Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Getting Stuck

As many of you know, I still have a book or two left in the Ivy Thorn series. One of them is close to being done! (The Ten Lost Princesses is in draft.)

Unfortunately, I've hit a road block with the plot (my ending sucks) and Life has kept me away from my writing.

A quick side note: I have the time to write. There are enough hours in the day to squeeze in some writing, so that's not an excuse. But when I have a bunch of new stuff heaped on me at once, and the ending of my book sucks, and I don't know how on earth I'm going to fix it, then it can be really difficult to find the motivation to sit down and work on my writing. It's MUCH easier (and I look forward to it!) when I'm moving along on a story and I have an idea where it's headed.

Also, I've been taking online writing workshops, which are helping my writing. (It also takes up that writing time that I just admitted to having. Oops.) The workshops are super helpful. My craft is improving. But at the end of each week, after I've turned in my assignment, I feel like I have nothing left for my fiction.

So that's why you haven't heard from me in a while.

That said, I've got some new ideas for my main character. A time traveler needs to be quite a character, right?

I'm going to rewrite my beginning, from a different angle. This means that I have a couple chapters of material that's not necessarily bad, but that will never see the light of day.

Just kidding. The Power of Blog is going to help out.

I thought it might be fun to post what I have, so you can see where I was heading with the story. I'm changing course, so the end product will be different. But I promised you a play-by-play on this story.

So while I get Ivy's stories fixed, you can read some early chapters of my first time travel novel. Stay tuned.

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: The First Scene

The research and study is going well. I've already learned a lot and I've noticed that my style is changing. I'm still taking classes online when I get the chance, but in the meantime...

It's time to start.

Yeah. The first scene. The big one.

Okay, so it's not quite so dramatic because I can (and probably will) change it a thousand times and then delete it before the final draft. It's part of the job description. I must kill my darlings.

But the first draft is a big step. It's intimidating. I'm staring at a blank page on my computer screen. How am I going to start this? Who is my main character? Where is she?

I want to do this as a Young Adult story, so my main character should probably in high school. And when I write books from solely a male point of view, things go badly. (I haven't finished a single one yet. They just fall apart like a bad batch of brownies.) So she's a teenage girl.

My first idea is that my character needs to be dealing with mundane things until her grandmother shows up and tells her that she's special. She can travel through time and she's needed so the balance of time can be restored.

But that's been done a few times in speculative fiction. Just a few.

So maybe I could change it up a bit. Maybe she could be approached by someone else. Maybe they help her out of a nasty situation and they give her a wonderful opportunity.

Yeah. I like that better.

And it might be a little more fun if my character has some idea of her abilities before the story starts.

And she needs a name. Time to hit the baby names websites...

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Craft

Before I dive into another series of books, I want to work on my writing craft. I'm a writer, and there's an endless amount of STUFF to learn. I spent years working on craft before I wrote The Fairy Tale Trap, and have dabbled since. Now, I want to dig deep again.

So I listened to a lecture on Science Fiction and how to write it more effectively. I'm also taking an online workshop on writing more in depth. This will take up a big chunk of my writing time, but it'll be worth it. Quality over quantity at this point.

I'd also like to go over some STUFF that I've read before, but need to review. I plan to go through Holly Lisle's massive online class: How to Think Sideways, as well as re-read some books on craft. (Dwight Swain comes to mind.)

That ought to do it for now. Let's see if I survive before moving on.

Adventures in Genre-Hopping: Dissection

"Mediocre writers borrow, great writers steal."

--T.S. Elliot

I think Pablo Picasso said something similar: "The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal."

I don't plan to plagiarize, here, just for the record. Writers steal all the time, and it's perfectly legal, if you know how to do it right. I'm not stealing other people's works or words and passing them off as my own.This is research of the market and of the genre. To be able to write a time travel novel, I need to understand a time travel novel.

Joanna Penn wrote on her blog: 

• Steal ideas. Read other people’s works, or look at other people’s art work. If you like an idea, ruminate on it, muddle it around in your brain and see where it ends up. Write the same idea in your own words and you can bet it will be a different story or a new angle on it. Steal other people’s experiences and write about them for plot. Steal their words as they speak to help your dialogue. How many books about the end of the world are there? How many unrequited love stories? How many quest adventures?

So I want to take some of my favorite time travel stories that I've read so far, and find out what makes them tick. Have you ever taken something apart and put it back together, just to see how it works? (Neither have I. I'm not mechanically inclined, but I hear some people do this.)

This involves the following steps:

1) Read books

2) Choose a few that are excellent

3) Read them again, looking for structural elements

4) Write those elements down

5) Analyze them. Do you see any patterns? Have these structures been used by more than one author? What works? What would you change?

So I'm mapping out a few stories. The notes I'm making (the parts that I'm "stealing") are things like: 

Mentor is in conflict with main character's Norm

Call to Action

Main character tries to return to Norm, but encounters disaster

etc...

So, for Back to the Future, I might start off my notes with:

Main Character in the Norm (good things and bad things) and receives object that will help later

Main Character is introduced to time travel

Main Character inadvertently time travels (without being fully prepared)

Main Character changes the future, which would destroy the Norm

Main Character seeks out Mentor

MC and Mentor use object to formulate plan

etc...

**Spoiler for Back to the Future I (you know, from 1985...)**

The Mentor is Doc Brown in this particular story, but it could be any knowledgeable character. The "object" is something I didn't even notice until I started paying attention to the structure of the story: it's the flyer that Marty gets from the crazed lady in front of the clock tower. That flyer has information on the lightning strike that will help get him home near the end of the movie. Marty only keeps the flyer because his girlfriend wrote a phone number on it (because why else would a teenage boy carry around a flyer to "save the clock tower"?)

****

Hopefully, I'll figure out a plot structure that is totally awesome and works for my characters and my ideas. Once I have my basic time travel ideas and characters created, I'll see if I can plug their particulars into these structures. It might work, it might not, but I'll be able to see my story in a new light.

Part of me thinks I should map out some good stories from other genres...maybe mystery or thriller. Thoughts?

For now, I'm going to let these ideas simmer on the back burner.

Do you ever think about the structure of a story? Besides structure and basic plot, what does a story need?