Drafting Tips

Writing your story from beginning to end sounds like the right way to go, right? You write the beginning, the middle, the climax, the denoument, and the end. Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, once noted that the last third of a book usually took up only the last ten percent of the time to write, either from confidence in your story or maybe the narrowing of options for alternative endings.

But what happens when you don’t know what happens in the next chapter? My solution for that with Hurricane Baby was to write sections as I thought of them. I wondered about if Judd and Laine divorced over Wendy, how long would it be before Judd started dating again? I knew not long—he had a reputation as a womanizer in college and was still relatively young. So I wrote a scene where he met his second wife six months after his divorce was final. Ray would eventually figure out that Judy Ray wasn’t his—studies show that a child’s similarity in looks to their father peaks around two years old, so Ray would notice she did not favor him or his family in any way by then. What would he do?

I put the scenes I was writing in sequential order in the original manuscript as I drafted each one in my notebook. I would fill in what I thought would connect them as I went. The final scenes were the third ones I wrote. I knew where the story was going to go—but how did I get it there?

Sometimes the characters up and surprised me. Dr. Jack Rawson turned meaner and meaner with every scene I wrote him into. His playing-God ego was huge, and it led to Wendy being so uncomfortable around him that the scenes were excruciating to write.

So instead of writing linearly, where you write the first scene first and the last scene last, try going where the answer to the question of What happens? is burning a hole in your imagination. Write that scene. You may keep it, you may not. Pencils have erasers, and a computer comes with a delete key for a reason, right?  If you’re blocked on the Next Thing, try the next Next Thing and see what happens. 

Starting Revision

So I’ve gotten feedback from a few of my readers and some of the same issues keep cropping up. So I am starting to add more material and take out other material as I revise this month. I still have several readers’ comments outstanding so I am not changing any existing storyline too drastically–just adding a new story arc I dreamed up on vacation and adding a fifth story to each arc to address another comment that I knew likely was going to be said anyway. So I have more to revise and draft.

Luckily some of the new scenes can still come out of the old draft and be suitable with just a few revisions. But I know I have several new ten-page scenes to draft soon as well and will start work on that with an eye to finish August first so I can make a switch with another author I admire very much; I’ll read her chapbook and she’ll read the revised story collection.

I am truly excited about what has been said so far. I really think I’ve found the moves to finally tell this story and maybe reach the audience I want to reach with it. Now I just have to let the comments buoy me along so I don’t freeze up again. Again, I have done a lot of thinking ahead of time on what I want to say and need to just write down what is in my mind.

More on Beta Readers

So I found several beta readers after all for Hurricane Baby. One has finished reading and reported in that she does not like Mike and Holly’s storyline–the guy that has a huge crisis of faith. She said it reminded her too much of the Fireproof movie, where all they needed was Jesus and everything turned out fine.

I countered that I had wanted at least one story to turn out to have a happy ending. She wasn’t convinced. So depending on what other readers say, I may be back to the drawing board on that.

This sort of feedback is why you want beta readers. You need people who will be honest with you about how stories come off to them. Beta readers are not necessarily editors–their role is to tell you if the story hangs together or not. For this reader, who I’ve known since I was eight years old, it didn’t. It’s just one opinion. She loved the Wendy and Ray Magnum story and the James and Lori King story. But that other one just stuck in her craw; she couldn’t swallow it. It means more work may need to be done on it, or to maybe ditch it altogether. We will see what others say.

Eyes On Your Work

What do you do with a manuscript once you finish it? I always try to get someone else to look it over. I am about to reach that stage where I will be finding another pair of eyes to read and see where the story needs revising. I have a few more pages on my last story to do and then I will be ready to get another perpective.

You can go about finding readers several ways. One avenue I have taken is to go to my MFA mates that I still stay in touch with and offer to switch manuscripts–I read one of theirs, and they read mine. Both of you get a new perspective. and all you’re out is a little time. Cooperation is a wonderful thing. Maybe you have a writing group or people you met in a conference or workshop. A swap can really work in your favor.

