A quick note before I jump into my post about plotting: My footnote to yesterday's post gathered several comments of its own, so I've decided to post a short series on the topic next week. Stay tuned!

Now, onto plotting.

tinachristopher asked: How do you deal with plot problems though? I have the seedling of a story, the 2 main characters and the baddie and I know where I want to end up. At the moment I'm still staring at that big gap in the middle, so any advice on how to fill the hole would be appreciated.

Ah, the Dreaded Middle. There are a few different approaches that I take:

The WWJD Approach
Assuming I have some sort of beginning (which may or may not end up being the *actual* beginning), I try to put myself in my characters' shoes and think about what I would do next. Literally. This sounds overly simplistic, but it works. What's the logical next step here? If I was in X situation with Y information (and so on), what's the next thing I would do?

There are a few pitfalls to this approach, however.

First, I am most definitely *not* my character. So I need to make sure that I test whatever my next move would be against my character's personality, background, etc. to make sure it makes sense for that to be his/her next move.

Second, I'm working towards a predetermined goal or ending, so I need to make sure the next move both feels logical and natural for my character and leads him/her in the direction of that goal/ending. I also typically write with at least a few subplots woven in (I like really full storylines), so I also have to figure out how the next move will impact those, if at all.

Third, sometimes the next move in real life is something like "eat lunch" or "take a shower" or "go grocery shopping." But unless I find a way to tie those activities to the action of the plot, I need to skip them and move onto the next next move. :)

The Spiderweb Approach
If I'm coming up blank with the WWJD method, it probably means I don't know enough about an aspect of the story yet. My theory is that if I understand the characters, their motivations, their connections to each other, how they are similar to each other, how they are different from each other, and how they tie into the worldbuilding (which assumes I have a firm understanding of the worldbuilding, itself), then the plotting should flow pretty easily.

If I'm stuck, I start with the individual characters first (the innermost rings of the spiderweb, if you will). Do I really understand who they are? What they want from life? What they don't want? What major experiences in their lives have shaped them? What their flaws are?

Then I move out to a slightly broader view: How do the characters connect with each other? What are their relationships to each other? How do they positively and negatively affect each other? How do they challenge each other? Are they foils? Are they opposites? Are they struggling with similar challenges but in different ways? And so on. I think this is REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT to understand in order to fully develop your plot and make your characters and their relationships seem real, as well as to get the most out of them.

Then I move out to what I see as the broadest view: How does the world I've created affect my characters and their relationships with each other and vice versa? Where do they fit in the world? How has the world shaped them? And so on.

If I can dig deep enough into these questions, I can typically get enough information that I can bounce back to the WWJD approach or the Vignette approach to continue plotting. If I'm still stuck, either I'm not digging deep enough into my characters, I still don't understand everything about them or the world, I need to change something about them to better align them with each other, or I just plain don't have a full story.

The Vignette Approach
Sometimes I'll have a handful of scenes (the vignettes) but not the full, sequential middle. In this case, I can use the Vignette approach, which is great for psyching myself out of plotting anxiety. Here's how it works:

Let's say I have only three scenes so far: the beginning, one in the middle and the end. I think about the characters and the world and another scene eventually pops into my head. Not in a linear way (like in WWJD, my preferred method of plotting), but I can see my characters doing something that appears to gel with my storyline. Okay. Does this happen before the middle scene or after? Before. Super! Now, I have a scene between the beginning and the middle. All I have to do is figure out how to get my character from the beginning scene to the new scene and then from the new scene to the middle scene. Easy, peasy! Like fractions.

Okay, not really, Ssssh! In reality, I probably need several scenes between the beginning and the one I just came up with, just like I'll need several between it and the middle scene I had. But I find that thinking more simplistically like this takes the pressure off and allows me to just relax into the characters and the story.

So then as I'm trying to figure out how my characters got to the new scene, I'll come up with something new. This will either fill the gap between the beginning and the previous scene, or it will slice it in half again.

I just keep leap-frogging through the story this way, not worrying about whether the ideas I'm coming up with are robust or linear. They're points in the story and I place them where they need to be and worry about connecting them all later. By the time I get that far, my wheels are usually turning faster than I can type and I can just let the plot spill out.

