Karen Sandler

Tag: novel

  • A Literary Schlep–4…er…5 Tips on Finishing Your Novel

    Awakening Final cover-sI flew from DC to Northern California today. I bring this up because I was contemplating how odd it is that at 6am this morning (3am PST), I was heading off in my rental car to Dulles Airport, and at 2:10pm PST, I was pulling into my own driveway. Door-to-door, about 11 hours.

    Which might seem like an excruciatingly long time. But truly, if you think about it, my plane ride was barely a blink of the eye compared to crossing the country in a wagon train. A quick Google search tells me that a wagon train trip (which generally left from Missouri, not DC), took 4-6 months. Tack on the extra 40% farther DC would be and you’re talking 6-8 months.

    What does this have to do with writing a novel? That plane ride I took is a lot like, say, writing a short story. The cross-country wagon train trip is like penning a novel. It’s a long-term commitment with pitfalls and setbacks around every corner, and if you’re not fully prepared, you just might not make it.

    So how can you improve your odds? Here are a few tips I’ve learned along the way:

    1. Write at least a rough synopsis. Yeah, I know, some of you are thinking, But that’s just not how I work. I just have to let it flow. My answer to that is, if it really, truly works for you, if you find yourself able to finish that book, then another, then another, and they’re all reasonably coherent stories even before you start your re-writes, then okay, I’ll give you a pass. But if on the other hand, you start one book after another, get a few chapters in, or even half-way through, but can’t seem to close the deal–write a synopsis. Even if it’s so ugly you won’t dare show it to anyone else, get your story structure mapped out.
    2. Flesh out your characters. I have a variety of character sketch formats that I’ve used over the years. Twenty-plus books later, they’ve gotten a little abbreviated, but I still like to know a) physical characteristics (don’t want to change eye color in mid-stream) and b) conflicts and goals. This helps me get to know the character well enough that when I plunk them down into a scene, I know how they’re going to behave. I know what they’ll say, how they’ll say it, and what they’ll reveal and won’t reveal about themselves. They’re not just blobs moving through my invented universe, they’re real, three-dimensional people.
    3. Turn off that infernal internal editor. Shoosh her away. Put duct tape on his mouth. Lock that hyper-critical, opinionated loud-mouth in a dark closet in the corner of your mind. Because she will freeze your hands on the keyboard. He will convince you to turn your back on that story that you could see like a movie in your head. That cantankerous soul will make you doubt every word you put on the page. Your internal editor has his place in the process, but it isn’t now. Give her a margarita and tell her to wait her turn.
    4. Just keep going until you get to the end. Well, that’s pretty stupid advice, isn’t it? If you could get to the end, you wouldn’t need this blog post. But this goes along with tip #3. Just keep going. Without worrying too much about how it’s all going to hang together. Without stopping every paragraph to polish the prose. Without going back to chapter 4 and adding that crucial information you didn’t figure out you needed until chapter 18. Just make a note to yourself about what needs adding and keep going. The time for worrying about those changes, for letting the editor out of the closet and taking away her margarita is at the end. Because after you’ve written right to the end, you have a book you can re-write and fix and polish. As author Nora Roberts said (my all-time fave writing quote), “I can fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank page.”

    So, there you go. With these four fabulous tips, finishing your novel will be easy-peasy. A do-it-with-your-eyes-closed cake-walk. Heh. Yeah, right.

    It isn’t easy. It’s cholera-just-broke-out, the-wagon-wheel-broke, early-winter-has-us-snowbound hard. So here’s one more tip to keep you going.

    5. Don’t beat yourself up over the bad days. If all hell breaks loose at home, or you’re exhausted after work, or you have a stack of student essays to correct and you can’t get even one word written, let alone one page, cut yourself some slack. You’ll get back to it tomorrow. And you’ll be one more paragraph, or page, or chapter closer to The End.

    Anything to add? Tips you’ve discovered that keep you going? Please share.

     

  • RTW – Writing Superpowers & Kryptonite

    YA Highway  is such a great blog that I decided to make their Road Trip Wednesday prompts a regular part of my own blog. Today they ask, What are your writing & publishing superpowers and what is your kryptonite?

    I think I do a pretty decent job with many aspects of the writing process–characterization, plotting, making sure there is a period or question mark at the end of every sentence. But I have to say, I am pretty super-dooper about spotting a scene that’s in trouble and creating a solution.

    I think it’s because I spent 14 years as a software engineer. I had to do a lot of problem-solving when sitting down to write or modify a piece of computer code. It’s a very structured activity as you might guess, and the end result isn’t nearly as entertaining to read as a young adult novel. But programming a computer was better training for writing a book than you might think.

    As a consequence, when I’m making my way through a scene, or I’m doing a read-through of a draft, my superpower comes to the fore. First, I zero in on a scene that isn’t working. It might be dull, it could be awkwardly written. The dialogue might be clunky or expository, it might just be extraneous text. It might just be in the wrong point-of-view (in a multiple POV book). It might be that a section written in summary should be re-written in scene.

    Next, my inner computer takes in that wrongly written section, evaluates it and ka-ching! an idea for a solution pops out (I’m starting to sound like one of the GENs in Tankborn). I usually get pretty excited at this point and the words pour out. I get a big grin on my face when I realize how well the new code…um, prose…is working. I feel super-powerful.

