My writing process blog tour!

I’ve been invited to participate in a blog tour about the writing process, started by Maya Rock.  Maya used to be a literary agent at Writer's House. I know this because I queried her a couple times because she seemed totally cool and like someone I'd like to work with, but we all now how the query process is and, well, that didn't pan out. Now she's an editor and writer and the one who started this blog hop. Go check out her website. Her first YA novel comes out next year. Yay Maya!!

So this blog hop is an ongoing opportunity to get to know something about how writers see their processes (um, processes? are there such things as processes?) It's kind of like playing tag. Today I'm it. I was chosen by Facebook friend and fellow YA author, Stephanie Feuer (see how her name is a link? click on that and go check her out). You will see who I've tagged and will be posting a week from today at the end of this post.


Let's get started shall we. I'm supposed to answer four questions. Let's see...where did those damn questions get too...(pushes side sticky notes, grabs legal pads with scribbles on them) oh yes. Here we go...

1. What am I working on?

 Oh I just this very second tweeted about this. Would you like to read my tweet?

When you tell your kids the plot of the MS you're writing & they say, "What's wrong with you?" & "You're sick" #yalit #contemporaryfiction

 Yes. Contemporary YA. For some reason I'm drawn to it. The plot is this: A teenage boy, who is quite the douchebag (womanizer, homophobe, racist, treats his mother, his girlfriend, pretty much everyone like shit), finds tornado debris in his front yard. His mom makes him help clean it up much to his dismay. Among the debris is a notebook, a journal if you will. He begins to read it and finds the words of a troubled teenage girl. A girl whose mom is an alcoholic, whose stepfather is abusive, who is bullied at school, basically whose life is a miserable mess.

Because he's such a douche, he thinks it's funny at first. But the more he reads into this girl's life, the more he starts to feel for her. He also starts to see parallels into his own life and his own faults are coming to the surface. When it comes down to the end of the journal, and the girl wanting nothing more than to die, he sets out to find her and stop her before that happens, to show her that at least there is one person out there that cares about her. But will he be too late? It's currently titled, A Tattered Life, but I'm not sold on the title.  

You can read an excerpt here.

I'm also working on revising a novel I want to put out this fall titled Girl in Motion. So there's that to contend with. Also still trying to market Dissected. Not too good at the multi-tasking stuffs. Oy. Working on it though.

That seemed like a really long drawn out answer.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Tough one.  I think I take risks other authors aren't willing to take. I write about hard things other authors won't write about and some people, yeah, they won't publish it. I write about the ugly truths, the not-so-happily-ever-afters.  The fact is that the good people don't always survive, and the boy doesn't always get the girl in the end, and some people don't always want to read about how perfect life is because it's not.

Sometimes life is hard and dark and painful. Sometimes we need THOSE characters to relate to. Sometimes we need to read about people who hurt like us and feel like us and not just the people who lead exciting existences and get what they want and you know in the end everything is going to be all right.

And I may not always end on the happily-ever-after, but I do end on the everthing-will-be-okay. I always end on a ray of hope. I don't write beautiful stories, but I think I write stories that need to be told. I don't know who said it, but there's a quote that really resonates with me, and I write it in my book, Dissected when I sign it.

"But without the dark, we'd never see the stars."

3. Why do I write what I do?

I think I sort of answered this above. The hard stories, the dark stories, for some reason I am just drawn to them. I think they're important and need to be written and that I'm one of the writers that needs to write them. 

I suppose it's because of my experiences too. I've seen a lot and suffered through some and that makes it easier to write this contemporary fiction that is so emotionally raw like an exposed nerve. It also makes it easier to put myself in my characters shoes and bring out their most inner feelings, fears and dreams.

I do want to write other things. I have different stories in different genres started, but I keep getting drawn back here to this place. Too many stories, too little time...


4. How does your writing process work?

And here is the hardest question to answer. I'm not sure what I do is a "process" per se. 

As far as the when and where...time seems to be fleeting these days. I write whenever I can. I have a day job, so I try to write in the afternoon. If I get up early enough, I write before work. I sit at my kitchen table in front of my sliding glass door, it's the place in my house where the most sunlight comes in. 

I also write in many notebooks whenever I'm out and about. I have notebooks scattered all over. At times I gather them all up in a central location and find where I've written everything. I counted the last time I did it, there are about 20 notebooks around my house, car and in various bags laying around.

As far as the how, I sit down, I write. That's what I do. While I'm writing, I research. Probably to a fault. I think I get a little overzealous when it comes to authenticity.

Anyway, so I write and I research and I get a 1st draft down and it's crap and way too short (when I write the first draft is always way too short and always way too crappy)

So I do a next draft and flesh it out. I add details about people, places, make the prose prettier. Sometimes I have to add characters, pets. I usually find after a first draft that everyone is an only child, has one dead parent, and no one has pets.

I do a next draft, get Beta readers to give me feedback, give it to a couple editors, do another  _________rewrites (changes with every novel). Then I worry about how horrible it is for the rest of its days, no matter its future, published or sucked into the abyss of a word file for the rest of its existence.

So, for next week, here are the next three contestants...
Hart Johnson, Angel Young, and S.D. Skye. They will be posting on April 14.

First up, Hart Johnson...

