Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

redraft

Creativity: Multitasking the process

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Multitask the process of writing

Let’s face it, if you are working at a job that you enjoy and that also pays the bills and writing for publication in your free time, than multitasking is probably a necessary evil. I don’t advocate the idea of using up every moment for productive result at all times: cleaning house, writing, food preparation, outdoor maintenance, etc., leaving yourself without a moment to sit and relax, read a book, talk silly with someone, enjoy the view, and so on. But if you are in the same situation I and many other writers are, you are squeezing time out of anything not related to work and family.

You are multitasking for your craft during the precious moments you have garnered.

I have my own approach to this process.  When the opportunity to write is present, I do the following:

  • When I am writing a first draft, I focus all my creative energies on that work. For the most part, I won’t turn to any other writing until the draft is done.
  • If I am in redraft, everything changes.  (And you are going to see the paradox of this in relation to the first point.) That’s when I move about from work to work.
    • I redraft two ways: clarifying what is already written and adding scenes that expand and develop.
    • I plan out my next novel first with Freemind, brainstorming simple hints and ideas I have about plot and character. 
    • Next I break down each scene and enter them into yWriter for later development.
    • I edit the current work that I am preparing for publication.
    • If I have sent out a draft to my beta readers, than I jump into writing my next novel, but…
    • If at any time an idea or needed expansion scene comes to mind for the work that is out for feedback, I’ll drop what I am doing and return to that work.
    • I work on cover art, blurbs, make changes to social media backgrounds to reflect new or upcoming publications, and generally organize files.
    • I back up in two other drives (flash and external drives) everything I have going on.
    • If I am beta reading or editing for a writer friend, then I will give over a couple of weeks to that as they arrive.

 What does this look like in real time?  Let me show what last year looked like.

Real time (wish it had time travel button)
  1.  The book I was anticipating publishing had the working title Time 3. It was already drafted to the point that I needed my beta reader to look at it. She had sent me her newest work for beta read and I had just finished with that.  So I sent mine off to her in October.  (My year always starts in September, teacher and all that.)
  2. I then turned to the work that I had in first draft, Time 4, and began refining and adding scenes.  My beta reader anticipated getting her response back by November, but I had told her to take her time fitting it in to her drafting schedule and did not expect it back before December.
  3. Every now and then a flash of concern over a scene would come to mind for Time 3, and I would open it up, make some additions and then return to 4.
  4. December was just around the corner and my beta reader was expecting to get it to me by then. I asked her to delay as things were moving so well on Time 4 that I did not want the tug to redraft (damn near wrenching grasp) that would occur when her comments came back. So she held off sending while I wrote madly on Time 4. 
  5. January, I gave her the go ahead.  
  6. Worked with my beta buddy and husband to come up with a strong title for Time 3. (I now have titles for books I haven’t even thought of!)
  7. My mind was beginning to wander onto Time 5, already mapped in Freemind. I started making scene notes in yWriter.
  8. Time 4 was reaching a state of full draft and then I realized where I was ending it was not really the end. Back into mapping, and scene notes to plan out the new ending: Characters! Sometimes they yell, “Hey, we’re not done. What about….”  Mine were screaming and waving, and generally making irresistible sense.
  9. March, put Time 3 through another redraft per beta reader inspiration.
  10. April, working on the house and in strode contemporary novel idea.  Amazing what can come to you when you’re digging foundation holes for concrete.  Stopped work on Time 3 & 4 to begin mapping, character design and scene planning.
  11. Returned to Time 4.
  12. Still April, sent Time 3 off to a second beta reader.
  13. Returned to Time 4 to develop new ending.
  14. May, received Time 3’s new feedback.  And made adjustments to clear up issues.
  15. July put Time 3 through numerous edits: line, content, reverse, search and replace, formatting.
  16. Revised two book covers and updated various necessary sites. Designed cover art for Time 3 and Time 4. Prepared the blurb.
  17. Last day of July published Next Time We Meet (Time 3) on Smashwords and Amazon.
  18. In July, I received a novel to beta read.  I got to it in August. I took a couple weeks to read and draft comments on my friend’s book.
  19. August, returned to work on Time 4.
  20. Designed cover art for omnibus three book box set for all books currently published for the Students of Jump series (In Times Passed, No-time like the Present, Next Time We Meet.)
  21. Returned to preparing for the new school year.  I haven’t added to any of my ongoing projects since August 11.  Time 4 still has a patchwork ending.  My contemporary fiction idea is barely planned out, and Time 5 is looking a bit bleary eyed.
  22. So in the little bits of time that I have available, I am tweeting, reading, visiting Goodreads and Google+, and blogging.
  23. And since December 2013, my hubby, daughter and I have been building a house.  Roof is going on this month.
  24. But I managed to read three of the Divergent books, two YA books my daughter wanted me to read, all four of Jodi Taylor’s St. Mary’s books.  Another novel by Taylor.   Connie Willis’s Passage, and three other time travel books, both Patterson’s Heinlein biographies, and King’s On Writing.  So I do relax now and then (hmm, or do research depending on how you look at it). And I tweeted, blogged, found pics for Pinterest, commented….