    And what’s my kryptonite? Distractions. With the Internet, there are so many things to distract me from working that sometimes my discipline is in the toilet. Believe it or not, it’s worst on a day I have nothing else but writing planned (no appointments, no trip to the barn to ride my horse). Knowing I have the whole day to work, I futz around, figuring, Oh, I don’t have to start yet. I have plenty of time. I sometimes get even less done on days like that when I don’t have a deadline.

    So there it is–a mighty superpower and a mighty weakness. Time to put that nasty kryptonite away and get started with my day. I can already feel myself getting stronger. 🙂

     

  • Embryonic TANKBORN (How a Script Became a Book, Part 2)

    Screenwriting is an entirely different world than the publishing world. The most obvious difference is the format–a script looks entirely different from a book manuscript. In a film script, dialogue is set off in blocks with wider margins. The dialogue alternates with description, each scene identified by an interior or exterior location. As an example, here’s an early script for Blade Runner, one of my favorite movies.

    A script is also 3-hole punched and bound with brads. A book manuscript, on the other hand, is not hole-punched and is generally kept together with rubber bands. At least manuscripts were rubber-banded together in the olden days, when they were sent snail mail to agents and editors. Nowadays, everything is e-mailed.

    It’s always funny to watch TV shows and movies where one of the characters is a novelist. The screenwriter who wrote the script bases the character on their own experience as a writer. The book manuscript will be three-hole punched and bound with brads. The novelist always hands his/her manuscript over to their editor or agent in person. The fictional writer is able to do this because they always seem to live in NYC, just like most actual screenwriters live in L.A. and are able to have personal contact with their agents/producers.

    Anyway… When I wrote Icer, the script that I eventually used as the starting point for my YA book Tankborn, I didn’t just have to learn how to write a story that was suitable for the screen (i.e., everything on the page had to be visual). I also had to learn script format. One problem with this is that although there were many sample scripts available (at that time, in printed, hardcopy form that I could order from a service) the majority of those were shooting scripts. Shooting scripts contain all sorts of camera directions that aren’t appropriate to include in a spec script (a script written on speculation). It took some years of education to figure that out.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, part of that education was a class I took through UCLA Extension. The instructor liked my concept enough that he helped me with the beat outline (essentially coaching me through the plotting process). Later when the script was finished, he suggested that he and a writer friend of his option my script for $1. I wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement, so I was then on my own.

    Here are the first few pages of an early version of Icer.

    Nothing much happened with Icer for a few years. I kept writing, mostly short stories, but a few TV scripts as well. We moved from Southern California to Northern California and my husband and I agreed I’d stay home with the kids and write while the kids were in school. I focused on novels, pretty much forgetting screenwriting.

    Then I stumbled across a tiny ad in Writer’s Digest magazine requesting scripts. Talk about a leap of faith. No way of knowing if the person on the other end of the ad was a fraud or the real deal.

    It turned out to be the latter. I got a call out of the blue one day from Fern Baum of the production company Kanter-Baum. Fern was the daughter of Martin Baum, legendary agent at Creative Artists Agency. Mr. Baum agreed to shop my script on behalf of his daughter.

    I was thoroughly awed by the massive Lichtenstein mural in CAA’s lobby, and my jaw just about dropped seeing the Oscar displayed in a case in Mr. Baum’s office (which had been awarded to Gig Young and bequeathed to Mr. Baum after Gig Young’s death). Even still, I was pretty ignorant about who Marty Baum was and the honor he paid me by agreeing to work with me.

    We went through a number of re-writes and eventually Icer went out to a long list of studios and production companies. One of those submissions was to a brand new studio called Dreamworks, SKG. Alas, Dreamworks passed. Icer was eventually optioned by Prism Entertainment Corporation, a small production company that had previously done a number of lower budget films including When the Bough Breaks starring Martin Sheen.

    I actually had one of those Hollywood “meetings” at Prism where they gave me notes (kind of like an editorial letter, except in real time). It was pretty cool. Everyone threw out ideas, some of them great, some not so much and I scribbled madly. (Note: One of the better ideas is an element that will figure into the second book of the TANKBORN series, TANKBORN AWAKENING.)

    Everyone was very enthusiastic about the script. The notes led to another round of re-writes and the script continued to improve.

    Prism unfortunately couldn’t get funding to proceed so they weren’t able to go any farther with Icer. I co-wrote another script for Kanter-Baum, but we weren’t able to get anywhere with that one either.

    A few years later, I met another producer who liked Icer, Craig Nicholls of Pendle View. We went through another round of re-writes with an eye toward decreasing production costs. By this point, CGI had come of age and what once would have been very expensive special effects could now be done at a much lower cost on a computer.

    With Craig’s guidance, I was able to kick Icer up yet another notch. Still no takers ready to finance the film, despite Craig’s best efforts. He worked with me on another script, a quirky YA time-travel called Timewrecked (now there’s a screenplay that’s ripe for novelization!), but we couldn’t get any traction on that one either.

    You’ve probably gathered reading this post that as tough as it is getting a book published, that’s a cakewalk compared to selling a script and getting it produced. I do confess I never felt completely comfortable in that world. I was never quite sure I had the format down, that I wasn’t over-writing (a screenwriter shouldn’t be directing the actors, for instance), that what I put on the page could be transferred to the screen. Books I understood. Scripts are even now still a mystery to me.

    But writing Icer led me to writing Tankborn, so obviously the time working on that script wasn’t wasted. And it was an amazing challenge and there were some very exciting times. I’m grateful for those who helped me along the way, who worked so hard to see my vision on the screen. I hope they’re satisfied with seeing it on the page instead, between the covers of a book.