Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Today, I’m welcoming Hart Johnson to the blog. Hart is currently working on the third book of her Conspiracy trilogy and blogs at Confessions of a Watery Tart on writing, digressions, and her road to publication.

For those of you who don’t know me, I go by the Watery Tart in several areas of my life, and it’s true that I have trouble behaving myself, so why should my writing plans be any different? A few weeks ago when Elizabeth asked for volunteers to guest blog, though, I thought… well at least my approach is probably different than everyone else’s… and I do a few things right, so I thought I’d throw it out for your perusal.

The Ideas

Ideas are the precious resource of writing, and unlike certain creative types, I can’t force them. I don’t wander through my day noticing interesting things (I’m lucky if I notice my children) and the interesting things I think are more likely to get me arrested than published. I find that the big ideas most often come accidentally. I have to be COMPLETELY relaxed. That is one reason I do most of my writing in the bathtub. The fan drowns out my family and their incessant watching of The Office or Family Guy. The water calms me, a Sudoku puzzle releases my academic brain, and then I write, and often, just that will release some creative juices and something interesting will flow without me even being aware of the process. But the TRULY big ideas usually come in dreams, or in that lazy not quite asleep anymore space of early morning, or EVERY once in a while, in the midst of some silly conversation where the tart in my says, ‘hey, you oughta write a book on that’.

Those ideas get written down and put in a notebook, which occasionally I’ll thumb through, but more often I’ll get the SAME really great idea a SECOND time and think HEY! I already had that idea, but I will build on it a little.

And even more often than THAT, I get a completely unrelated idea. *cough * (this isn’t helpful, is it?), but here is the fun part…

The Power Walk

I try, four days a week, to exercise somewhat strenuously. I walk to and from work daily, but that’s not a ‘sweat-paced’ walk, because I work with people, and they appreciate it if I don’t stink. But four days a week I exercise before my shower, usually with an iPod, but if I don’t take the iPod, when I am walking, brain relaxed but body exerting, there is some sort of magical synapse connection thing that often happens. It will occur to me how to connect two ideas that alone were not quite a starting point, but together, they are a skeleton of a story.

The power walk also works if I run up against a brick wall in my story and I can’t figure out how to get from point A to point B, but that’s writing, not pre-writing, so I’m not going to talk about that!

Stewing

This actually falls in the idea stage, but would have broken my (somewhat) cohesive train of what I do, had I put it in there. In spite of flying by the seat of my pantslessness in most parts of my life, I need my ideas to stew… they need to germinate. Last February I had a dream about sitting in a house typing, and realizing there were kids watching me, and I thought, ‘what an interesting set-up…moving into a house that had kids hiding in the walls or attic for some reason… why would they do that?’ A little more thought brought out parents that were spies who had disappeared and the kids had just hidden, and I tried and tried to force out a few scenes, but it wasn’t happening, so I set it aside and started a different book.

In AUGUST, something I read sparked something else entirely and a power walk connected the two ideas, and I wrote the prequel to the above story in 6 short weeks. It had been in there the whole time, dancing around, promising to be a great story, but until that second idea and the connection, I just couldn’t make it fly.

Maybe someday I’ll get back to that OTHER story I was working on! That seems to be how it has to go for me, though—idea, work on something else while that stews, THEN I can work with the idea I’d been so in love with.

[A note on research because so many do it in prep—for me it is a rewrite thing. I find I am overly accommodating if I do it ahead, and just end up with a long mess. Better to get down my story and then tweak with the facts LATER].

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it!

Thanks so much for guest blogging today, Hart! I’m thinking I might try your power walking method for pre-writing…I’ll just have to remember not to mutter to myself as I do it (a frequent plotting activity of mine. :) )

Blogging is one of my favorite activities. Whether I’m reading blogs or writing them, or tweeting about them, I feel like I’m learning an incredible amount from the process.

I blogged daily from last May until late January (when I started opening up the blog to guest posts). So now I’m blogging on average about 6 days a week.

The good thing about blogging daily, if you can swing it, is:

It’s a good writing exercise.
It’s a great way to establish a writing discipline.
It’s excellent for developing a readership.

