The extraordinary journey of the peony bud

Rick's Tuesday post made me smile. Distraction is the mood of the day. Are we all in the same boat? After a long winter of record-breaking cold and snow and a spring that sputtered and stalled, summer has suddenly burst upon us. At least in the past week, for those of us in Central Canada. I shouldn't cheer too loudly, lest summer decide to retreat back under its rock. But joy has overwhelmed us. People are flocking to patios, picnicking in the parks, painting their toe nails and hauling their flouncy summer frocks out of storage. It's hard to concentrate on anything serious.

Quite literally, after shivering in the endless, damp cold and struggling to poke their heads up, the flowers in my garden have exploded into colour.  It turns out all that rain was good for them, even as the grey days deadened our spirits. There are certain flowers in my garden that I wait for every year. I watch the buds of the peonies grow fatter and juicier for weeks, all for a few fleeting moments of glory. I watch the lilacs and the Siberian iris. I fuss over the early rose buds. Sometimes flowers surprise me. Plants I thought were dead, or at least unable to thrive, suddenly materialize where I least expect them.

There's a metaphor for life in there somewhere, and it is particularly apt for the writer's life. Perhaps we have to struggle through the darkness, not sure where we're going or whether the journey is worthwhile. Not sure we'll ever see the light at the end of the tunnel or the resolution at the end of our story. Not sure there IS an end. Nonetheless, possibly because we have a deadline and an expectant publisher, or simply because we're writers and we have to, we push on, trusting that the journey we're on will lead somewhere. After facing this angst through sixteen books, I know that despite all my misgivings this time, some sort of book will emerge at the end.

Rarely does the book suddenly explode in colour, sadly. Hey, the metaphor isn't perfect. But bit by bit, the bud opens. The story unfolds and its core is revealed – the high point towards which everything has been building. At that point, however flawed or muddled that high point is, I always feel a flood of relief. I have a book! The flower has opened. Light shines in, lifting my spirits and helping me to tackle all the flaws and messy bits. The rest is rewrites. I can prune and dead-head and fertilize until I've made it the best it can be.

This is a whimsical post, reflecting my mood as I sit in my garden enjoying all the colours. Savouring them to remember the next time the darkness settles in.

Ahah! moments

After the last echoes of New Years parties, family visits, and southern get-aways have faded away, the beginning of January feels like turning the page. A time to say "All right, then, what's next? Where was I?" In my case, this is often accompanied by considerable panic as I realize the hard work that lies ahead. The work I've been neglecting. The commitments and deadlines that seemed far away in December but are suddenly looming. I'm behind schedule on my novel, and I've forgotten where I was going in it. Time is wasted while I find all my notes and read over the draft to figure out what to do. And in the not-so-distant future, I can hear the ominous whisper of taxes, which entails long days of hunting down receipts, tabulating, and organizing so that my accountant can make sense of the mess.

My usual writing routine went out the window during the holidays. For one thing, there was a one-year old in the house, along with out-of-town adult children, and for another, there was this constant thing with food. Buying it, preparing and cooking it, washing up after it, and thinking about what's next. But when January 2 arrived, it was back to just me, my dogs, and my to-do list. I've knocked off most of the easier tasks on the list, so now it's just me, the dogs, and my shitty first draft. It feels like standing at the foot of a mountain, looking up, and thinking, "Oh God, I want to go to the beach."

I am nearly halfway through the shitty first draft of THE ANCIENT DEAD, my fourth Amanda Doucette novel. First drafts are always shitty, so I'm not worried about that part. But after refreshing my memory about the story, I suddenly realized "I'm bored." Translated, this means that the story lacks energy and that the reader will almost certainly be bored as well. Bored readers are not good for business.

The halfway mark is usually the point at which most – dare I say all? – authors experience this malaise. It's been called the floppy middle or mushy middle, the point when you've breezed through all the high points and major twists that you had planned and realize you still have at least 100 pages to fill before you can start to wind the sucker down. Some writers have it all planned out, so perhaps this crisis doesn't occur, but for a modified pantser like myself, I don't even know how the story will end, let alone how I'm going to get there. I need something more to happen here!

The conventional wisdom is that you add an unexpected twist to add more complications or conflict. "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand" (Chandler's Law)  or "Drop a body down the chimney" (which I believe comes from Christie although I can't find the reference). But sometimes all that does is give the reader whiplash. Too many twists and turns, too many explosions, shootings, car chases, and dead bodies merely dilute the effect. I will need more moments of peril, and probably at least one more body, in the next 150 pages, but I know that's not the issue here. The issue is passion. The story needs to be energized by greater passion, and what this almost always means is that the protagonist needs to be more personally committed to the hunt. I thought I had her motivation figured out, but at some point in the re-reading, I thought "Why should she care?" She was going to a lot of trouble to solve something, including putting off her real work, for a motivation that didn't seem to warrant it.

As I tried to answer that question - why should she care? - a thought drifted across my mind. What if...? Is it possible that...? I rejected the thought. It was not actually a major change but it would have a ripple effect. It would mean changing the parts already written and alter the course of the backstory quite a bit. It would seriously mess up timelines too. But as I toyed with alternatives, the thought kept circling back through my mind, until I finally decided to at least give it a shot. To see what happened if I altered the backstory and rewrote the parts in question. I have not yet tackled that, but instead have been thinking ahead with that alteration in mind. So I'm not sure whether the whole thing will work, if indeed it is enough of an answer to why she should care. But it's always an exciting moment when an idea drifts in from left field to potentially shift the course of a story. It usually means the story will be deeper, richer, and hopefully better.

Stay tuned!

The Fine Art of Pacing

I finished a really, really fast-paced novel a couple of days ago. The characters were interesting and well-developed, the plot hung together and made sense. The action was explosive and intense.

The book was boring. The author didn't understand the importance of pacing.

Imagine a movie where they cut to the chase immediately and it never lets up for two hours. One hair-raising desperate move after another. Bang. Bang. Bang. Close call after close call. Near collisions and real side swipes with parts falling off.

I'll guarantee you the patrons will be checking their iPhones in very short order.

Readers and movie goers need to rest between scenes. The 'tween time is a perfect place for back stories and to build up motivation for the next confrontation. It's also an ideal time to introduce any necessary historical material and comments on the setting.

Flashbacks used to provide an ideal venue. This technique lost popularity, but I've noticed flashbacks are returning. Whether flashbacks or back stories are used, insertions of this nature can provide a springboard into the next crucial scene where all hell breaks loose again.

An example of the use of a breather between a scene that propels the protagonist into the next scene: Tom and Jerry have just had a vicious verbal confrontation. Tom, our hero, loses big time. Jerry, his big brother, taunts him and feeds his fury. Tom slams out of the room.

During the time he's licking his wounds he recalls (in back story, not a full flashback) other times that Jerry made him feel this way. He broods on all kinds of unfair incidents from the past. The girl friend Jerry moved in on, the time Jerry blamed him for wrecking the car.

Tom can be walking down the street while he's thinking about all the past unfairness. It's a chance to describe surroundings, the neighborhood, etc. and give the reader a rest. Then motivation for the next scene begins to sneak in. Tom is not going to let it happen again. The stakes are too high this time. It's now or nothing. He stops at a pay phone and makes the crucial call. Which leads us into....

The next scene.