And how do you run your never-take-a-moment-to-sit-down-and-do-nothing writing?

#writing
#creativity
#multitasking

Characterization, Star Trek and life challenges

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Star Trek, Next Generation is one of my favorite shows, and my husband and I have been watching an episode every night while we eat dinner as we work our way through the seasons the show aired.  The early ones were still working on depth, characterization and purpose, but after the third year, the show got its legs under it.  I can view the same episode again and again and enjoy the interactions of characters that are distinctly different, driven by motivations individual and evolving.  What captures my attention most are the shows which focus on particular characters and their growth facing distressing or challenging situations.

Tonight we are watching the episode which has Captain Picard trying to understand why he left the ship.  As a second Picard arrives in a shuttle craft that is from six hours in the future, the original Picard wonders what would cause him to choose leaving the Enterprise when the result was the total destruction of the ship.  He is angry at the second Picard for leaving and surviving.  It causes him to question his integrity as a captain and his responsibility to his crew.

In the life of any individual, events take place which force one to evaluate, re-evaluate and respond to situations.  We question our choices based on our desires and attempt to see ourselves as truly as we can.  How we answer ourselves, how we evaluate our choices forces us to grow as people.  Characters we create must grow as well, question their choices based on their understanding of the reasons which caused them to select those choices.

This is the challenge I love to work on when I write.  It is also what causes me the most doubt.  It generates questions that I must answer if I want to understand what sort of growth is potentially possible in my characters.  Looking at characterization forces me to stay aware of the process of growth in my characters.

In the first book of my series, the main character Brent Garrett from the start was driven by his perception of his mother’s expectations.  A part of me was always uncomfortable with this fact about him.  Why so driven by his mother’s attempts to control and inspire his life choices?  He’s a grown adult and should be past any dependency on what his mother wishes him to accomplish.  But that is only one part of his story just as our own lives are replete with challenges.  We don’t get them one at a a time.  He doesn’t either.  Still I had to examine my discomfort with his difficulties in order to understand his.

So when I look at my own life and consider the things that have driven my actions, I must confess that the loss of my mother when I was an infant played a strong factor in my wanting to emulate her.  And it had an even stronger influence on my efforts to make sure my father was proud of me.  At one point in my teenage life, I became aware that he gained me shortly before he lost his wife, my mother.  I did not stand a chance of replacing her.  I could only hope he would find my efforts to be the best I could adequate.

When I reached adulthood, I found that every time I visited my father, he attempted to place me back in a childhood role.  It wasn’t until I had been married several years, spent numerous phone calls learning about his experience watching my mother die over a six month period while playing both father and mother to two small children that we grew beyond the loss together.  I hadn’t seen him in four years, though we had talked on the phone regularly.  When I came to visit, it was to find he had suffered a heart attack while I was traveling the 1200 miles to get to my parents’ home (he had remarried).  He was in the hospital and his perspective had gone through a tremendous change. 

The challenges I had gone through entering and growing in adulthood and his own brush with death had caused us both to change, to make new choices and to see ourselves and others in new ways.  So Brent had a perception of himself governed by his mother’s expectations and desires for his “success.”  Through book 1 and book 2 of my series Students of Jump, Brent reached adulthood and whether his mother was ready for him to grow beyond her wishes or not, he did.  Picard worked to understand the choices the second Picard made, and my father and I climbed over the wall that had divided us, interfering with our view of ourselves and our understanding of each other.

Yeah, that is what I like about writing — seeing characters evolve as questions are generated and answered.  And evolving myself along the way.

Tuesday prompt: #10 2013

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This is an exercise for plotting.  Below is a plot that contains a major flaw: the main character has no challenge to reaching her goal.  Replot the events so that the character still gets to the goal, but she doesn’t have an easy time of it.

  • Susie eats at the same diner each day without fail, ordering eggs, bacon, and hash browns.  Though she does not know the cook’s name, he always nods at her when he sees her head for a her favorite booth in the corner.  A short time later, her breakfast arrives.
  • Sam enters and takes the booth beside her own.  She sits looking in his direction over the two seat backs, he hers.
  • Each time she looks up, she finds herself looking into his eyes.  He smiles every time.
  • She hasn’t any ketchup at her table and asks him if he could pass her his.  He walks it over to her and waits for her to finish before returning to his own seat.
  • She eats every bite, pleased she didn’t have to do so without the ketchup.

(And you thought this was all about Susie and Sam.)

Now the goal is the ketchup.  Time to alter the plot so that she still gets the ketchup but the process is not easy.

