Rose Colored Insanity

So now I had a premise, and character sketches, and it was time to try to put all those new ideas into a plot. So I spent a week putting together a ten page "outline", then sent it out to my readers, and sat back and waited for the adulation for my creativity to start rolling into my inbox.

Right.

To my surprise, one of my readers liked it even less than they'd liked the original story. I was shocked, because this one had all the right elements! There was a villain! And fight scenes! And... that was why they didn't like it. I had written a completely cliche plot.

I fought against the idea in the beginning, but soon realized that they were right. I remembered something OSC (Orson Scott Card) said in his book for the Writer's Digest Series, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: that the first idea you come up with is almost always cliched. That was what I'd done- I'd been so eager to get input that I'd written down the first ideas I'd come up with. In fact, when I started looking closer, I could see that my plot echoed every fantasy ever written. All I had done was regurgitate the story structure that I'd been absorbing for years.

It's not a bad story structure, but it's not mine, either. And I want to make it my own. To do this, I'm revising the plot again. It turns out I was confusing the concepts of a synopsis and an outline, and so I'm also trying to keep my outline to no more than two pages, to make it easier to see the story structure and to make corrections.

I started revising almost petulantly, because I really thought I should have gotten it right the first time. But something Lynne Griffin said at The Writer's Group blog really helped me (this post):

When it comes to potential novel problems, I suggest a bring it on philosophy, rather than turn the other way tactic. That's one of the many reasons I treasure my friends at The Writers' Group. In knowledgeable and compassionate ways, they tell me like it is. And I know my work is better as a result.

I want my writing to be the best it can be, and I know that being critqued and challenged honestly is the only way for that to happen.

So I have a premise. Great. Now what? If I seem to be asking that question a lot, it's because I am.

Lajos Egri (and if I seem to be quoting him a lot, it's because I am. I think his book is one of the best on the subject, and most clearly defines the elements that make up story) writes that plot comes from character. You must know everything about your characters before you can know how they will react in a given situation.

For the first draft, I ignored this advice. I decided I would get to know the characters as I went. It worked- by the end, I knew them well, and that was reflected in my writing. But the first two-thirds of the book showed that I didn't know them. This time through, I decided I didn't want to finish another draft and then have all that work left of going back and fixing the characters.

Because Egri is right. The choices humans make are a direct reflection of their life experiences. My story will be richer and deeper if I can make the characters three-dimensional, with motivations that form naturally from their pasts.

So the question at the end of the last post was, is it worth it to revise the fairy tale?

The answer turned out to be yes and no. See, by the time I finished writing the story I had originally planned, I had a million other ideas for the world I was creating. I wanted to include them in the revision, but I couldn't tell if it should be a whole separate story. I loved those ideas, and found them way more interesting than what I'd already written, but I didn't want to have wasted *eight months* of work.

So I sat down with Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing. I decided to try to identify a premise for both stories, and see which one was stronger. Egri points out why a premise is so important, and how strange it is that not all written work has one, with the following example:

A man rushes down the street, panting for breath. You intercept him and ask where he is going. He gasps: "How should I know where I'm going? I am on my way."

Egri says that a good premise is made up of three parts: Character, conflict and where the story is going. For example, he identifies the premise of Macbeth as "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction." Character is identified in the phrase "ruthless ambition", one can easily see how that character trait would lead to conflict, and the end of the play is suggested by "its own destruction".

In the end, I couldn't come up with a premise for the story I had already written, because there wasn't any conflict. I decided I would do a major rework of the plot, but keep the main characters, which would make me feel less like I had wasted all that time. And although my story is nothing like Macbeth, I have chosen to get started using that premise: "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction". Hopefully as I work out the plot and further develop the characters, I will be able to refine that basic premise into something uniquely mine.

I was really struck by something Jessica over at BookEnds had to say today (in a post about something completely different):

Trying, no matter whether you achieve the results you thought you wanted, is never a mistake.

Sometimes I find myself wondering if I'm making a big mistake, if five years from now I'll have to give up on writing and realize how much time I wasted on something that didn't pan out. But she's right, trying is never a mistake. The mistake would be if I didn't try, and always wondered.

Peter: "You said no. We broke up."
Ashley: "No, no. I was confused, we stepped back."
Peter: "You moved to Portugal."
-While You Were Sleeping

After discovering that my manuscript was lacking oomph, I decided to take a step back. Throughout the first draft, I'd made myself stay close to it so I didn't lose momentum. I didn't want to think too hard in case I changed the whole story- I needed to get into the habit of writing.

