Now doesn't that look comfy?Yep, that's my writing spot. Actually, it's where I'm sitting right this minute as I type this blog post. It's right in the middle of my den with the rest of the family.
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Yes, I do need a quiet spot to write more and more these days. This past summer my husband and sons were in and out of the house more than usual, so I spent several days writing in one of the Sunday school rooms at the church at the end of my driveway. It's nice and quiet there and I get a lot of writing done.
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So, that's the where I write.
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When is whenever I can, since I have a full-time job, and work part-time as the ACFW Conference Treasurer..I suppose the next question is how do I write. Okay, this is the fun part!
My ideas come from everywhere. A song on the radio, a sermon, a picture. I log them into an idea file, and let them percolate. Sometimes I just have a title. That's how Terms of Indenturement, my historical romance that just won the ACFW Genesis contest and The Maggie came to be. I had the title for years and played with several ideas until the current idea set in 1790’s Natchez clicked into place. [Update: Terms of Indenturement is now a 3-book series with the first book tentatively set for release in the summer of 2017.].
Once I read a contemporary romance where the heroine ended up with a pile of stolen loot and chose not to return it. What would a Christian have done under those circumstances? Especially a woman in 1880’s with nowhere to go and no way of supporting herself, her elderly grandmother and her blind sister. That jumpstarted the idea that became Marrying Mariah, [Update: Published as Claiming Mariah, Feb 2014] winner of a host of contests, including RWA’s Golden Heart.
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Moving from the kernel of an idea to a book.
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I have various methods of getting to the next stage of writing the book, but my favorite is to open a spreadsheet and start typing scene ideas. I just keep brainstorming ideas until my head spins. I’ll also run the basic idea by my critique partners and the Seekers and let them throw stuff at me. Anything goes at this point. It all goes into the spreadsheet, one scene idea per cell. My Terms of Indenturement plot spreadsheet has 176 scene ideas. Some are already obsolete, but I never delete anything. Who knows what direction the story might take before it’s done, or even after it’s finished in the rewrite?
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Once I have a pretty good handle on the overall plot, I write the first few scenes, tweak, work on those scenes, fine-tuning my spreadsheet to match the live document that’s written in Word, contrary to rumors that I write in a spreadsheet.
I don’t.
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But I have seriously considered it! But in the long run, it just wasn’t feasible to get 1200-1500 words in a spreadsheet cell. This spreadsheet is a living document. It grows and changes as the story does.
I’ve also found that I can plot out about 1/3 of the scenes and have to write those before I can plot out the next section. That’s not to say that I don’t have an overall idea of the major plot points, and a glimmer of the ending scenes, but just that I don’t know every little scene in detail until I get to that Act in the story.
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Oh, and another cool thing that I’m doing this time around is concentrating on ACTS. I chose the 3 act structure as described in James Scott Bell’s book Plot and Structure.
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Stay with me now.
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Assume your novel has 360 pages, 32 chapters, give or take a few.
Act I is the first 8 chapters / 90 pages
Act II the next 16 chapters / 180 pages
Act III the final 8 chapters / 90 pages
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Act I is the first 8 chapters / 90 pages
Act II the next 16 chapters / 180 pages
Act III the final 8 chapters / 90 pages
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And around every 45 pages or so, or every 4 chapters you have a major TWIST or EXPLOSION of some kind.
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Okay, okay, Mary has an explosion in every paragraph, and we need excitement and hooks to keep the reader turning the page at the end of every scene, like Julie talked about in her Seekerville post, The Tease. But I’m talking about something that really throws the reader for a loop, a curve the reader didn’t see coming, something totally out of left field. It could be something physical as in your heroine is kidnapped, or it could be where the hero finds out that he’s not the street rat he thought he was, but the long-lost son of a king, or where a major plot point is revealed, like the hero admitting that he’s in love with the heroine even if it’s just to himself.
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So, that’s the method to my madness, ladies and gents. It’s not smooth, and it’s not consistent, but it works. Sometimes it’s like catching and pulling the eye teeth of a mountain lion…without anesthesia, but so far I’ve finally wrestled that cat to the ground.
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And you can too!
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Here is the ONE resource I must have handy at all times. The Synonym Finder, J. I. Rodale.
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Okay, okay, Mary has an explosion in every paragraph, and we need excitement and hooks to keep the reader turning the page at the end of every scene, like Julie talked about in her Seekerville post, The Tease. But I’m talking about something that really throws the reader for a loop, a curve the reader didn’t see coming, something totally out of left field. It could be something physical as in your heroine is kidnapped, or it could be where the hero finds out that he’s not the street rat he thought he was, but the long-lost son of a king, or where a major plot point is revealed, like the hero admitting that he’s in love with the heroine even if it’s just to himself.
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So, that’s the method to my madness, ladies and gents. It’s not smooth, and it’s not consistent, but it works. Sometimes it’s like catching and pulling the eye teeth of a mountain lion…without anesthesia, but so far I’ve finally wrestled that cat to the ground.
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And you can too!
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Here is the ONE resource I must have handy at all times. The Synonym Finder, J. I. Rodale.
One last picture of me actually WORKING in my writing space. You'll never know how many pics my son had to snap before we got one I was willing to share with the world!
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This post first appeared in Seekerville 10/8/2010, when Pam was still eligible for the Genesis. What a fun walk down memory lane. Comments are closed today so we can catch up on our writing and reading.
The California Gold Rush Romance Collection: 9 Stories of Finding Treasures Worth More than Gold
Rush to California after the 1848 gold discovery alongside thousands of hopeful men and women. Meet news reporters, English gentry, miners, morticians, marriage brokers, bankers, fugitives, preachers, imposters, trail guides, map makers, cooks, missionaries, town builders, soiled doves, and more people who take advantage of the opportunities to make their fortunes in places where the population swelled overnight. But can faith and romance transform lives where gold is king?