********

Each of these approaches (and these aren't the only ones, just a handful) are meant to help get my mind burning up with the story, to get the movie playing in my head and to stow away that great creativity stifler: anxiety.

I hope this helps! I lurve to talk about plotting, so thanks for the great question. F-List, please add any other advice you may have in the comments. I'd also love to hear it. :)

I've been struggling with a character detail for a few days now. She's an important secondary character, and this particular detail will be closely tied to the story's main plot. I thought, if I could just get her to tell me* this bit about herself, then the plotting would start to fall into place. But she wouldn't give it up. I'm very eager to start the actual storytelling for this new project, so today I decided I would just push ahead with the plotting and hope that this character detail would fall into place that way, instead.

Voila! Within (I'm not kidding) ten minutes of opening my mind to plot ideas, I had the character idea nailed down.

It's good to remember that stories are not formulas. They are living, breathing, fluid mysteries that need to be coaxed out of our minds and hearts and onto the page.

*I'd like to note, for the record, that I enjoy speaking about my process this way however what I really mean when I talk about things like negotiating with my characters for information is that I was wrestling with my own mind to produce an idea worthy of the story. That's just not as fun to say. But I do believe strongly that the writer is in the driver's seat of the story and the characters, however real they may seem and feel, are still fictional. I do not believe in The Muse. I do not believe in Writer's Block. I believe in the power and creativity of my own mind (and yours!) and I believe in my ability to make mistakes and plow ahead for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words, ignoring said mistakes until I finally hit a wall and my mind refuses to produce anymore words until I fix the mess I made.

First, thanks so much to everyone who provided name suggestions. I decided on several names, each of which was THE NAME until the next one slid into my brain. :) I'm (mostly) certain the character's name is going to be Megan. So, thanks again on that. But! I need your help again! Only, this time, there will be a prize. :D

If you could never speak again (literally) and you could have ten cards with words or short phrases on them to assist you in communicating as you traveled through your life, what would your ten cards say?

This question is related to my New! Shiny! project (which, incidentally, is the Newest! Shiniest! Most Exciting! project ever) but I think it's a really interesting conversation piece and a neat way to get to know people. So, I'm genuinely curious to hear your answers as well as "research" for my new book. ;)

Leave a comment on this entry by midnight EST on Sunday, July 12th with what your cards would say and I'll pick one winner to receive a $10 iTunes gift certificate. Because, really, music is just one more way that we express ourselves and communicate with others*. This contest is open to anyone, anywhere. You don't have to list all ten words or phrases but you may not list more than ten. Please cross-post if you're so inclined.


*See what I did there? The post title is a song title that also speaks to the contest about words for which music is the prize. Heh? Heh? Get it?

Dudes! Check this out!

THE ETERNAL KISS is an anthology of vampire stories from 13 amazing YA authors:

• Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles, Tithe)
• Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty)
• Melissa De La Cruz (Blue Blood)
• Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)
• Rachel Caine (Morganville Vampires)
• Nancy Holder & Debbie Viguie (Wicked)
• Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof, Queen of Cool)
• Kelley Armstrong (The Awakening, Women of Otherworld)
• Maria V. Snyder (Magic Study, Poison Study)
• Sarah Rees Brennan (The Demon's Lexicon)
• Lili St. Crow (Strange Angels, Dante Valentine, Jill Kismet)
• Karen Mahoney (of Renee-Kaz BFF fame)
• Dina James (up and coming YA writer)

And now you can read the first six pages of the anthology for FREE on Amazon with their 'Look Inside' feature. Know whose story just happens to be the first one? Karen Mahoney's! That's right, you can get an early peek at kazdreamer 's amazing story Falling to Ash for FREE right now by clickety-clicking on this link right here. Incidentally, you can pre-order THE ETERNAL KISS via the same handy-dandy little link. Which, naturally, you'll want to do when the preview ends and you're left hanging, dying to know what happens next in Falling to Ash... *cue e-vile laugh*

This is a very complex book that reads very simply, very beautifully. It is a book about fear and desire, choice and regret, and hope. Mary is an incredibly compelling character because she is flawed. There's a lot of talk about "flawed" characters and how we must write them and how that's what readers want and so on. But not so much talk about what a "flawed" character really means. That's a whole other post entirely, but the point is: Carrie nails it.

