That’s the WHAT of it, here’s the WHY

I’ve found out that there are a lot of people I know who also like to write and/or want to write. So, I thought I’d post some mistakes that I make, so hopefully you won’t have to make the same ones.

Last night in my writing class, my teacher talked about two different types of writers. On one end of a continuum is "discovery writers," and at the other end is "planners." Discovery writers like to sit down to write, not having thought too much about plot, and see what happens. They like to discover as they go. Planners like to work through characters, plot, setting, figure out the beginning and the end and everything in between, and then start writing. There’s not a right or a wrong way overall, just a right or wrong way for each individual writer.

Stephen King is a discovery writer. He comes up with some good characters, then plops them down in a situation to see what they will do. He enjoys finding out what happens in the story as he writes it. He likes to be surprised as he goes. This obviously works well for him.

Orson Scott Card is a planner. He may work for eight months on a story, then spend one month writing it. Tolkien was also a planner. He spent 15 years writing The Lord of the Rings. This method obviously works well for both of them.

Brandon Sanderson works somewhere in between. He meticulously plans out setting, world building, and plot, but doesn’t plan so much with his characters. He starts without knowing them very well, and likes to see how they grow when they are placed in the situations he has planned out. This obviously works well for him.

If you would have asked me, even many years ago "If you wrote stories, which kind of writer do you think you would be?" I would have answered without hesitation, "A planner." Now that I’ve been writing for a year, I would tell you that one of the big reasons why I’m a planner is that plot is always difficult for me. It takes a lot of thought and consideration to get it just right. I could never do it on the fly.

My teacher, though, told us that to find what works well for us, he recommends we try out both ends of the continuum. I’ve used the planning method tons. It’s always worked for me. I tried thinking if I’ve ever used the discovery method. That’s when I realized that yes, I have ONCE.

Wanna guess which story I used it on? Yep, Ancient Chinese Secret. I knew WHAT went wrong there (see my last post). I think that WHY it went wrong is because I wasn’t using my writing style. I focused too much on plot and not enough on characters because I knew plot was a weak spot for me; I had to put my focus on it.

So, I guess the lesson learned is to figure out where you are in the continuum, and then respect it. Plan if you need to plan. Discover if you need to discover. And maybe try both on for size if you aren’t sure which will work best for you.

One word of caution from my teacher, though. Stay away from the far ends of the continuum, even if you have to work hard to do so. If you are too far on the discovery end, you’ll find yourself starting out a story, then you’ll get a little stuck or start feel like you aren’t loving your story any more. So, you scrap it and start with a new story. Before long, you have a dozen started stories, and nothing ever gets finished. If you are too far on the planning end, you may write and rewrite and rework until you find you’ve spent most of your life working on the same story, never really feeling like it’s good enough for others to read. Both are bad. Be good and stay away from the ends, but stay true to your writing nature.

That’s all for now, folks. I’m sure I’ll make other mistakes before long.

I think I understand

I have been reading The 39 Clues: The Maze of Bones to my kids. I’ve been excited to get to this book, because I am a fan of Rick Riordan; I think he did a great job on The Lightning Thief. Plus, he used to be a junior high history teacher, and I love that he combines history with a great story. All of the ten 39 Clues books will focus on an event or person in history; this one (The Maze of Bones) focuses on Benjamin Franklin, whom I think is beyond cool.

But, I’ve had a very hard time getting into the book. So have my kids.

Why? At first, all I could think of was that it lacked heart. I’ve been trying hard to put my finger on what exactly makes it feel like it is lacking heart. Character Development? I wondered. No, he tells us lots about the characters. (The fact that I thought “tells us” instead of “shows us” should have been my first clue, but I didn’t see it.)

It wasn’t until I realized that The Maze of Bones has the same problem as Ancient Chinese Secret that I figured it out.