The bad thing about blogging daily:

It’s time-consuming. That’s really the only downside I see.

Blog Reading:

I’m completely addicted to blog reading. Yes, I do have a problem. And I would love to be able to read everyone’s blogs every day…because they’re that interesting! Even if you have nothing to say I think it’s interesting because it’s a window into another writer’s world.

But I don’t have the time I wish I had.

I subscribe to 700 blogs in my Google reader. I know…it’s a little crazy. I didn’t think I had that many, so I double and triple checked, but I do. I have them divided up in folders to help me keep track of them.

I have some that frequently feature really excellent resources for writers. I file those blogs under “Tweet Sites” because I’ll tweet the contents—but I frequently don’t comment on the blog…it’s a time-constraint thing, since I do send out a lot of tweets in a day on Twitter. But I tweet the link to the post and sometimes the poster’s Twitter tag, too, if I have it handy.

I divide up other blogs by days of the week to help handle some of the reading and commenting. And I tweet many of these posts, too. 98% of the time, if I’ve read a friend’s post, I comment. My comment may not add much to the discussion, but I want to be a part of it anyway.

If you start dividing the blogs you read by days of the week, you might want to make sure you haven’t put a blogger in a Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday folder when they only blog on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. There usually is some tweaking that has to happen until the method gets smoother.

Why blogging is fun:

There are so many benefits to reading blogs and blogging that it’s hard to know where to begin. The biggest for me is the support, friendship, and inspiration I get from the writing community. Next are the ideas and resources that are in such great supply online.

Promotional benefits of blogging:

Yes, they’re definitely there. First of all, you’re getting your name, and your book’s name out there on the internet daily. This really helps when someone is looking you up on Google.

It does help to introduce potential readers to your book, too. There are so many books out there. If you can help increase awareness of your own novel, then you’ve really helped your publisher out.

There is definitely some networking that goes on in the industry between writers, editors, and agents. And networking, in any career, isn’t a bad thing.

Blogging Tools:

I use Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer application for writing and saving blogs. It’s easy to learn and is an organized way to write blog drafts, organize pictures and text, etc.

WordPress vs Blogger? Well, Blogger is free. :) Blogger completely infuriates me several days out of the week, but at this point I’m not planning a move. I’ve heard lots of good things about WordPress, though.

What do you love or hate about blogging? And do you have any tips to add for managing your blogging habit? :)

Please come by and visit tomorrow as Hart Johnson, AKA the Watery Tart, will be guest-posting on pre-writing!

I’ve noticed that many people I know view life through a lens.

Some of them use a political lens—they look at everything in relation to politics.

Many use religious lenses.

There are some that use a financial lens: everything boils down in terms of money.

There are egocentric lenses…how everything in life affects them.

There’s even a motherhood lens—how life’s hardships and joys affect their children or the raising of them.

The big thing that seems to set writers apart, to me, is our lens—it’s an observational one.

It doesn’t seem to be a very analytical device… we’re not so much into the why people behave the way they do as watching it happen.

I do know many different kinds of writers and there are some extroverts in the bunch, but I’d say it’s probably 90% introvert to the 10% extrovert that I know.

Most of the writers I know are happy to sit on the edges of a group or gathering and watch the people. We’re less happy being the center of attention—you can’t observe life as well when all eyes are on you. We’re the perfect bystanders.

We don’t mind the quiet.

We can get so caught up in our writing that we don’t feel self-conscious about taking notes or writing in a public place.

This filter provides us with a little distance from other people. This can be a very welcome distance. I can come across a really annoying person, but through the writing lens they come through as complex and different.

And, yes, still a little annoying. But we need those kinds of people in our books, too.

But the biggest thing that stands out to me is the watching and recording that writers do. We’re listening and looking…jotting down names of people and places, unusual situations, people’s personal conflicts. We’re sorting through ideas.

And I think this note-taking is frequently done in a nonjudgmental way—we’re just relating these life observations to readers. We’re the middlemen…we polish up our notes to make them interesting or entertaining, but it’s truth, on paper.

Do you see yourself as an observer?

