Theme and Scenes

I’ve been hard at work on two projects using the How to Think Sideways and How to Revise Your Novel Workshops.  I would say it’s not a good idea to try taking the two together–at times I feel like I’ll never get all of it done–but in some respects they’re both helping me understand some areas that I’ve had a lot of trouble with.

One is a new project, started from scratch, and the other is an existing project, which an agent told me I overplotted.  Here’s where I’m at:

New project: Masks (working title)

Conflict has been one of those things that was difficult for me to understand on the revision side.  With some of the work I’ve done through the course on the creation side, I’m starting to see how to work the conflict.  Mind you, I’m still in the planning stage; I haven’t begun actual words to page.  One of the things I had to flag to myself was to avoid the word “discover” because it represents weak and uninteresting conflict.

Poor conflict:  Protagonist decodes the book and discovers the truth about the curse.

Better conflict: Protagonist decodes the book–what she thinks she knows about the curse is all a lie.

And discover is awfully easy to fall back on.  I had to work a bit to create the second sentence without using the word ‘discover.’

Next up is to do an outline of the scenes.  It’s not a typical outline where you plan everything out in excruciating detail, plus it’s also not the first step (I’m on step 8).  Still, I’m trying hard not to running screaming from the room!

Revision: Cascadian’s Blight (title will change)

This had the tougher task of dealing with the theme.  My experience with theme was in school with teachers pointing to a book and saying, “The theme is X.”  And I’m reading the book and not seeing “X” (Southern California schools).  Plus, the concept of it is rather vague.  I went out and got a writing book that was supposed to deal with themes.  At least one would think so since Theme was in the title, but it was a chapter near the end.  This was about as specific as I was able to find:

Themes are often a declaration of the human condition. Or a truth that explains human behavior.

I’m still not all that clear on it, though it looks like I’ll hit on it again in Lesson 10.  So we shall see …

 

What Did You Learn About Writing in 2010?

The new year always offers moment of reflection on the past year and what’s coming.  One of the biggest revelations for me came in December, and it was on why outlines haven’t worked me.

I’ve always just started writing.  No outlines. And I’ve had people pressure me to use an outline over the years, always with whatever their format was.

Novel writing presented special challenges, because I’ve had a lot of trouble with running too short and with subplots.  So I tried different types of outlines and participated in an outline workshop.  What I found was that the outline always crashed and burned at about Chapter 3.

The only one that was a little different was the workshop.  That provided a clue that eventually led me to discover why outlines haven’t worked.  The workshop came in four sessions.  The last two I had a hard with–I didn’t understand them, but I tried to fake my through, figuring I might get an understanding by doing. I have to learn by doing, but it’s hard when you don’t understand what you’re doing.  The instructor kept telling me I needed to do more character development in the outline.  I was having trouble with the story and I was sure about the characters, so I was letting them go.  She kept pressuring me to do character development, so I finally tried to get something in.  It was very difficult, and frustrating.  A month after the workshop, I looked at the troublesome lessons again and still didn’t understand them at all.

I started How to Think Sideways in December.  That’s Holly Lisle’s workshop on how to create a book from the beginning.  In Lesson 5, she shows a very different approach to outlining.  I realized that a traditional outline requires me to juggle all the elements i.e., protagonist, antagonist, conflict, story, etc. at the same time, so I was dropping balls.  In some cases, like in the outline workshop, I dropped elements I knew would be easy, but I’ve also dropped balls on hard elements.  I do better when these elements are in buckets, separate of each other, so I only need to focus on one.

What did you learn about your writing in 2010?