Usually when I read back through a story I wrote, I relive a little of the high I got writing it. It makes my soul do a little dance, sing a little song. It makes me happy. I had a hard time re-reading through Ancient Chinese Secret to make sure it didn’t have any grammatical errors before posting it. It just didn’t interest me enough to read it again. (And yes, warning signals should have gone off here, but they didn’t.) I couldn’t really put my finger on why exactly I didn’t like it.

So, when I had the two stories to compare, it was easy to see the similarity. We didn’t inhabit our characters. Sure, we knew lots about our characters. We both shared lots about them. But, I know that at least in my story, I never tried to BE Karen. I never really got into her head. I didn’t know what it was like to walk in her shoes. I didn’t see the world through her eyes.

I wrote a book for my kids, with them as the main characters along with a girl named Claire. Claire is a sweet girl. I like her. She had a few sad parts, though. Sad parts that really made me feel bad. I bawled when I wrote the parts where she cried. I wanted to give her a hug and tell her everything would be okay. She seemed real enough that I almost believed I could. There was another character in the story, Daniel, who was long dead (decades earlier) when the story takes place, but still integral to the plot. My kids found his journal in the new house we moved into, and learned a lot about him and how he was a part of the map they found— stuff I had outlined before I even wrote the first word of the story. When I wrote the part in the story when Daniel was 15 years old and his dad died, it was really, really hard for me. I felt sick that I had been the one that killed off this wonderful man. I did it. My writing killed him. It was awful.

But with Karen.... I didn’t even feel bad when I made her break her ankle.

So, I am writing this in hopes that the lesson I learned will have a better chance of sticking with me. It’s not a mistake I hope to make again.

And, the night after my epiphany, as if to put the lesson in capitals, I read something that explained it all in one sentence. I was reading Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks, and came across an epigraph that reads:

“If you do not hear music in your words,
you have put too much thought into your writing
and not enough heart.”

Ancient Chinese Secret: Part 7 (The Ending)

Note: Make sure you have read parts 1-6 (below) first.

Monday

Judy waited in the lobby, excited to share the good news with Karen. She had been waiting a while. She figured that Karen had a greater chance of getting to work on time with Peter driving her– he seemed to be a very punctual person. And yet here she still was, at 9:15, waiting. Maybe the crutches were slowing her down, she thought.

When Karen finally entered the building, Judy ran to her, giving her a hug and taking Karen’s purse so she wouldn’t have to juggle it with her crutches.

“Guess what?” Judy asked excitedly. “I met with Rosenberg this morning, and told him you broke your ankle. He said that he didn’t think you could really work in the daycare in that condition, so he is letting you come back to marketing early!”

“Oh. Thank you, Judy.” Karen’s voice sounded more relieved than it had been in days.

Judy carefully kept the subject away from fortune cookies and curses and Chinese food as they went up the elevator to the fifth floor, and walked the corridors. As they rounded the corner to their desks, they both froze. Sitting on Karen’s desk was a fortune cookie.

Judy gasped. “Where did that come from? It wasn’t here when I went downstairs to get you!”

Resigned, Karen placed her crutches against the wall, sat down, and picked up the cookie. “It’s okay. It’s not like I really thought I could get away with not getting a fortune cookie yesterday. I knew it would show up somewhere.”

“So it just appeared?” Judy asked. “And without any Chinese food to go with it? How unfair is that?”

“It’s okay. I think I may have gotten over my addiction.” She let out a mirthless laugh and turned the cookie around and around in her hands. “You know, I’m okay with not getting a fortune cookie that says I will get fame or riches. In fact, you know those cookies that don’t really have a fortune, they just have advice— I would be just fine with one of those.”

“Why don’t you just not open it,” Judy suggested.

“It won’t change anything. And it’s probably better to know what’s coming.” She took a deep breath, then pulled off the plastic wrapper. She cracked the cookie, pulled out the paper, and then read aloud, “All things must come to an end.”

A feeling of dread washed over her as she realized that she didn’t know if the fortune meant the end of her curse, or the end of her.

The End