Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

Tools for writing

Exercise: Writing the logline

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Getting my logs in a line

I visited +HannahHeath’s blog recently and read her great post on writing loglines for novels. It galvanized me to work at mine a second time. So here’s my loglines for all my Student of Jump books.

In Time Passed, Students of Jump Book 1


Logline: An accidental inventor of time travel
takes his desire for anonymity back 200 years, but his struggle to live as an
average Joe demands he accept the expectations present at his birth and use
them to recreate society and put into motion what he jumped into the past to
avoid.

No-time like the Present, Students of Jump Book 2
Logline: The abandoned daughter of a time traveler takes
her skill of testing prototypes to their breaking point and applies it to a
time jumper sent to check on her, convincing him he must take her forward in
time to demand answers from her father whose guilt for leaving her and devotion
to her dead mother is both less and more than she could have expected or
imagined understanding.

Next Time We Meet, Students of Jump Book 3
Logline: Recently trained to travel in time and set to
take a honeymoon in the past, an anachronistic building contractor and his
quick-witted wife find the leisure life lacks challenge, so they take on locating
a missing and notably annoying physitech, placing them in the cross hairs of the
kidnapping entity as they jump through time chasing clues of uncertain reliability.

That’s the Trouble with Time (publication date sometime this summer), Students of Jump Book 4.

Logline: When a student of jump taking his first
solo time traveling assignment meets up with a determined renegade fighting
the world government for freedom from oppression, he finds losing his jump unit
is just one problem he has to fix, quickly followed by how he can protect his
heart from being the next thing he loses, especially when she keeps throwing it
back at him.

Follow this link if you are looking to revamp your own loglines and need a refresher course.
Hannah Heath: How to Write an Awesome Logline for your Novel

#writing
#loglines
+HannahHeath

Creativity: inspiration thru anticipation

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Overwhelmed by stuff, use anticipation to inspire.

Creativity is best when the appetite is wet.

I have already said that teaching encroaches on my writing time.  Remember the movie The Thing? That is the life of the English teacher: pursued by an engulfing pile of stuff.  The teaching thing just eats everything up.  So I need every trick in the book to take advantage of my writing opportunities.  My most often used technique is anticipation.

  •  Work taking over  your life and it’s been more than a month and you haven’t written creatively in weeks? What do I do?  I start with little self talks.  “Thanksgiving is just a few more weeks away.  Keep your grading up to date. Don’t overload the kids ’cause that just comes back and bites off another chunk of your time.  Keep it steady and high quality, but keep it under control so Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, SUMMER! will all be yours.”
  • Weekly overload? I grade everything I can Friday night, having promised that Saturday will supply a slice of time for writing.  Then I am back on the grading, planning, prepping mode come Sunday, ready for Monday. Plug in any huge “thing” you want into the spot labeled “grade.”
  • It’s getting worse instead of better? When it is an especially hard year, which the last two have been due to changes in education objectives and focus, I can go nearly an entire school year without more than ten hours of personal writing time in ten months.  So those days of summer become a mantra of anticipatory excitement. 
  • Use all non-work time that can’t be given to writing time to brainstorm time. I use the moments when I can feasibly say I can’t grade, teach, plan, prep or do anything house related or family related to brainstorm and review scenes.  That means showers, the fifteen minutes before I fall asleep, putting on makeup and doing my hair, running on the treadmill, vacuuming, etc., are for thinking about what I am going to write when I get the chance. The idea is you have everything ready to go when the time to write finally comes.  You’re excited about writing because you know exactly what you are going to do. It will practically type itself.
  • Carry the image/scene/dialogue everywhere you go. Sure this may mean you never talk in the car when your partner is driving. They get over it. My husband has. I am quiet in the car whether its twenty minutes or two hours, but my mind is not. I am revolving the scene over and over looking for telling details, foreshadowing that can be slid in, characterization, and what else can be carried by the scene other than the original idea that set it off.

Next week: how to make multitasking your creativity work for you.

So how do you deal with the overwhelming activities you do to pay your bills and such to make room for writing?  Writers who write for a living are not allowed to respond.  You may smirk off in a  corner somewhere, quietly.

#creativity
#anticipation
#writing

Creativity: get it in capture mode

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Be ready to pounce on the writing moment.

So last week I blogged about how creativity can be dependent upon routine.  I do use this to a degree during the summer months, but I am just as likely to use the capture mode.

This is when you sit down to do one thing and inspiration hits.  It stops everything: “I have to write now” time. This happens to me fairly regularly. It is not that I have the kind of life that I can put things off any time I want to sit down and write. I don’t, far from it. But I have learned that when I feel the need to write, I better look around and see if I can arrange it without delay.

