…my first draft, that is.

Still, compared to the first drafts I finished for my other two novels, this one feels much more complete. I still have a long way to go before you, dear reader, can pick up this book in a local bookstore, but I feel, for the first time, like I’m on the right path–not trying to guess what the right path is.

Here’s why:

1. I’m not doing it alone. Working with Jennie, my book coach, helped me appreciate the value of a professional, someone who can guide you, critique you, and help you when you get stuck. It’s true there are a lot of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) writers out there who succeed and succeed admirable, but truth be told, I’ve never been a DIY-er for anything. I consider this writing process like building a house. I’d been trying to do it on my own, and it turns out I’m an excellent carpenter who can craft the nicest furniture for my house, and I’m pretty good at splashing the right colour paint on the walls. In other words, I’d learned how to complete the finishing touches very well. What I’d never been taught was how to build the foundation and structure and that, if you’re talking about houses, is a very dangerous thing. For books, obviously, there’s no critical damage, except wasted time, energy and a vicious blow to the ego when the rejections keep piling up. Still, learning how to build solidly from the ground up (and do all the invisible work, like plumbing and electricity) has been key to my increased confidence.
2. Start with story.That seems obvious, doesn’t it? You have to know your characters and what happens to them, but I never appreciated the meaning of “story” before. It’s not about what happens to your characters, it’s about what life means to your characters. Story isn’t about action; it’s about reaction. And every time your characters react to situations they find themselves in, we, as the reader, learn a little about ourselves and our world. Would I do that? What is that guy thinking? How could she say that? I’d never be so stupid. Ah, that’s what I want my friends to say about me.The funny thing is, I teach that kind of stuff every day–how we can learn about our world from the characters–but I never knew how to write it. Now that I know to start with what the character wants internally–his or her greatest desire–and why he or she wants it, plus what’s stopping him or her from getting it, this whole book-writing thing is a lot easier.

So, next steps: I revise my novel based on all of Jennie’s suggestions, as well as adding in details I couldn’t possibly see when I first wrote my opening chapter.

Example: Early in the story, Lyra gets into a confrontation with the bad guys. In later chapters, I decided to write that another character actually witnessed this altercation. That has a huge impact on the motivation of both characters, but since I didn’t figure out that connection until later in the story, I now have to revise that earlier scene to make sure there’s continuity. The thing is, it’s not going to be hard to do (ok, ok, I say that now). But because I now have the whole story on paper, I now know what needs to be strengthened. I’ve never had that much confidence going into a second draft before. 🙂

Then there are beta readers and query letters and agent submissions and well, a whole long road beyond that, but now I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, I’ll take a few days off, wait for feedback on my final scenes from Jennie and then dive back in.  ‘Cause it ain’t over till it’s over.

Yeah, you’re right. It means I’m not really done…

Your regularly scheduled blog post will return when the writer has finished the first draft of her manuscript which will be next week because that’s her final deadline with her book coach!

p.s. The book coach wants to approach literary agents with my (as-yet-unfinished) book.

(yay 🙂 )

Writing is a lonely profession, where perseverance in the face of the world’s absolute indifference to your drive, talent and goals is essential.

So when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work, I’m buoyed.

But when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work on her own blog, to her own readers, I’m jazzed. 🙂

Here’s an excerpt from her most recent blog. (By the way, I’m Writer A… 🙂 )

Writer A came to me with a finished novel – sci fi YA – which she hoped to polish up before submission. She had been working on it for a long time and felt relatively confident in her effort – among other reasons because she is a creative writing teacher at a high school and knows her stuff.  But I asked her a few basic questions about the point of the book, the desire of the characters – and she couldn’t answer. She had a super cool scenario, but had not done any of the deep work that would make the narrative hold together over the course of a whole book. I also looked at her first chapter and there were glaring errors in the first pages that would make any agent say no and any reader pick up another book. Those errors were info dumps and head-hopping (moving from one character’s head to another within the same paragraph or scene.) These are extremely common problems.

(Ok, that’s not the compliment part…)
 
The amazing thing was that this writer was really talented in all other writerly ways.

(Here’s the compliment.)

She just hadn’t done the deep story work she needed to do, and she had few bad habits she simply could not see. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles,I wasn’t writing info dumps,” she later said to me. And yet she was…
 
We worked together for four weeks to nail down the internal logic of her story, and then she re-wrote those opening pages four times. I made her go back four times to the same five pages. I kept marking the info dumps and the head-hopping until she could see them herself, and avoid them. Then we followed the logic we had hammered out, and she wrote forward from there, revising her story as we went.