Mary is a creature of desire; she wants more than what she has, more than what's given to her, more than she's told is all there is--it's what drives her. It's also what draws others to her, and what pushes them away. But the world that Mary lives in isn't kind to those who desire more and Mary is forced to choose over and over: is this enough?

Yes, there are zombies in THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH. :D The world Carrie has created is unique and terrifying. But it was Mary's inner struggle that really provoked my emotions.

Highly recommended. Go! Buy! Love!

Below is the book trailer for Maggie Stiefvater's (m_stiefvater ) SHIVER. There are some important things you should know before watching it:

1. I'm not a big fan of book trailers. I know, that's a weird way to intro a book trailer, right? But you'll understand why I'm telling you that when you get to #4. But don't look at that yet. Read #'s 2 & 3 first.
2. Maggie cut out all the lovely paper figures herself.
3. Maggie also composed the music herself.
4. After I watched this trailer last night, I couldn't stop thinking about it. The music and imagery haunted me. It made me want to tell the story of the emotions it evoked.

Now, I will share it with you:




Maggie is hosting a contest related to the trailer here which, although I've entered, isn't the reason I posted the trailer here. Something this evocative is too good to keep to oneself once discovered.

We all have our writing quirks, right? Well one of mine is that I can't fully dig into the plot of a new story idea until I know the main character's name.

And I have a wonderfully shiny new idea to work on. *rubs hands together greedily* *wonders if she just made up the word 'greedily'*

So, can you help a girl out? I'm looking for an ordinary female name. Like Jane, except that's too cliche. Suggestions?

Such an exciting couple of days in the UF world! Today, these two books are officially on the shelves:

DARKNESS CALLS is the second full length novel in Marjorie M. Liu's urban fantasy series. Here's the back cover copy:
They are the obsidian shadows of my flesh - tattoos with minds, hearts, and dreams. By day, they protect me. But when night calls to them, they leave my body, dissolving into their true form - as demons…
Nomad born and bred, demon hunter Maxine Kiss has always relied upon herself to fight the darkness that surrounds her, the predators-human, zombie, and otherwise - who threaten the earth. But one man has penetrated her lonely life: Grant, the last of his kind. With music he is able to control any living creature…including demons. And now his life is in danger.

Haunted by the past, determined to change the future, Maxine soon understands that to save Grant, she has only one choice-to lose control, and release her own powers of darkness…

I was lucky enough to find this early. I'll be catching up on reviews this weekend and will post a proper one then, but in the meantime know this: it's excellent . If you haven't checked out this series yet, don't wait. It begins with Hunter Kiss, a novella found either in e-format or in the anthology WILD THINGS, followed by THE IRON HUNT and now DARKNESS CALLS (the last two are both full length novels).

CITY OF SOULS is the fourth book in Vicki Pettersson's Signs of the Zodiac series. Here's the back cover copy:

Joanna Archer, Agent of Light, has survived a violent initiation into the paranormal world lurking behind the seedy seams of Las Vegas. She's found a home, friends, and even t he chance for a new life and love.
But evil never rests, and to save her beloved city, and herself, Joanna must venture into a new world hidden among the shadows, one where the line between good and evil is barely visible, every agent is a rogue ... and each breath could be her last.

This is a great series and offers readers truly unique worldbuilding. Again, if you haven't had a chance to check out this series yet, now's the perfect time: you can read the entire first book for free here.


Tomorrow is the official release day for this book:

I know. I was all, "I'm back! Really! I swear! Posting, posting, posting!" and then I disappeared for four days. Here's the thing: we had tornadoes.

Kind of unusual for Connecticut, but we New Englanders like to keep everyone guessing when it comes to weather. Luckily, we didn't have any damage to our yard (probably because we lost 16 trees in a storm a couple of years ago) but three houses down was complete devastation. Not a single tree left untouched, many not left standing. Our power was out for a good portion of the weekend, but we fared so much better than our neighbors and people in nearby towns. Here's a picture of a house in another town that was completely devastated by a tornado, although the exact same type of house-cleaving happened here, too, just a few streets over:

(Pic thanks to courant.com)

Crazy stuff. So we fell asleep to the sound of chainsaws Friday night and woke to them Saturday morning.