Getting different perspectives from your readers is something else to think about. I am getting another writer’s thoughts from my MFA friend. I have another friend who dabbles in writing but also reads voraciously. He can give me a reader’s perspective–does the story hang together? Where is he tempted to put it down because it’s boring? Etc.

Free options are the best options–but if you want a little more professional opinion, Facebook groups or Twitter searches are always a option to find a professional developmental editor. Be sure to vet someone first–see if other books they have worked on have eventually sold or if they are good enough editors for their own work to sell. If you’re paying for it, make sure it money well spent.

So when you finish a manuscript, celebrate your accomplishment however you choose. But know that the work is not necessarily done; getting other eyes on it is the next step.

Fear Redux

I am trying to finish the last two stories in my manuscript this weekend and have been panicking every time I open the document. Thinking that I’m an idiot for believing I can finish a big fiction project like this again. Thinking that no one will ever bother to read it and care about the people I’m writing out or about the story I’m trying to tell.

I am just going to treat my self-imposed deadline as a hard one and pretend it’s going to be published do-or-die the day I finish it. We will see how well I can hoodwink myself into believing that. Fear is strong. Fear has bedeviled me my whole life. But I am going to be strong, and I am going to defeat the fear. No matter what.

Fear

So why was I afraid to pick this project back up and write on it when I got the idea for linked stories several months ago?

Number one was fear of failure. Would I start it only to find that it was unworkable? That it wouldn’t turn out as I envisioned? That fear is largely gone. I have ten stories completed in the conversion–several of which had been published in stand-alone form over the past few years. I need to have faith in my ability to craft something new out of what was already strong material.

Number two was fear of the blank page. This one is harder to fight. Where I have had to create almost an entire narrative from near-scratch, I have had a ton of problems. In fact, I have two stories left half-done after I pulled source material out of the main manuscript that have been a challenge to work on.

Number three is imposter syndrome. Many of us writers, when faced with a challenging task, can draw on past success at our craft as a reason to believe that we can face this new challenge, too. So why don’t we? Often it’s because we live in a culture that says simple success in completing a project is not enough; more must be done to make it “successful” by someone else’s standards.

Number four is fear of wasting time. This belief whispers to me that my paid work is more valuable than my fun work because it pays off financially. When I have paid work pending, it’s really hard to give time to unpaid work. This fear tells me that I am only a valuable writer when I’m earning money. I still work to overcome this obstacle.

Number five is fear of losing my mind. Many writers write from a place of trauma. I do so in my memoir work. Well, the first writing on this story came out of the trauma of Hurricane Katrina, which ultimately consumed me and resulted in a psychotic break. Many writers report re-experiencing their trauma when they write about it. I don’t want to go back to that some place I was when first crafting this story.

How am I working to overcome these fears? I remind myself that I am successful by my own lights and that is all that matters. I remind myself that computers come with a delete key to erase a poorly written sentence or paragraph or whole scene. I remind myself of Anne Lamott’s advice that no one cares as much as we do, and others do not live to tear apart our work.

Concrete steps I have taken have been to sign up for an extended flash fiction writing workshop where I can learn more about my craft and get used to the flow of writing fiction again in a low-stakes environment, one where my work is supported, and I am not writing only for my own satisfaction but for others who want to see me succeed. It basically comes down to getting my own confidence back.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Where We Are

So I picked “Hurricane Baby” back up this year to try to make it work as a series of linked short stories. I took the most dramatic episodes in the novel manuscript and am rewriting them to show how the hurricane affected the lives of various characters.

Wendy and Ray Magnum have to deal with the fallout of Wendy’s encounter with Judd McKay. Mike and Holly Seabrook work to overcome the damage done to their home and lives with Mike undergoing a serious crisis of faith. And James and Lisa King suffer through a dissolution of their marriage after Lisa decides she is never returning to the Coast again.

Each of the three storylines is told in four installments, alternated throughout the manuscript. Each of the twelve stories is told from a slightly different point of view. Wendy and Ray each have their own story, Mike’s point of view is illustrated through three stories, with Holly closing their narrative with her own story, and James and Lisa’s stories alternate from one to the other.

