From a Different Perspective

So the plan is on Monday we will be starting our novels. I did the math and if I am writing like I did on my last novel, I should maintain a 2000 words a day schedule to be done by Thanksgiving. I have read different schools of thought on having a word count goal. I have heard it cramps your style and makes you less productive. I have not found that to be true. Counting my words at the end of the day make me feel productive. It’s a little treat to myself. I never beat myself up if I only managed to write 200 words that day. There are always going to be more productive days down the road where I write 5000 words that day. I keep a running tally, because I have always liked to see my progress (you should see some of my to do lists, I take them to the extreme to feel like I accomplished something). So the word count thing is just like everything else, do what works for you.

However, as I am finishing up the final draft of my outline, I was thinking back to the assignments in Domet’s 90 Days To Your Novel. I would have to say my all time favorite activity was Day 8. This day was about taking three of your characters and putting them in a scene. From one characters point of view, then write the same scene from second one’s POV, and then the third’s POV. I learned so much about my characters and their relationship with each other. I decided to take my three friends and put them in a scene where one reveals she is going to start going to Al Anon. Even though I had flirted with the idea of having each one narrate their own story, after this exercise, I decided on only two narrators. Even if I don’t use 90 Days To Your Novel for my next book, I think this exercise is going to be a big part of any prep work I do on future novels.

If you are stuck or just not sure about the relationship between some of your characters, I would suggest this exercise. You just might get some insight into a character that’s been giving you the cold shoulder.

Conflict (a.k.a. Moving Things Along)

I don’t like conflict. No conflict = peaceful life.

There are so many ways I avoid conflict:

1. I stay away from people who invite drama into their life.

2. I agree with people to avoid a fight.

3. I pick my battles with my children and husband.

4. I don’t look in the mirror before I scarf down the last donut.

I am on Day 11 of the 90 Day process (I know I should be farther). This day has me writing down all the conflict in my novel. While no conflict in my life = a blissful Amy, no conflict in book = comatose reader. Or even worse, no reader.

So this got me to thinking, how much conflict is too much conflict? My first instinct was to write down all of the disagreements and fights in my plot, because there is plenty of opportunity for conflict.

There should be conflict in every scene, but obvious conflict in every scene is too much, because my character would end up in the loonybin or I would be emotionally exhausted after every scene. There needs to be a balance that still moves the story along. That is where subtle conflict comes into play.

Subtle conflict will sustain your novel between the drag out fights.

For example:

Obvious conflict: I just ran into my best friend’s husband cheating on her with another woman and now I am confronting him.

Subtle conflict: I just found my first gray hair. When did I start getting so old?

Of course, depending on your character, finding a gray hair might be a bigger conflict than seeing the husband of her best friend cheating. Either way, we learn more about the character and the story is moved along.

So, if your character doesn’t act or react to things, not only will you be bored, but so will your reader.

Missing: Baby Name Book

I am on day 3 of my first three weeks of planning my next novel. The first two assignments in the book 90 Days To Your Novel by Sarah Domet went pretty good. When I opened to assignment 3 this morning and realized today is about my characters, well, this is definitely going to be a slow going assignment. I don’t have any of my characters named. I have ideas on who they are, I know who is who and how they are related to each other, but no names. For some reason, this is the book that wants to be written right now. The last two weeks of my last novel, I kept thinking about this book. So, last week I decided to start finding character names. Sounds pretty easy, right? Run downstairs, grab the baby name books, and start looking for the ones that jump out at me. Except that I walked down into this:

Nobody goes down into the basement, well, obviously people go down there to throw things all over the floor, but no one needs to go down there. Yes, I feel a little ashamed of the mess, boxes of clothes that don’t fit the youngest, bins of clothes that will fit the youngest some day, bags of things to be filed, a workout system that never got put together right, piles of books, piles of preschool workbooks, and the things that people just drop at our house and leave (the sleeping bag in the white bag, the crutches, and we are storing someone’s personal items in our crawl space for the last year). I have the best of intentions with this basement (notice the file boxes in the back of the photo) and it has been cleaned several times, but out of sight, out of mind.

Last week I go down to look for the baby name books and couldn’t find them. Surprised? I kind of was. 98% of my books are actually on the bookshelves in the back corner, but I couldn’t find the ones I needed. I vaguely remember throwing one out because it was falling apart and I am not the girl who holds books together with a rubber band. I was going to finally purchase a new one. The book was 22 years old and well read (I even used it to search up potential names for my own children), the thing needed to be retired. The problem is that I never bought a new one (though I know there are at least two other name books somewhere in that mess). So I requested one from the library and picked it up yesterday along with several books I had requested for research. Not a big fan of this name book. I like my character names to have meaning, heck, I like my children’s names to have meaning (just don’t ask me what their names mean), and this book does not list the meaning. The book isn’t completely worthless to me, it does say when the name came into popularity, so at least I know if it was likely my character would have been named that. My biggest issue is the layout of the book. I like my baby name books nice and orderly, this book feels like total chaos. It gives me the same feeling I had the first time I went into a Christian bookstore to buy my first Bible: overwhelmed.

But I am determined to conquer this assignment, so I will trudge through this baby name book and make sure the next time I am out and about to purchase a new name book. And I should probably conquer that basement, or at least chip away at it.