I teach English, probably one of the most planned, graded and time-consuming subjects to teach. I happen to enjoy teaching it, but it is a life eater. So if there is a moment free, the first thing I do is sit a quite moment and see if anything has been waiting to bubble up. There will be a rise of excitement in my chest, much like when I know there are only three more days before I am heading out on a long-awaited trip. I listen for a stream of dialogue running through my mind, look for an image rising out of the silence and words playing bumper cars between my ears.  Time to sit down and write.

This is capture mode. Grab it while the grabbing has a chance at nipping at the heels of a plot, post, character sketch, etc. I once stopped my husband mid-drive to a bicycle race to buy me a notebook and pencil. I needed to write that moment and had potentially hours of quiet writing time ahead of me between driving to the race and back over the mountains to and from Eugene’s Tandem Classic (the Burley Classic, I believe now defunct, and before you ask, this is before the invention of the laptop).  When the urge is there, take advantage of a ready mind.

This is writing on the run and has the likelihood of being intensely productive because the time could disappear at any moment, so there is no room for sharpening a row of pencils, finding the perfectly flat piece of paper or the cozy niche no one is likely to stumble into. You may have to sit in the stiff- backed wooden chair with the tippy corner; ignore the seat belt, blasting radio and kid kicking the back of your seat; lean against the wall, hair whipping in your face, paper leaping up where your fingers can’t stretch to hold it down while you write. Yup, you don’t even have time to hunt; just pounce and land on the scittering, scattering words, grab with straining claws, pull them to your chest, and start laying out one word at a time (though if any one knows of a way to simultaneous set out words in lumps I want to hear about it).

So that’s capture mode. What examples of capture mode have you experienced?  I’m sure you’ve had a few wild writing stories you could tell, so share them here.

Next creative post: building desire to write.

Feel free to follow me here, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest. There are means to this end about this blog.

#creativity
#writing
#inspiration

Regional word choice: would you rather a frappe or a cabinet?

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Not just plants are regional: words, too.

I moved all over the place when I was a kid, and I collected words and differences in pronunciation of words like most kids collected bubble gum trading cards.

Milkshake, cabinet, frappe

Even though these words reference the same thing, each brings a different feel to the image. When I think of a frappe being served at my table, the imagined tall glass of white is full of lumpy froth at the top with condensation on the glass so thick it is opaque, and the only places where I can see the milky fluid is where the fingertips of the waitress touched.  And the container is cold, and I cannot view it as any color other than white, with the smell of vanilla beans thick in the breath I take before slurping in the first taste of half air half tantalizing sponginess that sounds like distant firecrackers as the tiny bubbles pop against my lips. 

Tennis shoe, sneaker

I wore sneakers into my teens.  When I first heard there were shoes called tennis shoes, I thought I had to play tennis to wear them.

route: route (root) or route (rout)

Don’t ask me for directions unless you are prepared to hear me switch back and forth in my pronunciation of this word and not even know I am doing it.

aunt: aunt (ant) or aunt (awnt) or aunt (tante)

I only used the first two of this one.  I had two aunts, one on each coast.  I met them when I was a child.  I thought saying Aunt (ant) Sue and Aunt (awnt) Peg was just a case of that being their names, similar to Sally Ann or Jim Bob. Later I understood that they resided on different coasts and geography made all the difference.

submarine sandwich, hoagie, grinder, sub, Italian, hero, wedge

I can still remember when my family was moving from Massachusetts to New Jersey.  We had been traveling for what seemed like all day, and we went into one shop to get something to eat.  I looked at the menu and had no idea what they were offering.  I wanted a submarine sandwich, but there were none listed.  Would a hoagie taste good?  I was about 12 years old and thought this was probably the only place in the US silly enough to call them hoagies.

purse, pocketbook, bag, handbag

This one still gets me in trouble.  I say pocketbook and my students give me blank looks. They trust that I know what I am talking about, but they don’t know what I am talking about.

toilet, john, head, loo, porcelain pony, commode

I only came across the first three of these in my travels.  Toilet is my word of choice, but recently my husband was explaining what a room in the house we are building was and said “commode.”  My daughter looked at me unsure of what we were putting in the house. So I had to explain.

The second one I am very familiar with, but “john” is one I just can’t use.  Both my grandfathers were named John, my brother and my father.  But my mom thought it was quite funny to say things like, “John is in the john” or “We have several johns, are you looking to talk or use?”  My dad was a Navy man, and when out on the ocean fishing, he always said “head” but never in the house.  And he never referred to a toilet as a john.

What makes word choice so important? It adds characterization and settings if you are picking a specific region for your story. What regional words have you noted?  Do you know the reason behind their use?

Seeking the perfect junction: crossing the gap between what is written & what is read

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Readers need to connect the content to their own lives.