My now eight year old daughter was in preschool for a couple of days a week to give me a break—and some time to do some writing. This always seemed to work out well for both of us.

Except when she was two. That’s when separation anxiety kicked into high gear. Her poor teacher that year was a sunny, small, smiling, blonde mother of two. Mrs. Heinz would greet my daughter in a cheerful voice. My daughter would scream bloody murder and cling to me in a way that necessitated her being pulled off me like a banana peel.

I promise that there was nothing sinister about this lady, the school, or the classroom, which was very open and well-monitored. Mrs. Heinz was the very definition of ‘benign.’ The only scary thing this teacher was doing was separating my daughter from me at a time she couldn’t tolerate separation.

Most of us have, at some point, to write a scene that’s either very tense or frightening.

How do we pull our readers into the scene? We want them to feel caught up in the action and definitely want them to keep turning the pages.

We want to put the reader in the protagonist’s shoes:

Have the character display nervousness or disquiet before the scary things even happen. Maybe the scary part hasn’t really started in your scene—but you can set the stage by having the protagonist looking behind them, jumping at small noises, etc.

The reader needs to know what’s at stake: The character’s life? The character’s job? Nuclear holocaust? Getting dropped off at a preschool program? Obviously, the higher the stakes, the more tension for the reader.

Make sure the character uses his senses and relays that information to the reader. What does he hear? His own heartbeat? Footsteps running behind him? Maniacal laughter? What does he see? Nothing, because the lights are off?

Make them feel what the protagonist is feeling: chill up the spine, hairs standing up on the back of the neck, heart thumping, sweat dripping down the side of the face.

Build suspense. I took a film course in college and learned about parallel editing there. That’s when you cut between a shot showing the bomb with the timer counting down rapidly and a shot of the FBI agent running desperately up the staircase to stop it. Although it’s a visual device, the technique can be useful in fiction, too. You can cut back and forth between the thing the protagonist is afraid of and the frightened character.

Books and movies that scare me also feature nightmarish setbacks…the protagonist tripping over a root as he runs through the woods, the gun that isn’t loaded, etc.

My daughter, six years ago, was able to convey a great deal of foreboding and dread (and heaps of guilt) by shrieking at the very sight of poor Mrs. Heinz. Although I didn’t share her feelings about the teacher, she did an effective job of transferring her emotions to me. :)

Which is exactly what we want to do to our reader if we’re writing a frightening or tense scene.

How do you write page-turning scary or stressful scenes?

Sunday morning I woke up with a stiff neck. Since Sunday was really busy for me, I just ignored it. I continued ignoring it the entire day…until I sat down to write this post and started thinking about it again.

But what if I weren’t a busy mom? What if I were an Olympic athlete? I’d be devoting some time trying to resolve the problem. Maybe I’d take some ibuprofen (or maybe not—not sure about the drug testing there.) Maybe I’d put ice, then a heating pad on it. I’d be talking to my coach. Maybe getting a massage?

What if I were a hypochondriac instead of an athlete or a busy mom? My whole day could be devoted to my stiff neck. I could be on the internet for hours, looking up symptoms….could I have meningitis? I might drive straight to the emergency room and spend most of the day in there because the triage nurse decides immediately that my case will be the last priority—there’s an odd lack of temperature for someone who has meningitis.

So, depending on the character, reactions will not only be very different to each possible situation, but will demonstrate a lot about the character in a show-don’t-tell way.

The fact that we don’t all react to situations in the same way seems obvious. But I find myself frequently thinking that friends or family members share my mindset on things they couldn’t disagree more on. It’s always a surprise to me. Doesn’t everyone think the way I do? :)

And that thinking seeps over into my first drafts sometimes. I consciously have to say, “Okay, in this situation, I would do this….but I’m not an octogenarian.”

And then there’s the wonderful moment in the first draft when I get into my manuscript and the characters come alive and act on their own accord and I have nothing to do with it. It’s one of the happiest parts of writing for me.

Before your characters come alive, do you have to consciously think like them and put yourself in their shoes? Or is your protagonist so much like you that you share the same reactions?