I love writing!

I love my new characters! They are stretching and showing me more and more of themselves. One is showing signs of being like my oldest son, but a few years older. Others of my kids have inadvertently shown up in stories, and I think oldest has felt a little left out. But you can't do it on purpose--it has to come naturally. And I think it will. I'll wait to tell him until I'm sure, though. In the meantime, plot is coming together, too. That feeling of freeing or setting alive something that has existed in embryo form up until now is completely awesome. I love writing!

On another writing topic, I responded to someone at Verla's who wanted to know which character she should kill off in her YA. And because I want to think about this some more, I'm repeating my answer here: it needs to be someone who really does matter to the main character, first of all. Tiny characters that serve no purpose might show you that the antagonist is a Bad Guy, but I think in a way it's less effective. (She wasn't proposing this, by the way--just my expanded thoughts.) You can, of course, kill off the bad guy, and that's perfectly rational. But if you kill off any good guys, it's got to mean something. Whoever dies needs to die because it's the ONLY way your MC can finally reach his/her full potential. A necessary sacrifice. And it should be someone who really does mean something to the reader. That death has got to work hard, or it will seem superfluous.

Not that I have any deaths planned in the near future. But it bears thinking about. What's a book without a little opposition? Without high stakes, and so on? Heartless, but true!

Why I can't write a book in a month (or three)

I've been having ideas rushing into my head so fast I can hardly write them down. I like this. I like it very much! I like that they aren't all in order, that one scene comes to me, and I realize to get the full effect I want out of it, something significant needs to happen earlier. Then I go back to that earlier scene and realize I want it to have certain reverberations later. And so on. Right now I have a big file with all these scenes dumped into it. Like last time around, I'm going to have a lot of work putting it all together (but not as MUCH as last time, oh please!). Today I read over a couple scenes I produced recently, and I like them very much.

But, despite the fact that 1000 words a day is a perfect and realistic goal for me, writing words isn't the only part of writing a book. The other part is thinking. Pondering what the outcomes of each character's choices will be. Figuring out what in their past would make them act the way they do. Thinking about them the way you would about a friend with a problem. I do a LOT of prewriting (the random scenes) to figure out just what the characters want to say, and what their own personal stories are. Every few scenes, I stop and have to do the pondering thing. And it's only after a lot of that that I can then start to outline. (Although I really hate the rigidness that word implies! I hate being locked in! I used to write my school outlines after I'd done the entire paper, because I knew I had things in my subconscious that were more important than the nonsense at the front of my mind. The quickest way to kill a novel is to outline it before my first 10-15K.)

Anyhow, all this longwindedness is to say that I spent today "outlining"--no, let's say "ordering the existing materials." There are two halves of the book, the first ending with both a mini-resolution and the awareness of an even greater problem than the characters thought at the start. The second half, of course, deals with this greater problem (which has been quietly building all along). I'm detailed for the first half, and I'm eager to see what appears for the second. So although I can't count those 1377 words from today in my word count, they are a very important 1377 words!

Okay, kids are asleep, pondering done. Finished The Pinhoe Egg (fun book). Maybe I'll start Neal Shusterman's Everlost.