YA or Bust!

The fact that it’s a synopsis, that’s what’s hard!

Honestly, until I sat down to actually write one, I thought this would be the easiest part of the journey. In my infant days as a writer, I assumed the hard part was going to be getting the 75,000 words down on paper and not giving up halfway through. Then when I hit my stride and was writing anywhere between 5-8k a day, I found that it was the (forgive the term) easy part of the whole process. As I sit in B&N helping a friend of mine plot her novel I realize that plotting is something I love to do and comes fairly easily to me as well. I’m at a point now where I look at a picture and can craft a story around it.

This is, however, more of a curse than a blessing. It’d be fine if I wasn’t trying to balance school on top of writing (or as I think my parents would rather hear me say “balancing writing on top of school”), but right now I don’t have time to plot out fourteen different ideas! But I digress.

While I let my novel sit and percolate in my brain for a while before I begin the hardcore edits, I thought I’d use the time to work on my query letter and synopsis. Even the dreaded query letter wasn’t horrible to write… once the idea came to me. Several drafts later, it’s in a drawer waiting to be used and I’m happy with it.

Finals are starting now and I’m turning to the synopsis as a study break… or so I thought. The deeper I get into this, the more I’m realizing it’s turning into more work than the take-homes themselves! How do you take something that’s 75k and parse it down into only 3-5 paragraphs? One of my professors suggested that I make them five veeerrrryyyy lllloooooonnnnngggg ppppaaaarrraaagggrrraaappphhhsss (in his words) but I don’t think an agent is going to like getting three thousand word paragraphs. ;^)

So that is my goal at some point… to get my SECRET PROJECT down to a measly 3-5 paragraphs. It’s not going to be easy, and there will probably be a lot of crying coming from my corner of the world that has nothing to do with law finals. Hopefully, once it’s done, I’ll have cracked the magic secret of writing the perfect synopsis.

More likely, I’ll be sitting in a corner, rocking, and wondering how on earth I got this done in the first place.

Thanks to Anya’s post on navel-gazing and a much needed GChat talking to, I sat down today to properly outline, for the first time. I’ve never been much of an outliner (I always hated when teachers made you outline your paper/essay!), and going into NaNoWriMo, there wasn’t enough direction/characterization/plot to warrant it anyway.

But now I’m 18K in, my characters have backstories, passions, personalities and ticks and, most importantly, the plot has definitive direction. I’ve been doing a lot of navel gazing, as Anya wrote, and it’s time to snap out of that. No more skipping scenes because I don’t want to write them, or simply because I don’t know what comes next. If I don’t know what gets me from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, there’s a problem. I started my outline, and immediately a few things became clear to me: 1) what I have so far lacks continuity (insomuch as realistic exposition is concerned — my MCs were asking the right questions far too late in the text), 2) Skander needs more to do if he’s going to carry his own chapters and 3) It’s time to get the first half dozen chapters hammered out.

I outlined up to chapter eight, reorganized my Scrivener files a bit and wrote some scene filler and transition. Now I’m over 20K! It feels like I’m back on track, and once I’ve got chapters 1-6 done (bearing in mind that chapters 1 and 3 are rather short, and chapters 2 and 4 were already practically done), I plan to properly outline the rest of the book and use my outline to keep everything running smoothly. I will jump ahead where its warranted (I mean, if I’m super excited to write something, I need to get that out!), but my aim to write chronologically whenever possible.

I think if I’d started out with an outline a month ago, it would have been the wrong choice. I’ve been stymied in my novel writing in the past because I over think and over plan — get so caught up in world building and figuring everything out that I can’t see the trees for the forest. For me, it was important to take this novel one tree at a time, figure out what kind of forest they were in, and THEN incorporate those trees int the forest I had constructed. (HOLY MIXED METAPHOR, BATMAN!) If you’re not an outliner, that’s OK, but some of us NEED an outline at a certain point. It lends your novel cohesion, and should save you from huge rewrites later.

From this point forward, my outline helps me stay on track, especially when it comes to character motivation, story flow and continuity.

Sure, we all hit this point when we’re writing when you know that AMAZING scene is coming up soon and you can’t wait to reach it. It’s not such a bad thing to skip ahead to write that amazing scene because you’ll come back to where you were later. Right?

… Right…?

Well, as I (and I’m sure many of you have figured out) skipping ahead is a very dangerous habit to get into. Why you may ask? Well, I’m about to tell you… from my own personal experience of course. Again, personal experience. If it works for you, then scroll on by this.

This blog is thanks to Alexa, by the way.

