writing back in those days, so shorter was better.

***INTERRUPTION***

So, as I sat typing this in the Dallas airport, I got the announcement that my flight to La Guardia was cancelled. Worse, they can't get me there for two days, so I'm just going home again. Nothing like a day jaunt to Dallas for lunch!

What was to be a long trip has become a short one. Sometimes it works out that way.

At any rate, in writing those fantasy novels, I discovered the great joy of writing long. I even think of it as VERY long, because it's a long wending tale across the series at this point.

Conversely, with my new Sorcerous Moons series, I've been trying to write shorter again. The first book, Lonen's War, is about 65,000 words and it's looking like the next two in the series will come out about the same. The thing is, part of why I wanted those to be shorter is that I really wanted to write a long-term, slow-burn romance. In some ways that series of three will be like one 200K book.

Or longer. I might not be able to tell it in three books. We'll see.

I try to be flexible.

I Had One Writing Ritual and I Gave It Up

I'm not a ritual type person. Pretty much I sit down and I write. The words flow and I'm happy. Or not, if it's a difficult scene!

Starting in junior high school, I did have one ritual. I'd read somewhere that creativity could be enhanced if one listened to music, which I thought sounded like s great idea. (I wish music could enhance math capabilities too, but that's another topic.) I made a lot of mix tape cd's of my favorite songs and whenever I wanted to write I'd put those on and go for it. There was no attempt by me to tailor the song selection to the theme or pace of the story, just music was enough. Typically what happened for me was I'd hear the first song and then I wouldn't hear the music at all as I became immersed in the flow of writing.

I kept that up for many years, with the variation that sometimes the sound of a specific song would seem to help me write and I'd put that song on endless replay. A lot of one of my novels was written to "The Russian Dervish" music from Riverdance, although nothing in the book remotely related to that music. Thank goodness for head phones or my family would probably have wanted me to move out!


Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a few songs that seemed to work for one book, as did The Little River Band, and Nelson's "Can't Live Without Your Love and Affection" was killer for a certain set of scenes.


Nowadays I don't need or use music as a background for writing. I started to find it distracting and do better without any. I sit down and I write.

I DO use music sometimes to inspire creativity when I'm thinking about plots or characters, especially if I'm out cruising the freeways...So, there you have it!

My Ritual to Create Rituals

I don't know what it is about publishing a book, but every single time I do, some crisis descends, and the rituals, schedules, and discipline that got the book done and published get blown to hell. I have to reinvent my process all over again, accommodating whatever crisis has arisen this time. Can I have a ritual I'd *like* to leave behind? I nominate this one.

 

Usually rituals are lovely things designed to signal our brains that we're shifting out of our everyday world and into something other. I'm all for them. My office, when I had one, was filled with ritual items. Seriously. There's an altar in the southern window. A waterfall fountain. A salt lamp. Something to bring every element into my work space. Also - cat beds. Let's be realistic. I have long been expected to write whilst holding cat. That's more an imperative than a ritual. Book one was written in this office.

 

 I miss having a dedicated desk and office chair. That much is true. I miss all of the accoutrement that went with the great luxury of space. What I do NOT miss is the heating bill that went with this particular space and the fact that it was hell and gone from everywhere ever. So rituals of all kinds have fallen by the wayside. Desks gave way to the ergonomically egregious salon table, or to writing with my laptop in my lap. Book 2 was written with the laptop in my lap while I sat in the cockpit. Took weeks to unkink my neck and back.

 

Then I had to establish a new ritual, preferably a healthier one - that of riding in to the tea shop every day to write. Books three and five were written there while sipping various murky brews. Book four was written at the boat and while I waited during a long string of vet appointments when the eldest boy took ill. (He's now fine for a 17.5 year old with liver disease.)

 

But, on the heels of publishing book five and in the midst of writing book six, the tea shop can no longer be my go-to. I 100% regret the loss of that ritual, but it can't be helped. So here I am. Gritting my teeth in the center of the ritual that requires me to find a new ritual. Quite by accident, I may have found it earlier today. While waiting for the laundry in the Laundromat, I pounded out 800 words in an hour. Hush. For me, that's incredible. My point is that if this bears out, I may wear every last stitch of clothing out by washing them. Not sure how a Laundromat is germane to a historical fantasy, but what ever. Writing, man. The glamor never ends.