Writing The Story

Long story short–these characters have been alive in my mind for quite some time. The story has undergone many, many permutations since I completed that first story draft. In 2010, in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina fifth anniversary. I took the story and adapted it to a stage play, which is when the title went from “Still Waters” to “Hurricane Baby”. That stage play won third place in the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Mississippi, where a stage reading was performed on May 1, 2010.

I kept working at it and revising on it until I wondered if I had taken it as far as I could. I finally gave up on fiction almost entirely and started concentrating on blogging, setting up a blog about my life with bipolar disorder in 2014. In 2015, I enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Mississippi University for Women, concentrating on nonfiction. But even with that as my concentration, I kept flirting with fiction stories.

I took two semesters to write in fiction classes under Mary Miller, an up-and-coming short story and novel writer from Oxford, and Diana Spechler, a writer based in Mexico City. I wrote new fiction in their classes and experimented a great deal with flash fiction, discovering a had a knack for compressing a story down to its bare bones.

Characters

I did not plot out the novel and follow a script to write it. I simply kept asking the question: What happens next? I didn’t even ask why? that something would happen. I never told why! that something had happened. I tried to make sure each twist of the story was organic to the first characters as I had conceived them.

Wendy Magnum was a tough-as-nails working-class Southern woman. She worked part-time in a daycare taking care of three-year-olds because she seemed to not be able to have children, although she desperately wanted them, and worked her off days in Ray’s shop. She and Ray began dating when she was fourteen, not long after she lost her daddy in a drunk-driving accident and had married right when she finished high school. They had been married ten years when Katrina came through Hattiesburg. She loved the men in her life and knew how to handle guns but could not handle herself when she thought she was going to die in the hurricane without Ray to protect her, as he had throughout their life together.

Judd McKay was a wild one from Mandeville, Louisiana. He had gone to LSU and had lived and worked in Hattiesburg until his father died, leaving him his childhood home. He moved back home and began working as a traveling salesman selling first chainsaws, then generators, for Jackson Equipment Company. He and Ray had known each other for years. He had been married for three years to Laine McKay, who matched him in wildness and meanness, recognizing what he could do for her as well as what he couldn’t. He never had any sense when it came to a good-looking woman–something that had been his undoing more than once in his life.

Ray Magnum was four or five years older than Wendy and had been a baseball player in high school with blond hair and brown eyes. He owned his own business, Magnum Hardware, with his partner, Tommy Cade, and also worked as a professional firefighter to have a steady income. He was a stoic man who was capable of great love, moving into his mama’s house with Wendy to take care of his mama until she died. But working at the firehouse forty-eight hours on and seventy-two hours off at the shop, he could only do so much–when Wendy needed more.

They were a combustible mix–and I keep lighting fuses.

Even So

In fact, Judd and Wendy, along with Ray Magnum, and Rosie and Lee Oswalt. and Laine McKay, became so real to me that even after I let Judd McKay have his say about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the entire cast of characters decided they wanted to take ten pages each to decipher their emotions, too. I started several weeks later writing about how Ray, Wendy’s husband, suffered from PTSD from being on a firetruck after the storm. I talked about his struggles with increased alcohol use and survivor’s guilt.

By this time, I had started counseling for my own feelings of desperation and anxiety that overwhelmed me after the power came back on and the damage was cleared from my neighborhood, which had experienced Katrina as a Category 1 hurricane over 120 miles inland.

I had let my writing friend Lori read the original story, and I sent her this next ten-page installment from Ray after I finished it. She wrote an in an email back to me that she could see how I was “processing” my own feelings about the hurricane through Ray and thought I needed to talk about his actions, rather than his thoughts. I called her up.

She and I talked for a while, and she crystallized a sentiment for me that I took to heart as I continued to write: This story was not about how people attempted to learn to cope. It was about people who had been destroyed inside by what they had faced. Her exact words (as I remember them) were, “This story is not about Ray’s struggles and victories in AA.”

So I ditched those ten pages and instead wrote instead about Judd and Laine McKay’s meeting with a lawyer to finalize their divorce. Again, I let these characters hurt each other and say hateful things they truly meant. I didn’t get into their heads–I let their actions speak instead. Slowly but surely, I was developing this storm story into a novel that would consume my life for the better part of five months.