the stages of building story

I’m between voices. As my latest draft of Blackdirt lies drying in the sun, and a desire to give another polish to both Raising Cheer and The Empress Chronicles pokes out like a tulip, my head is a ping-pong match, and the ensuing (disparate) imagery that accompanies the characters’ voices is keeping me in a sort of la-la land.

Here’s what it looks like: Lily (who, just to complicate matters has a split personality—so she’s really three voices) Liz, Sisi and Brady, when they whisper ideas to me, yanking me into their settings and conundrums, there’s this lovely period of disequilibrium. I’m in the broad expanse of an onion field. A quiet front porch of a summer-swollen farmhouse. I’m deep in Forest Park, damp from a spring hailstorm. I’m in a cold Bavarian castle.

In the POV class I just finished teaching one of the students made an interesting discovery about his process. He realized that how he develops a scene starts with plot point, and then invites a distant third-person assessment of the plot point:

When I hit a plot point that could be told from any one of a number of povs I start by dashing down the scene in objective 3rd and stay out of anyone's head. The scene sketch is rather thin this way, of course. Until this class I had no idea I was doing this--I only registered annoyance  at the thinness of some scenes. 

Now I see that I have just been delaying the move to 3rd limited until I understand the needs of the story and can dive into the right head. What's freeing is that now I don't feel like I'm "doing it wrong"--more that I'm doing it in stages.

I love that he shared this, and it made me think of my own process, which I always assumed was character-driven, but diving into the real chicken/egg scenario, I now see that it’s really landscape-driven. The sensual aspects of a scene tend to appear first, followed by a voicey commentary on those aspects, and through those elements, eventually an action emerges. An intent. So if we’re talking “stages” – that’s my natural process.

However, some of you remember that Raising Cheer was my plotboard experiment, right? I had this action-oriented framework into which I flowed the actual story. In retrospect, I’d have to say that a plot board may be a compensatory device I’ll need to rely on in order to force me into conflict, lest I hang out in the woods, the castle or the fields with Brady, Liz, Lily and Sisi all the live long and never take them to uncomfortable places.

So what does this mean in terms of “approach” to narrative? How can one blend a natural approach with a framework that leads to a satisfying outcome? Is this, after all, what is meant by craft? Interesting to ponder.

What’s your natural approach to story? What appears first?

writing in the "new world"

I'm a little late to pipe in on the Amanda Hocking buzz, but I really like what she has to say in this post (thank you, Erin Reel, for directing my scattered attention to it!)

What I like in particular is the demonstration of how a "lowly" writer now has the power to set the record straight with nary a phone call or magazine interface. Hocking has a half-million page views and nearly 1,000 followers on her blog, and a choir of tweeters crowing in her behalf. She's honed her audience through sheer will, hard work, and savvy.

That she's the latest poster child for self-pub success not-withstanding, Hocking isn't all that different than other women who set their sites on a goal and exploited their natural sourcing ability and intuition, backed up with a solid strategy. Mrs. Fields and her chocolate chip cookies, remember her? Mary Kay and her drive to turn housewives into entrepreneurs. Amanda Hocking had a vision, a skillset, and the drive to see it through, and while her nay-sayers are pounding out cautionary missives throughout the blogosphere, she's parlaying her success while being careful not to kill the kernel of passion that fuels it.

It's easy to get side-tracked with all the media at our fingertips. Easy to get sucked in to burning cycles and spending our writing energy in secondary pursuits. Talking about writing instead of writing. Ahem. I have well-published friends who never read their reviews because of the derailing factor. I have writer buddies who don't tweet, or facebook or blog, deciding instead to use their time at the keyboard to enter the alternate universe. Other friends of mine are good at compartmentalization, and segment their day and exposure to Internet noise judiciously.

As for me, I'm a binge type. I use the energy of distraction to propel me into my line of flight, and then, when it works the way I like, I can glide in the zone for hours. This tiny talent is what keeps me from being truly ADD, I think. It's a state of hyper-daydream. A high. But, alas, it's not available to me every day, I have to carve space for it. Put it on my Outlook calendar.

What about you? Are you a multi-tasker (have your creative writing doc open while attending to e-mail and social media), or do you do one thing at a time?