 

Writing Routines

I was most successful when I was most productive. But, as we all know, 'things' change. I overestimated the load I could actually carry.

Once upon a time, I had a lifestyle that allowed me to prioritize writing. As with many things, repetitive function made it better and easier. Then things changed and my creative 'me' time shrank exponentially.

As a creative spirit, losing that time to access the creativity meant the task grew harder. Think of it like an internal pipeline through which creativity flows because your brain is actively pumping the creative juices. But then the mind has to do other non-creative things for a large majority of time. Instead of creativity flowing unhindered, theres this OTHER INFORMATION showing up in the mental real estate, and it JUST KEEPS SHOWING UP. It has to go somewhere, so it gets stuck in this conduit or that pipeline in an attempt to keep something still flowing...and before you know it,  the creative juices are dammed up because other things are taking priority.

That's the creative person's Hell.

Now, I feel like the mental real estate is clearing and the creativity is starting to flow again. It feels natural, not forced.

Goddamn, I've missed this.

The One Writing Ritual I Wish I Still Had

Once upon a time I had writing rituals. No, wait, I still do. I'm a creature of habit.  What habit fell by the wayside over the last ten years of being a writer? The one I am most ashamed I've let slip. ~hangs head~

Reading regularly. 

The ritual used to be write 5 days, read 2 days. Write 5, read 2.  Never read the genre or sub-genre in which I was writing. Different genres--even non-fiction--were necessary to unclog creative paths and to allow my mind to explore strange rabbit holes.

Lately, I write every day, working on the same story. No breaks until the WiP is done. Trust me, that's not only a bad idea; it's worse in implementation. Especially since I write so slowly. It leads to work-avoidance, burnout, and obsessing over the wrong things.

The other reason I broke the habit? I'm not proud to say it's gotten harder and harder for me to park my "editor" mode when I pick up someone else's work. I've spent a lot of money on books that I cannot finish. I get angry at the author for not trying harder. I'm furious at the editor for not insisting on certain fixes. It's all the criticism I heap on myself being redirected at someone else's finished product. I got issues. I know.

Maybe I'll try to get back on the reading-regularly bandwagon in 2017. I miss it. Like that dear friend I keep meaning to call yet never do.

#BadAuthor

Treasured Writing Rituals I've Discarded

In honor of this week's topic -  a writing routine we used to depend on but changed and why - I dragged out this old photo of me at my very first book signing. That's January of 2004, when my essay collection, WYOMING TRUCKS, TRUE LOVE AND THE WEATHER CHANNEL, came out. I look so fresh-faced and excited. You can practically see the visions of sugarplums and lucrative multi-book contracts dancing in my head.

~pets past self~

That was before I'd even contemplated writing a novel, or really much fiction at all. And I had lousy writing habits. Actually, I take that back. I had no writing habits. Sure, I'd gone to getting up very early (4 or 5 am) and writing before the day job in the morning. But, in order to coax myself into writing at all, I'd allowed myself to write whatever I wanted to. I don't regret this choice - because it did get me writing - but that's why I ended up with lots and lots of essays. Hey, I ended up with an essay collection published by a university press, so it wasn't a bad thing at all.

But I needed to do better, particularly when I tried writing longer works.

So I developed rituals. I had a dedicated writing desk. (By then I worked the day job from home and, while I had a single room for my office, I had plenty of room for two desks.) I played certain music (the soundtracks of The Mission and Master and Commander were my go-to's.) I did all sorts of things - read the (small-town, very thin) newspaper. I wore certain clothes for writing and others for the day job. A few other things I can't even remember.

You know what? Those things totally worked. I highly recommend establishing rituals, because all of those things, done stepwise, put my mind into the state where the words could flow. They served as a cue to do *that* kind of work.

But I don't do any of them anymore. I prefer silence when I write. I have only one desk - because we live in a much smaller house and I only have room for one. (I write full-time now, but as recently as last fall I was still doing the day job from home and I simply set up two monitors on the one desk. I read most of my news online, but only later, when it won't distract me from writing.

You know why I gave up all those rituals?

I didn't need them anymore.

I didn't even deliberately give them up. They just kind of ... fell by the wayside. As my writing habit became a firmly entrenched part of my day, I started forgetting about the rituals. I just dove straight into writing.