1. You’ll only write your favorite scenes. This is probably the most dangerous of all the reasons navel gazing is so very, very bad. When you keep jumping ahead to write your favorite scenes, you’re going to wind up having a set of scenes that mean almost nothing because you’re missing everything in between. They may be amazing scenes, but without the rest of the novel, you won’t have anything.

2. Continuity. This figures into point number one, actually. When you have a series of scenes, you run the risk of not having everything flow together when you finally come around to writing those hated scenes. Sure, you (hopefully, in any case) have an outline you’re working with but what author hasn’t had something completely unexpected suddenly happen with your characters and suddenly it’s damage control as your characters decide to go in a direction that’s completely different than what you already had planned.

Face it. We’ve all been there.

3. Those scenes? Yeah. Those scenes. If you hated them because you skipped them, how is it going to feel when you have to write EVERY HATED SCENE EVER. And? I have a feeling your audience is going to tell it was like pulling teeth to write those scenes too.

Am I saying you should never skip ahead? No, of course not. Looking at my first draft, I had several scenes plotted out in my head and I even had the ending of this book finished when I was at the half-way point. Sometimes you do have to go where the muse takes you and write what you need to write that day. But on the other hand, it’s a dangerous habit to fall into as well. You run the risk of having to write things over and over and over again if characters screw up your well-made plans or having to write a bunch of scenes you don’t like all at once.

Instead, may I suggest a few alternatives?

1. Just Write it: Yep. Advice number one is to muscle through what you don’t like and just (to quote Earl) “git ‘er done”. Besides, when you get through the scene you’re not looking forward to writing, you’ll have a scene you want to write waiting for you as a reward.

2. why is it hated? Take a step back and look at the scene and try to figure out why you dislike it. Is it because something bad happens to the Main Character and you don’t want to make their life miserable? Or is it because the scene is an info dump and doesn’t have much action? Perhaps the reason you don’t want to write the scene is because there’s something wrong with the scene itself and it’s your muse’s way of telling you “DON’T DO IT!”. Like I said up above, if it feels like you hated writing the scene, chances are your audience will know you disliked it.

Jumping around isn’t a bad thing to do… so long as it happens in moderation.

And if you still want to jump around, navel gaze and stare at the shiny object in the corner to the exclusion of all else? Well, just let me know. I have a prodding stick with your name on it!

Note: Originally published over at my blog.

Maureen Johnson does an “Ask Auntie MJ” feature on her Tumblr, and recently covered two questions on opposite sides of the same issue: originality in premise (The Curse of the Similar Thing) and “stealing” elements from novels one is reading.

I’ve grappled with both things, as I think a lot of us do. It’s a dance: On the one hand, we want to have an OMG ORIGINAL! premise that will help us sell our books. At the same time, however, there are expectations, trends and formulas within fiction genres (such as paranormal YA or YA dystopia) that lead to similarities across novels. Plus, it’s easy — and natural — to be influenced by the books that we are reading.

The reality is that authors (and creative types in general) ARE inspired by other works to create works that they feel are better executed, more original, better written… or just similar but different! The Hunger Games was clearly inspired, at least in some part, by Battle Royale (if you haven’t seen it/read it, you must!), but was executed very differently and stands on its own. And how many dystopias are likely inspired by books like 1984, The Giver and, even, Harry Potter? I think every one of us has that YA novel they’ve read that was OK, but  didn’t quite follow up on the premise as we wanted it to. And from that often will come the idea for a book that can execute that payoff we were looking for. The key is to give it a spin that hasn’t been done before.

But, where is the line between inspiration and copying? I have been struggling with this on my novel. I have a plot construct. I’m brainstorming. “Well, how can I get Character A to Plot Point 1? Oh, Character A was (insert plot conceit here)! Oh, and then (another plot conceit)!” Plot conceit 1 is similar to one I saw in a book I read recently, but the rest of the plot is completely unrelated.  Inspiration.

But what if plot conceit 2 is *also* very much like something in the same book? Am I really coming up with things on my own (maybe a curse of the setting/genre?) OR have I been unduly influenced and am I entering copying territory? No one wants to be derivative.

Similarities are inevitable in genre fiction (especially YA), but no one else writes or thinks exactly like you do. That said, it is a slippery slope between incorporating plot constructs and character ticks that are inherent to genre (ie: there will be some commonalities among vampire stories, magic stories, detective stories, etc.), and your novel becoming derivative. Not all writers who are “inspired” by another work have the skill to make it their own.  And even the best of us can find ourselves unduly influenced by the things we have read/seen and are reading.

It’s a fine line to walk. “I could do it better” can be great motivation to Write A Damn Novel, but it’s not kosher to write essentially fanfiction thinly veiled as your own, original work.

Where is the line for you? Have you found yourself wandering down the dangerous road of inspiration?