(Here was the hard, frustrating work.)
 
She is almost finished with a revised draft of her novel. There are no info dumps anywhere in sight and the POV problems are completely gone.  The narrative is seamless and riveting. I am not exaggerating when I say that her work has brought tears to my eyes.

(If that isn’t a compliment… )

It’s SO good.

(That, too.)

It’s a thousand times better than it was before. It has a thousand times better chance of finding an audience.

(I hope she’s right!)
 

(http://jennienash.com/how-to-write-a-book-blog/2017/8/3/what-does-a-book-coach-do-part-4-the-dangers-of-diybook-writing)

When I started my semester off in February, I had an ambitious goal: start and finish a draft of a new book, my third, before I returned to the classroom in September.

When I ran into roadblocks looking for literary agents to take on my already-finished manuscript, I shelved my original plans. I had to take time to fix Book #2  before I could go on to Book #3.

When I threw out everything I’d done on Book #2 and started from scratch, I chucked my original goal. There was no way I could rewrite my Phoenix Cells book and write a brand new one before the fall.

When my book coach Jennie sent me an e-mail last week asking if I’d thought about beta readers and literary agents, I thought she was crazy. Why would I think about the steps that come after a polished manuscript is completed when I haven’t even finished a first draft? But Jennie assured me I was well on track to finishing my draft by the end of August. It means I’ve had to pick up the pace–writing two scenes a week instead of two scenes every two weeks, but I’m determined to meet my deadlines.

Which got me thinking… maybe I will have accomplished my original goal after all. I wanted to write a brand new book, Book #3, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. While the name of my main character is the same as Book #2 and the concept that she has “super cells” remains consistent, everything else is different. Even Lyra herself is a different person. The plot is different, the setting, is different, the theme is different. The whole book is different.

So, I can either consider this a rewrite of Book #2, or I can consider this Book #3.

Some people might argue that it’s better to think of it as a rewrite–why tell yourself you failed at getting two novels published? But I’ve decided on the opposite. I like thinking of this as a brand new book.

Which means I will meet my goal of writing Book #3 after all.

(Yay for me. 🙂 )

It’s full-on summer, which  means, with my kids home from school, I’m a full-on mom.

Which means I have less time to write.

Which means I have to prioritize my writing time: work on my novel to get my first draft completed by the end of August or continue with my twice-weekly blog updates, since I’m discovering I don’t have time to do both.

Which means I have to cut back on my blog posts.

Which means I’ll now only be posting once a week about my progress–otherwise I won’t have any progress to post about. 🙂

Thanks for your support so far and we’ll chat again next week.

Did you know that adjectives describe nouns? Did you know that adjectives don’t erase them?

For example, if I put the adjective “unpublished” in front of the noun “writer”, it simply describes what type of writer I am–the word doesn’t negate the fact that I am a writer.

This is a hard lesson for “new”, “emerging” writers to learn, and it’s one I re-learned during our trip to France.

In Nice, at a beautiful beach club on the Mediterranean, we encountered a couple of Canadians from Toronto–when you’re across the ocean in a foreign land, anyone from your country becomes a neighbour–so we got chatting.

I introduced myself as a high school English teacher. Christy introduced herself as a stay-at-home mom of three young children. We talked about our kids, we talked about our travel experiences (we both spent time in France as teenagers on an exchange!), we talked about our interests and families and histories. We talked all day.

Only when we were about to leave did Christy mention, in passing, that she also writes.

“Really?” I asked. “So do I!”

Turns out Christy writes young adult fiction. (She’s already self-published–check out her book Wicka and her website www.christydeveaux.com)

Turns out we had a lot more to talk about.

Now imagine if I’d had to courage to call myself a writer from the start–we would have had so much more time to share our writing experiences. But I’d gotten hung up on that adjective “unpublished”, so I chickened out.

And if it weren’t for Christy stepping up to say she writes, then I would have missed out.

So, new resolution: introduce myself as a writer. Because published or not, that’s what I am. One pesky little adjective can’t change that. 🙂

Memo to the cast and crew of  Phoenix Cell Savior:

We will be on hiatus for the next few weeks. All production, including blog posts will halt while the writer-creator-producer-director galavants off to France (lucky her).

Please be ready to report back to work the last week in July.

Have a good break.

Ayaan’s gone. I had to give her the boot.