Hart Johnson writes books from her bathtub. A social scientist by day, Hart spends her evenings plotting grand conspiracies and murdering people on paper. She is author via pen name (Alyse Carlson) of the Garden Society Mysteries and is serially publishing an apocalyptic flu conspiracy tale called A Shot in the Light.
  


 For her post next week, visit her blog, Confessions of a Watery Tart 

You can buy her books here. (they didn't tell us to do that, but I'm awesome like that)


Next, Angel Young...

Angel Young is a bit eccentric by nature. She's a writer, photographer, artist, dreamer, and all around weirdo. She cut teeth on vampire movies and carried around a beloved Wolfman doll as a child (appropriately named 'Wolfy'), pretended she was the Caped Crusader, and waited for her letter to Hogwarts. Not much has changed. She's a 23 year old girl battling an autoimmune disease, Sjogrens, with a lot of dreams, adventures, and a firm belief in nurturing her inner child. While her creative outlets are always being added to, writing will always be her favorite passion. To sum it up: A Batman-addicted weirdo covered in tattoos, almost always in Converse, running around in her own La-La Land.

Visit Angel's blog, Misadventures of a Misfit on Monday. (see what I did there?)

S.D. Skye, author of the J.J. McCall series, is an award-winning author and former FBI counterintelligence analyst. She's a native Washingtonian (D.C.) and professed nerd-girl who loves all things Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Big Bang Theory. She's a member of Romance Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, the Maryland Writers Association, and Sisters in Crime and lives to write novels, especially those involving 3-letter agencies and Beltway intrigue. She's hard at work on the next installment of the series. 

You'll find Ms. Skye's blog, here. 

Until next time...

Just how difficult is it to write a book?

This was posed to me last night, and a totally legit question. I know that many non writers often wonder, because maybe  they'd like to try their hand at it because they have an idea that's been nagging at their brain for some time. If they have that much, that's good because of course a book has to start with an idea.

An idea can come from anywhere. They have come to me from big events in my life and fleeting moments, newspaper articles and simple phrases. Sometimes the ideas are big and sometimes all I have is an opening line, a character or a title and I have to work from there.

Once you have your idea, you can either outline it or just start writing. I tend to do the latter. I just write until I can't write anymore. I"m called a "panster" because I write by the seat of my pants. This is the first draft of my novel.

By this point, many people who start writing a book have already given up. You have to be determined, motivated, and diligent to stick with writing a book from beginning to end. It's not easy. Things will get in your way -- job, kids, time, life in general. If you really want it, and really think you have a story to tell, stick with it.

In the second draft I deal with the sticky parts. Usually the sticky parts for me are the details, developing characters and places, figuring out the storyline in what us writers call the "murky middle" and well, *cough* the plot. I have to make sure I actually have one. I've had to at this point add characters into the book, cut thousands of words and add 10s of thousands of words.

Then there are usually a couple more drafts.

For me, editing comes next. I have a couple friends who I think are great editors. their work (editors can be wrong too you know, plus, they're all proper and shit and sometimes you don't want to be proper and shit).

Much better than me (though I see they don't know their lay, lie, lying, laying either). So I have them go through the manuscript and find my mistakes.  I am doing all my corrections hard copy now. I've proven to myself that if I just have them track changes on Word, I get lazy and don't really check them. Having them correct on a hard copy actually makes me read the entire manuscript again and even check

Next step is to get Beta Readers. These are a group of people to read your manuscript and give feedback. I like to choose a variety of people. My editor friends give me feedback as well, so they kind of count. I gather up a couple writer friends who can usually give me an idea about the plot, storyline and character development. Then I grab a couple people who are strictly readers who give me a blanket idea of how the book worked. Did they like the story? The characters? Were there any problems? If so, what were they? Were there any questions left unanswered?

I do another rewrite based on the information I've gathered from my Betas. Now, keep in mind, your Betas are giving you opinion and you may not agree. Change what you feel needs changing and toss the rest away. However, if they're all saying the same thing, you should probably listen. When I had Betas read my last book, Dissected, none of them liked my protagonist. So in my rewrite I had to make her more sympathetic and likeable.

After the rewrite I'll give it back to at least one editor for copy editing again. With all those new words in there, there are bound to be grammatical and punctuation errors.

I may give it a couple more reads for good measure, just to make sure it's as publishable as can be. The voila! You have a book with which you can either start querying agents or indie publish.

This is just the basics. You should also brush up on writing tips, like don't use too many adverbs, exclamation points or ellipses...crap like that. There are a ton of great books on writing out there and of course, the almighty Google.

What is your process? Do you have any questions or comments? Feel free to leave them. I try to respond to every one.

Done!

I finally finished my rewrite of An Unbalanced Line.  But I'm not done. I made some notes on the manuscript along the way, which I want to fix, then I print it out and read it aloud. Reading aloud helps me get the voice and dialogue right and it also is useful for finding little mistakes, typos, punctuation problems.

Then I do revisions.

The step after that, I get some beta readers. I usually pick four or five people. A couple readers, a couple writers, and I have one friend who is a writer and an excellent editor. 

After that, I do another set of revisions, then maybe another. I do as many as it takes to get it to a place that I feel is good enough to send to agents.

How do you get feedback on your work? Who do you count on to give an unbiased opinion? Do you read aloud?

I'm interested in other writer's process.