To take that step back, I started writing a summary of each chapter, highlighting the plot points and character motivations/decisions. As I went through it, my heart sank. Through the first two-thirds of the story, my main character was consistently indecisive. She made bad decisions, and consistently did stupid things. But I can explain! I told the hubby, who was reviewing the summary.

See, I started this manuscript as a rewrite of a fairy tale. Bluebeard, to be exact. I didn't know how to plot, and this was a great way to learn- the major plot points are already there, and you get to practice in between. So in the fairy tale, the girl meets Bluebeard and agrees to marry him rather quickly- the original takes place in that magical fairy-tale-time, when arranged marriages were common. But because I was rewriting the fairy tale, I needed my main character to marry this guy rather quickly. So *that's* why it seems odd that she meets him in chapter one and is married to him in chapter three.

...the hubby didn't buy it. And I shouldn't have either. Character should drive the plot, and I'd let the plot dictate to the characters. Stepping back helped me see that the story needed some major reworking, which lead me to a question I really didn't like: was it worth the effort?

As you can see in a previous post, I was really excited over the pitch critiques going on at the BookEnds blog. I learned from reading the examples that were being critiqued, and I got excited to see what my pitch would look like.

That's right- I wrote my entire first draft without knowing what my pitch was. Well, I thought, now's the perfect time. I know what happens! I've learned who the characters are! This is going to be great! To my dismay, it wasn't. I couldn't write a pitch about the story I had because I couldn't identify the conflict. As I started looking at the story, I realized that was because I didn't really have a villain. I have a weakness for bad guys, and wound up making the villain too sympathetic.

All the way through the first draft, I kept telling myself, "it's a first draft. I can clean this- and thisandthisandthis- up later." Well, it's later. And I've finally noticed that I have a mess on my hands. It's a well-written mess- I keep consoling myself with that. I can see a real improvement in my writing throughout, so by the last four chapters, the writing is clean and the characters are decisive and the plot keeps moving along. (Yes, I'm trying to make myself feel better.)

Writing is a learning experience. When I started this adventure, the most I had written at one time was ten pages- the beginning of a short story for a college writing class. Of course I'm not going to get it right the first time. But I'm not going to give up either. I'm going to learn everything I can from each mistake, and apply it the next time.

What I learned this time is that I need to work out the pitch- or the premise, as I'll call it in my next post- before I ever start writing. I'm not saying this will work for everyone. But I've found out that without the guidance of a pitch, I don't really know where I'm going, or what point I'm trying to make. A good premise should be able to focus that story like a magnifying glass focuses the sun. The result of my first draft is a fun read- but it's like gentle sunshine: pleasant, but I wanted to fry the ant.

So there I sat, thick binder in my lap, pen in hand, ready to edit, when it occurred to me that I had no idea what to do. I started anyway, fixing a few grammar problems here and there, realizing that certain sentences could be phrased more clearly. And about halfway through the first chapter, I stopped. Even I could tell that this haphazard method of editing was not going to result in the masterpiece I was hoping for.

Then I remembered an interview Writer Unboxed had posted with Dave King, co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. The second part of the interview addressed specific techniques for editing that I found interesting- but at the time, I was very skeptical. Rules for editing? I thought I should just be able to edit by instinct.

But with the manuscript actually in my hands, I was desperate for some guidelines, something that would focus all the energy I was throwing into this task. To my surprise, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers was exactly what I was looking for. My second draft of chapter one was much, much better than the rough draft. Some of the ideas I found most useful:

* Watch out for narrative summary- both too much and too little. To my disgust, I found that I had my main character washing dishes for two pages while she thought about something. It was surprisingly easy to work what she was thinking about into a different scene using dialogue.
* Beats. The pauses between words where the character thinks or moves. They're wonderful when well used, but as I discovered, you can easily obscure good dialogue with them. I had two pages of dialogue where every time a character spoke, there was a beat afterward.
* More on beats- what kind of beats are you using? Are they generic or do they help show who your character is? I found that I'd been falling back on generic beats as a kind of writing crutch- after all, it's easier that way. (Of course, that was part of my problem- I didn't really know who my character was, so I couldn't come up with unique beats. More on that later.)

But what I found most useful was something Dave said in the interview with Writer Unboxed:

"...if you’re applying any of these techniques mechanically, then you’re not really writing. Your story has to be a living being, growing and changing according to its own internal spirit. It’s that story that I try to help writers find."

It was surprisingly easy to lose the perspective of the larger story and get absorbed in making sure that I'd eliminated all the -ly adverbs, etc. I need to remember that I'm the writer- it's up to me to decide if my story needs a few -ly adverbs sprinkled in. The guidelines are just there to make sure the story shines through.