Bright & Dark

Back and finally settled some after having been on the Oregon coast for a week and a half in February. These trips have always been invaluable, and this one was no exception.

First up, novel workshop. I’ve been to these before, but this time there was a new method, moving from traditional Clarion workshop round-robin critique rules to more targeted comments about the marketability of the novels and spiffing up the proposal packages so that they really shone. It rocked. I found the whole experience eye-opening and very useful. And such a treat to read so many really great books.

I took The Heart of the World to this workshop. So well-received. And then mailed to editors, one of whom requested the full manuscript so far. Good stuff.

Next up, a couple of days off, which I mostly spent reading the first round of stories sent in for the second workshop and walking on the beach. Great reading, strenuous walking on that loop down to the beach and around to the inlet near Mo’s, then back up through the neighborhood via the Hill of Hell. Sunshine even graced us some.

And then the anthology workshop with Dean and Denise Little. This one, too, went as usual above and beyond my expectations as far as learning and networking. I wrote my first ever noir for the overnight short story at this workshop. What a blast! And I got to read and learn from the excellent overnight batch of stories and all of Denise’s and Dean’s comments.

Both my first and second story are out to markets.

Add to all this mix a shopping trip to North by Northwest Books and my first trip to Mo’s (no chowder for me unfortunately because of the glutens, but it smelled heavenly; and Mo’s surprised me with a bang-up bowl of chili) and lots of time with so many other professional writers and editors, and you have a recipe for amazingness.

So. Reading back over what I’ve just written, it strikes me that there is no real way to describe what I get out of these workshops and what it’s like to experience them. Because I’ve written about the logistics and mechanics, and that doesn’t include the way it feels to be among people who write professionally, who love it, who love story, who love learning. Or how it feels to completely immerse myself in writing and writing culture for at least a week. Or how it feels to bump up my craft and business knowledge in a way that fuels my work once I return home. You just have to have been there.

I’m betting you have a similar experience that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there. Feel free to substitute words and phrases.

I take “vacation time” from work to do all this, usually a couple of times a year. Everyone, including me, knows that it’s not a real vacation. Not in a million years. I work my butt off. I get very little rest. It doesn’t matter, though. What does matter? Doing what I love. That feeds me in a different way than sunning on the beach or curling up in front a peat fire on a rainy Irish night. Without all those different kinds of nourishment, I feel like a starving woman.

Do what you love. Find a way. That’s my prescription.

After a long weekend of working with story structure, I joined a group of six folks working one-on-one with Dean on advanced story structure.  I was really excited about having the opportunity to do this because as far as I was concerned I had major structure issues with my some of my short fiction and had spent lots of time writing the first 100 pages or so of novels only to realize they didn’t work and throw them away before beginning again.

I thought I had my problem narrowed down to emotion in structure.  Emotion is one of several author decision points in a story, and it must be balanced with other qualities in order for the story to work.  Writing a blazing hot action scene?  There’s not going to be a lot of emotion, and if it’s there it won’t be written in thick prose.  Otherwise it’d throw a splash of cold water on that blazing hot action and put out the fire.

The issue I thought I had with emotion is what I called “knowing the emotional thread of a story.”  A story’s emotional thread, the way the characters feel and their motivations, their emotional journey through whatever happens, and how they are changed in the end is what makes a story worthwhile.  It’s my holy grail.  If it’s not there in any particular book I’m reading, regardless of genre (and counting, of course, what’s appropriate for that genre), I don’t care.  I am officially Dark-Willow-bored-now and outta there.

I labored under the mistaken impression that I should know all that holy grail stuff before I ever start writing, or at least within the first 1,500 words.  (Cue sinister laugh.)  Because I never really have known it ahead of time (even if I thought I did) I would often write until 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through a story or to about page 100 of a novel and then the thread would reveal itself.  Problem was, I hadn’t laid the groundwork — all the little clues my subconcious would normally place in the front part of the work — to support it.

There is almost always no way to fix a situation like that.  Hence the stories that fell apart and Humpty-Dumptied themselves (they couldn’t be put back together again).  Or all those thrown-away novel pages and re-drafts.

I understand now that that emotional thread in stories always shows up on its own.  It can’t be manufactured.  It can’t be engineered toward.  When I try, it shifts on me like quicksand.

What does work, however, is writing the story one scene at a time or one 800-1,500 word segment at a time.  And in this segment, I concentrate on the emotion.  That way, instead of trying to eat the emotional elephant of the story or the book, I am laying that necessary groundwork for the emotion point of the story, whatever it turns out to be.

It took me all five days of one-on-one work to understand all this.  Literally, to the end of the working period — it all finally clicked into place at that last group lunch.  In those five days I plotted a short story, 800 to 1,500 words at a time, concentrating on the emotion.  And I started writing a new novel, jumping off a dark science fantasy YA short story I’d finished a few months before, that I’d never even contemplated writing.

(The writing was a trip if for no other reason than my roommate was busy writing a very funny romantic suspense in the back room, and whenever the kids in my book were at their most terrified, she would cackle because she’d just written something off-the-charts hilarious.)

I’m still working on the book fast and furious, with my focus on emotion, one scene at a time.  You know what?  I’ve never had so much fun writing anything in my life.