Ayaan was supposed to be the teen girl who took Lyra in under her wing and showed her what a peer friendship could be like.

She did well in her initial role in my previous drafts. She lived overseas, where Lyra traveled, and she became a cultural guide. Ayaan, a quiet and introspective teen, was confident in herself, even as she chafed against the limited role of women in her society.

But Lyra no longer travels overseas. She stays in the U.S., so there’s no explicit need for a cultural guide.

Ok, I thought, but there is still a need for a cultural guide of a different sort–a girl about Lyra’s age who shows Lyra what “normal life” was really like. I naturally assumed I could recast Ayaan in that role.

Turns out I was wrong.

Ayaan simply didn’t fit. As I tried to write the scene where the two girls first meet, it wasn’t coming together. Every idea I had seemed wrong for Ayaan’s quiet character. Ayaan wouldn’t jump up on stage and belt out show tunes. Ayaan wouldn’t go on a vandalism streak. But those were some of the things I wanted Ayaan to do.

Ayaan refused. She had too much dignity to do what I asked, she told me.

So reluctantly, I had to fire her. Call it creative differences, if you like.

I auditioned a few other characters, but finally settled on Yasmine Smith, who has a different, more gregarious, open outlook on life than Ayaan. A third-generation American, Yasmine hated being saddled with an Arabic name while a devastating war rages in the Middle East, so she anglicized it to Jaz. Now we’re talking. Now I have a character ready to take her world by storm, and to drag Lyra along for the ride.

I’m pleased to welcome Jaz, but I’m sorry to see Ayaan go. She was a great character. Maybe one day, in another book, we’ll cross paths again.

Turns out I do know what I’m doing with this whole book thing. 🙂

Here are some comments from Jennie, my book coach. Her encouragement is invaluable. Makes me feel like I can actually accomplish this task.

On creating Lyra’s backstory:

OMG THIS IS SO GOOD —YOU KILLED IT!!! There are just a few TINY things to sort out…

And then there’s the question of how to let the reader into all this as you go along. But it’s a RICH RICH backstory that Lyra can draw upon as she does what she does — using it to make sense of everything.

SUPER well done!!!!

I’d love you to clean up the few questions I asked so you can use this as your Bible and have ALL the answers (and so I can use it as an example of awesome b/c you are SO good at being coached — WOW!

On the opening scene:

Your opening chapter is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!!! I’m STUNNED at the improvement you made — there’s NO TELLING ANYWHERE ??? It’s dramatic and logical and whole and just WOW.

On creating the backstory of secondary characters:

BRAVA on this document. It’s awesome!! Just a few things to clean up to make sure EVERYTHING fits and then you’ve GOT it.

The sister sketch. Great — all this works perfectly now.

I told you how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE what you did with this. You GOT it, Jen! Really! It’s SO excellent!

On revisions of Chapter 1:

You have a tendency to split a trigger — i.e. something triggers the character to think of a flashback or memory, but you talk about it in two places instead of just one, where it would be more powerful. As you write, watch for that.

But overall, this is just incredible progress. You totally GOT the show don’t tell thing — where YOU know the story and you are letting us watch it unfold. And you figured out how to let us inside this character’s head and really feel what she’s feeling. Write like this, and you’re gonna have so many fans!!!!

On my final chapter:

WOW Jen! Just WOW!

The person who wrote this last chapter is like a totally different writer than the one who wrote the chapter you first submitted to me. It’s specific, logical, dramatic, moving, powerful — it’s ALL THERE.

On my “Aha! Moment” scene (where Lyra resolves her inner conflict):

I am sitting here totally blown away and totally amazed and totally thrilled that I will one day get to say that I played a tiny part in bringing this extraordinary story to life because YOU ARE AMAZING and this story is AMAZING and you just KILLED this scene. Just KILLED it. You have written a powerful, visceral, real and timely lovely story — it feels like The Fault in Our Stars. Like Romeo and Juliet. Like a really LOVE story for our times. It’s just — WOW.

And what you had before was just so NOT. It’s the transformation that is blowing my mind. How you went from what you were writing to this. I can hardly believe it.

I know I sound like a broken record but WOW. You have total command of this story now. You are letting the reader IN. You are SHOWING us and it has such integrity from a story perspective. It’s just awesome! And now you have this aha moment scene and the first and last scene — you ​have the architecture of your book!!

Here’s the catch: the pressure! Jennie may think every scene I submit to her will be this good. 🙂

Still, it’s nice to know I’m on the right track.

Whew.