Writing workshop: taking the risk to grow as a writer

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A couple of weeks ago, my creative writing class held their monthly workshop.  I have ten students working on various writing forms: poetry, short story, prose essay and novel.  What I noticed is they did not seem to know what to tell each other.   Each one knew what he or she wanted from the others but did not have confidence that the others would want the same.  There were so many, “Hey, your story is just great.  I like all the comic moments.  You really made me laugh.”  No substance to the criticism.  No chance for growth.  And then big, bad teacher thing had to sit there and attack failing description, pages of telling without concrete, sensory imagery, dialogue that offered little characterization, weak construction and a complete disregard for punctuating dialogue and paragraphing.  These students know better.  So why the sudden regression?

This was the sixth workshop we had this year, and my students had gotten
over shyness and taking things personally.  But a new student joining
us from another school and choosing not to speak at all when poetry was
on the floor seemed to take a lot of the earned confidence away from
those who were gaining familiarity with the forms they felt less
comfortable with.

Turning the light on in workshop

Today we sat down and talked about what each writer wanted to know to improve the work submitted to the workshop.   There were some revealing moments.  There had been a real division between the poets and the prose writers, a strong belief that there was little they had in common.  But as they added to the list on the board that each wanted feedback on, so much turned out to be the same: imagery, purpose, viewpoint, consistency, tone, tense, timing, conventions.  Sure there were areas that had greater need:  my novelists needed to know that they were consistent with the details, and my poets’ main concerns were imagery and message.  But they still all needed this feedback to improve and most importantly wanted it.  By the end of our discussion there was a better sense of how not just to use the workshop to benefit oneself, but how to provide the best assistance to the other writers.

This one class discussion brought back the chance for growth in all of them and put a stop to the belief that there was any good reason to sit out when a less familiar form was needing feedback.  It is two weeks before our next workshop.  I will probably have a briefing the day before we start so they can recapture this new view of criticizing each genre and how they can assist their peers in growing as writers.

Revisiting linear vs non-linear plots parallel plots

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Back on 10/10/12, I wrote about a redraft I was working on for In Times Passed.  I had set up two parallel plots, one linear and one non-linear.  I felt pretty good about the changes, but I was uncertain about if the reader would be able to follow the non-linear plot line.  I had chosen the non-linear scenes to match to the linear flow based on common links in dialogue, which seemed a reasonable approach to connecting the two plot lines.

You know that part of you that syncs together what you write, that manages the pull of imagery, purpose, characterization, depth of character, release of the gathering of facts?  The inner coil that tightens as you develop plot and bothers you when things are not working. Well that place, that wellspring of creativity was giving me muffled bursts of dismay at that non-linear flow, unflow.  Last week, just to check, I moved the pieces about and straightened out the sister plot so they both ran chronologically in line but not in the same time frame (one is set in the future).  That muffled burst of dismay settled down with a contented sigh.  There was no mistaking it. 

I am letting it rest as I line edit and watch out for any more muffled bursts.  My advice, if something in you is protesting, check it out.  Make the changes called for and see if you find creative peace.  You can always revert back to the original draft.

When I have trouble getting the words out

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What some might call a mild form of the infamous writer’s block.  I have never suffered from the extreme form.  I do have times when a scene I have in mind isn’t working, but I don’t call that writer’s block.  It is more a case of not having worked out the details or I am expecting something from my character that really isn’t what he or she would do, or maybe not how that character would do it.

On Goodreads recently a writer was looking for advice on how to overcome her writer’s block.  I made some suggestions but they were based on my practices to improve my effort when I felt I was failing to produce something worthwhile.  It has never been a case of not being able to put words on the page, which does sound awful, something I do not want to face.

So these are the things I do when my writing is not up to snuff.

  • I go read someone I think is a great writer and hope his or her ability will rub off or inspire my own (my writer’s muse frequently is named Heinlein.  I can’t tell you how many times I have read Door into Summer).
  • I lay my self down on the couch, close my eyes and imagine my character in the scene I am working on.  I put in all the details: lighting, decor, emotion, what happened just before, what is going to happen after.  Soon there will be dialogue of either the character talking to me or to some other character. At some point, I find something I simply must start writing, and I am off the couch.
  • Sometimes, convinced I am just tired, I will go to lie down and that will last all of two minutes.  Counter to my intentions, I suddenly have plenty to write.
  • I tell my self to just write anything, summarize what I wanted to cover, write a scene that is needed, dredge up an old hurt my character has, anything, good or bad.  At some point I am warmed up enough that I have something to write worth writing.  I never expect perfection.  I always tell myself, “Hey, you are going to redraft it anyway.”
  • When there are times that I cannot write, but I really want to, I record it on the memo app on my phone. Then when I am actually able to write and can’t think of the wording, I listen to the recording which always has some key line that I can leap off of, and then I write. 
  • A writer once told me (YA and children’s novelist Joan Oppenheimer) never leave your writing finished. Always leave yourself at a point where you know where the plot is going next or what the next issue is, whatever. Make a quick note to yourself about what is next.  Then when I come back, there is my reminder. I don’t have to stare at a blank sheet, something is already waiting for me.
  • I review the scenes I know are coming up and see if one seems ready to be written now.  I’ll write it and later fill in the missing space that I was having trouble with.  I have the start and now the end point, so filling in the middle won’t be so difficult.