I suspect that's one way of knowing when you've got it down.

Learning to Write Novels

Earlier in the week I was chided a bit by fellow SFF7 peeps for saying I learned to write novels by writing them. And reading them. And watching movies. And reading comic books.

Sorry, folks, that's my story! I was born with a LOT of imagination. I've been writing since I was a little kid and I write the kind of stories I wanted to read. The more I read, the more I knew what I wanted in my own books - bands of warrior brothers who would do anything for each other and the women they loved, science fiction adventures, romance, ancient Egypt, blasters, family connections, strong heroines, mystical events and powers, paranormal happenings....well, probably not all in one book of course!

I also got to know what I didn't want - no cliffhangers, no endless series of books where the heroine basically reboots with each new book and it's like the previous episodes never happened. I remember Cherry Ames, RN being particularly bad about this. No unhappy endings.

Along the way I received incredible support and encouragement from my family and friends, to keep telling stories for them...

Fortunately for me, there seem to be wonderful readers out there who enjoy the same elements in the books they read as I do. I've been able to share thirteen books and some assorted short stories to date. Book #fourteen is coming back to me from the developmental editor on Monday and I'll be sending her the next STAR CRUISE story.

If we're talking about the craft of writing novels, well of course I've had to learn about show vs. tell, head hopping, pacing, foreshadowing, character stage business, data dumps and too much backstory, and all the rest of the techniques, much as any other author should if they want to be turning out a quality book for readers. I have great editors, I've read a lot of excellent craft posts, I've been to a few workshops in my day...I probably made every craft-related mistake there is along the way to publication (and no doubt am still committing a few but hopefully my editors help me weed them out of the drafts).

When I had my author photo taken, the photographer asked me what I wanted to convey. And I said, I want to look as if we're sitting at the kitchen table together and wow, do I have a good story to tell. That's my goal!

Learning to Write

A movie with a shitty ending taught me to write. Yup. Historical. Ish. Adventure. Loads of fun right up to the end when the hero and heroine (after a convincing romance) intrinsically shake hands and say, "Right. Nice life then!" and toddle off their separate ways thus invalidating the entire prior two hours. Add into it that the heroine was a bit of a moron who couldn't fight her way out of a wet paper bag and you can already see where this is going to go, right? I was 12 and I was LIVID.

THEY'D DONE IT WRONG.

And *I* was going to fix it, by God. I did. Repeatedly. I spent that entire summer in my room with my mom's old Selectric typewriter set up on a TV dinner tray. No, I did not know how to type. I hunted and pecked my way into writing. The correction key didn't work because no one was going to buy correction ribbon for a kid with zero typing skill. We'd have had to have taken out stock in the company. So those old onion skin pages (which I still have) are a march of misspelled words, typos and carefully xxxxxxx'd out lines. I played and replayed the plot options in my head.

I could fix that ending.

NO. I could fix the entire affront! What if the heroine COULD fight? Wouldn't that be more fun?? Of course it would! Nobleman's daughter? Pff! PRINCESS. Who rides flawlessly. And handles a rapier better than anyone. Ever.

Yeah, I never finished that epic work. But it didn't matter. I'd always been addicted to stories. Books. Movies. TV shows. I think anyone who creates stories has to gorge on stories. We really are the monsters we write about - only we consume stories as fuel for our own. And for me, from that summer forth, I was lost. I wrote. And wrote. And learned. And read, and learned more. I wrote fan fiction during math class lectures when I should have been taking notes. Then I wanted to break my fan fic away into it's own thing with it's own identity. So I figured out how to do that during the most interminable year of social studies, ever. You'd think I'd have paid attention in English class. Until my mother shifted me up a grade level in the English department and the teachers had things to say I'd never heard before, that wasn't true. I spent my classes making stuff up on paper. Nooooo. There was no credit awarded for that activity.

Acting school solidified character development and dramatic arc. Possibly emotional vocabulary.

But honestly. Approaching story after story after story time and a gain, learning to finish what I started, learning to take critique and learning to edit - those, for me, were things I could only absorb and assimilate by doing. So yes. I may have been kicked into the blackhole of writing by a movie with an unsatisfactory ending, but the fact remains. I learned to write by writing.

At least it's no longer a typewriter on a TV tray.