Recently I was reading Jane
Eyre.  The narrator and main
character Jane was describing a view of Rochester seated alone in a darkened
room, and suddenly I was transported back about ten years and the memory of
walking into my father’s office to see him seated at his desk, quiet, lost in
thought, came quickly to mind. 

My father
had lost much of his vision, which for a man who loved to read and tinker with
electronics in his retirement was tragic. 
He did not know I had entered, so for just that brief moment I saw how
disappointed he was in his situation.   One of his hands reached to run fingers over his watch and prompt it to tell him the time. A magnifying glass mounted on an articulating arm was close to his face, and just inches beneath the glass a second magnifying glass hung. 

Of
course, as soon as he was aware I was there, his whole countenance changed to
one of pleasure and good cheer.  He
joked, worked hard to track my movements with his eyes, told me how much I
looked like his father, but I knew I was mostly blur for him.  His once lovely penmanship was a broken
scrawl, and the confidence at which he moved about the house or located things
was because he had memorized where everything was and was precise in keeping
each to its proper place.

Moved by this memory of my father, I could not but be moved by poor Rochester’s fate.  This is how writers connect their work to their readers.  They strike a chord that links to some piece
of our lives, one we have or one we wish we had, as well as those we wish we didn’t. 


My beta reader, Marcy Peska, read the first book in my series Students of Jump (In Times Passed).  In her notes on my draft, she would comment on what a scene triggered in her or how a piece of dialogue caught her attention.  At one point halfway through the novel, she had written in a note “Nooo, I did not see this coming. I have to break away.”  Then the note continued explaining that she had needed to stop for a “mini-meltdown.”  Marcy had been immersed in the scene and what occurred had caught her up so emotionally, she could not go on reading without some distance to recover her equilibrium.  She loved the scene and hated it at the same time because it had bridged the gap between the text and the imagination.  Goal achieved.  It was a tough scene to write and tough to read, which was precisely what I was going for.

Rochester’s injuries had that effect on me.  I hated seeing my father that way, but because of the quality of Bronte’s writing, I could imagine what Rochester must look like and what Jane must be feeling. The scene was real to me. I had sympathy for both characters, and the scene was authentic because it bridged the two events: fiction and reality.

This is the challenge of every writer and the need that every reader wants filled.  We want to connect, to find some essence of our own experience that draws us into the scene.  The writer must still supply well-written dialogue, description, imagery, finely drawn characters, etc., but what is most vital is that the reader have a way to travel the created moment with a sense of familiarity and originality combined.

What work of fiction or biography caught you, the reader, in such a moment?  Please share that moment of connectiveness, the author, text scene.

#writing
#readers
#connection

Reading the Heinlein biography, part 1: an immersion in the writing process

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I have been a fan of Heinlein’s for more than forty
years.  When he was alive, I watched
constantly for his next publication, and I have read nearly everything he has
written and a great deal of what has been written about his work.  Learning only recently that there was an
official biography about him leaves me rather late in following up my past
diligence, but I am glad I didn’t find these two volumes by William H. Patterson, Jr.,
until this month.  Now was the time for
me to read about Heinlein’s writing experience and process. 
I learned so much more about writing and my favorite author
reading these texts. I found numerous levels of understanding about the
process, organization and publication of writing, working with agents and
editors and publishing in general (though, of course, there have been changes,
the human element should not have altered much).  There was also the personal element of being
a writer, champion of ideas and role model that was just as provocative and
informative, but that will be for another post.
Below is a list of what I found important to Heinlein’s
process, important to any writer’s effort to write well.