The aftermath of this is pretty crazy, as was the storm a couple of years ago when we lost all those trees. But those storms were very quick. The craziest for me was Hurricane Gloria in 1985. I was too young then to really comprehend what the storm meant to the people who would have to pay for the damage it caused, but I remember being frightened and awestruck by the sheer force of it and the sense of being completely at its mercy.

I'm curious to hear - what's the most extreme weather you've ever experienced?

Oh hai. I am back from my whirlwind* period of social activity! I give you a quick recap of the past several days in photo-form, because I have become addicted to posting pics on my blog:

( pictospam under the cut )I should be back on a regular blogging schedule now (yay) with *actual* content (gasp!). Topics to be addressed shortly: 1st person POV and hooks (the literary kind, you pervs!).

*Am I the only one who wants to put an extra h in there: whirlwhind? (Besides JR Ward, obviously.)

...is that it can sometimes be the most powerful thing in the world. Both good and bad.

In lieu of posting today, I'll ask that you take the 2 minutes you would have spent reading here, and click through to Justine Larbalestier's blog to read her entry. Powerful stuff.

My busy schedule should be subsiding soon and I'm looking forward to getting back to a more regular blogging schedule in addition to more structured writing time. Yikes. Seems like the calendar just jumped up and swallowed me for a while there.

A couple of things for today...

First, I want to point you to kellyrfineman . Kelly, besides being an all around lovely person, has a really freaking cool blog. She works really hard* to write smart, educational posts that are sort of like mini-classes. Only not boring. :) She's declared June to be Shakespeare month over at her place and, being a fan of The Bard myself, I've had a great time reading all of her insightful information on his work. Go check it out! Did I mention there are contests...?

I thought I'd leave you with this quote to ponder:


I thought about how true this is and the cost it has on our relationships and our personal and spiritual** growth, which is unsettling in itself and certainly worth considering. However, the reason I bring it up here is that I also spent some time thinking about what this truth means for us as writers.

We write about life and, whether we portray it exactly as it happens around us or package it in an alternate world, we're siphoning from life's experiences to make the stories come alive. The more indirectly we experience our own lives--to Mr. Gore's point--the thinner those experiences are going to be and the cheaper the stories are going to feel.

Take a few minutes to think about this yourself. Read this post on the Deadline Dames if you haven't already. Consider scheduling a little more time each day that is technology free. :)

*Either that, or she's a genius. Maybe both?
**I don't mean religious here, but rather emotional and soulful -- the growth of the you who you are.

Happy Birthday kazdreamer !

Here's my birthday wish for you (quote courtesy of Red Ravine)

” A new journey to be started.
A new promise to be fulfilled.
A new page to be written.
Go forth unto this waiting world with pen in hand, all you young scribes,
the open book awaits.
Be creative.
Be adventurous.
Be original.
And above all else, be young.
For youth is your greatest weapon, your greatest tool.
Use it wisely.”   
–Wonder Woman # 62 by George Perez

(Just, uh, pretend your name is Jeni today. 'Kay?)

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

inkbabies gave me 'R'...



I went with an eclectic mix that's very representative of my favorite playlists. :)

Hi. *waves* Thought I'd drop in and see how everyone was doing, lest I lose my following entirely. ;) Real Life* has been kicking my ass lately and promises to continue doing so for the remainder of the week, therefore I shall continue to be scarce around the interwebs. Tomorrow evening I have another Writer Playdate with my friend Jon (yay!), which will hopefully turn into a regular thing. I'll be working on the third version of my synopsis. {koff koff} I have a six page version and a one page version, but some agents allow up to three pages. Seeing as the one pager is only a hair past a query letter, I'll be creating a three page version tomorrow night. Then I'll be pretty much prepared for anything!

On a completely unrelated note, I found this from a friend and thought it was a really great point to keep in mind. Thus, I share it with you...




*I hate this term because it implies that all of you are not a part of my "real" life and that's simply not true. However, I don't have another term handy to differentiate between online happenings and non-online happenings.

I'm operating on just a handful of hours of sleep so I'm going to slink off to my bed ridiculously early. However, I wanted to make sure my writer friends saw this guest post from Dan Case on Rachelle Gardner's blog. It's about how tough the biz can be and a way to tell if you should keep picking yourself up and dusting yourself off or throw in the towel for good. I loved it.

I'll be scarce for the next week or so as real life events kidnap my laptop time. Be good while I'm gone. :)