  • Use index cards to organize and maintain ideas. Sure there are numerous electronic
    organizers, but I like the inspiration that comes from being able to shuffle, redistribute and overlap
    ideas on a 3×5.      I am definitely going to work with this
    approach. Heinlein used index cards to jot down ideas and even carried them around with him when working on a story. When enough ideas started to
    come together, they were kept in a group, and he would refer back or add to them
    as his story grew.  The system gained
    structure as his ideas and completed writing grew.  So they (his wife Virginia Heinlein came up with his indexing
    structure) set up a filing system that
    categorized the ideas and identified each published or work in progress.  Each book or WIP acquired its own indexing
    number. I am going to use his system to
    build one that will work for me.
  • Gather research: he was constantly researching
    science, technology, engineering, etc., to ensure accuracy in his writing.  I do
    research, but I think I need to develop this process more and in a less
    isolated manner – both broad and deep so there is more overlap and more
    connections built and therefore more material for writing.     
  • Read up on a lot of topics: Heinlein was not
    afraid to read a tome far above his level of understanding. He was known to
    seek out specialists in his field of interest and have them teach him what he
    needed to know so he could understand in-depth writing in the field he was
    curious about. This is an area I need to
    work on.     
  • Gather a cadre of authorities to tap. No explanation needed here. 
  •  Let ideas stew, even for years.  Some books half written sat around waiting
    for the right idea, the new understanding or experience before they were ready
    to be completed.  He fought for every
    piece he wrote to get to its end, but he also was ready to recognize when
    something just was not ready for prime time. 
  •  Have an overall plan for a book.  For some writers this is not a useful tidbit.
    But for me it is. I realize more and more
    that I am playing catchup with my stories about two thirds through.  I knew where I wanted to start and where I
    thought it would end.  I often have a set
    of events I expect to fill the middle with on the way to start and finish, but
    I realize at that 2/3rds point that I failed to consider the reader interaction
    that goes with the connecting of these two points.  I think that is what that overall plan means
    to me.  I need to have the bones
    organized earlier for my books.  Even if
    I deviate in the process of writing, I will have still worked out much of what
    the intercourse will be between the story and the reader that is essential.     
  •  Use mythologies and connecting images or
    principals in a work.  The underlying
    pieces are so essential.  
    Heinlein would work out what mythology or images he wanted to imbed in his
    stories to link events and ideas together within a work.
  •  Making use of personal experience. I suppose
    this falls under “write about what you know,” but I think it is
    deeper than this, and I think writers naturally incorporate their own
    accumulated bundle of tragedy, comedy and drama. We all can take an experience
    and pick out the magic pieces that add depth and authenticity to our work. 
  •  The benefit of a participating spouse: providing
    ideas and feedback and being a resource of information.  Heinlein was fortunate that both ex-wife
    Leslyn Heinlein and his wife Virginia Heinlein were willing to be a part of his
    writing process and business. Not all writers have a spouse who is willing to
    provide this deep of a commitment. Mine
    hits at about the 5 percent when it comes to involvement, but he is
    tremendously supportive. He uses the word “work” when he asks what I
    am doing as I am typing on the computer. 
    He’ll say, “Is that for school or are you working?”  I love that. And he’s growing in this
    area.  After all, he is the one that made
    sure the plans for our house included an office for me.     
  •  Reading inside and outside your genre.  Heinlein kept up on both scientific writings
    as well as contemporary fiction.  He believed it
    advanced his writing quite a bit and resulted in his hybrid Science Fiction
    style which ultimately changed the scope of the genre. I write also contemporary short story and poetry, read for pleasure and
    read for study, but I could still enlarge on this. (I read three biographies in
    the last month, and that is more of that genre than I normally read in a year.)     
  •  Don’t be afraid and even seek to write something
    different, challenging or disruptive. 
    Several of Heinlein’s works, according to his bio, he did not expect to be
    accepted for publication. They were just too different:  Stranger
    in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love,     and Number of the Beast. But they were accepted and each were met with near instant success. 
  •  Don’t be afraid to create your own genre. Heinlein
    moved away from the strict confines of what constituted Science Fiction. (What
    was new and different in his time is very much the norm of our own.) 
  •  Submit to small presses and lower-end magazines
    to begin with. Submit?! Okay, I am
    working up to this. There is a time commitment here because of the research,
    selection process and keeping track of what is out and where it has been. I am
    going to squeeze it in. I promised myself and I am going to do it.     So
    Submit! 
  •  Submit repeatedly and continuously. Since we’re
    on the subject, Heinlein just kept things heading out the door until it found a
    buyer. Just keep flinging them off the
    merry-go-round until they land on their feet.     
  •  Take all criticism under consideration and
    follow what feels right.  I like this
    especially about Heinlein.  His stories
    had to meet his internal critic and his external (spouse).  Once it passed those two road blocks, he
    fought for it.  He took criticism that
    would make a work better but routinely refused to castrate or turn a work into
    weak milk. None of my current work is a
    challenge to society being largely written for entertainment, so this mandate does not apply too heavily to my work.
    But should I write something that pulls hair, I won’t let myself be forced to
    back down in order to keep a segment of society from having to take off their
    rose-colored glasses.     
  •  Join groups that augment or support your
    genre/subject/intentions.  Heinlein
    wasn’t much for writing groups, but he did form his own quasi-feedback
    groups.  Lucky stiff, he had Pohl,
    Azimov, Savage, the Smiths, Bova, the Sturgeons etc. They talked shop, shared ideas, helped develop
    plots, kept each other informed of new technology and writing aids.  Heinlein once bought another writer a
    typewriter because he felt it had been such an aid to lightening up his work
    load and time spent in production. 
  •  Keep organized files and sift through them.  This is much related to an earlier point, but
    the reason why it is separate is that one must do more than just organize the
    works and ideas.  You must review them,
    add and combine.  If they sit in a drawer
    than all they will ever do is sit in a drawer.
#writing
#Heinlein
#writingprocess