Please note: The book referenced in this post is no longer in print. I’m leaving this post up so that the pattern can remain and be knitted. If you’re so inclined, you may purchase any of my in-print titles to offset the work behind offering this pattern. Thank you!
If you’re just here for the shrug, scroll down to the bottom to find the download link. If you’re here for the inspiration behind the shrug, keep reading.
First off, Nessa lives in the UP.
Write what you know, hey? And a good Yooper has a closet full of plaid. I didn’t use just any plaid here – I went for Buffalo plaid in classic black and red. It’s a very bold plaid, with big solid chunks of color, which makes it easier to knit.
However, if you take a closer look and really scrutinize those cuffs with a critical eye …
… they don’t match.
I used the same two colors of yarn (Ravelry Red and Black in Malabrigo Rios, for the record) and both cuffs are Buffalo plaid, but they aren’t the same Buffalo plaid. One uses squares that are three stiches wide, and the other uses squares that are five stitches wide. The cuffs are very nearly the same, but … not quite.
Because the book – and the shrug – isn’t just about Nessa.
Sorry, Nessa.
She’s the main character and one of the two POV characters, but there’s a pretty big important cast going on. For example, Nessa’s got an older brother, Brent, and he happens to be in prison for serial murder. Oops. One of Brent’s murder victims was Sunni Bowen, and in the opening scene of the book her twin sister, Skye Bowen, comes to the UP to talk to Nessa.
You might say the cuffs of a shrug are like identical twins, right? The same thing, done again?
These cuffs aren’t identical, but they’re close. And maybe Sunni and Skye aren’t as identical as people thought … or are they? Cue dramatic music.
There’s also a lot of play on threes.
Let’s take a look at the solid part of the shrug. It’s also in Malabrigo yarn, but this one’s in Washted. (No, that’s not a typo.)
We’ve got three sections to the back, two in moss stitch and one in cables, and that cable section isn’t centered. Plus the middle section has three cable sections, and each cable has three parts. That middle one even feels a bit wonkier than the others, because it could be a standard braid, except … it isn’t. It’s uneven.
There are a lot of uneven threes when it comes to the characters in the book. You’ve got Nessa, Sunni, and Skye … Nessa, Brent, and Skye … Nessa, her husband Josh, and Brent … and a few more I can’t quite say yet. (26 days until publication!) Who’s got the power in each group? Who cares about whom … and doesn’t care for someone else? Once again, cue the dramatic music.
Why a shrug for Nessa?
Marcy got a shawl with some frilly bits because she needed something she could wear over various patterned sundresses to keep warm. Nessa demanded something a little more practical that would stay on while she’s working on her next book (she’s a thriller author, too – write what you know again). A shrug will stay on her shoulders while she madly types her way toward the climax and maybe forgets to eat (or turn on the space heater).
This is something that’s come up a few times now when I’ve been alpha– or beta-reading for other people, so I thought I’d muse on it for a bit.
First, let’s cover that Chekhov reference. He was a Russian playwright – hence the cover photo for this post – and Chekov’s gun is a famous piece of advice. There are a few versions, but the most famous goes:
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.
Anton Chekov (at least, ish)
And to a certain extent, I think all writers get that. It’s foreshadowing, right? Your main character can’t just whip out a gun in the climax if we’ve never seen a gun in the story before. That’s a bit too Deus ex machina. In Misery, Stephen King talks about the old parachute-under-the-seat trick employed by so many serials of his youth: our hero seems to be stuck in a crashing plane as one segment ends dramatically, but at the start of the next he pulls out this never-before-seen parachute and jumps to … well, not safety, but he survives long enough to make it to the next cliffhanger.
So that’s the first point of Chekov’s gun: setting up your climax.
No, you don’t want to give your whole plot away, but you want to do what all the best thrillers do: allow readers to go back through the book a second time and find all the clues they missed before. They don’t have to be obvious. You don’t need a character gesturing grandly and saying “I say, Chekov, what a big pistol you have hanging on this wall!” It can be a derringer spotted in a lady’s purse as in [redacted because hey, that gives the whole plot away].
And of course Chekov’s gun doesn’t have to be a gun. It doesn’t even have to be a weapon at all. If it’s something that’s going to be important for your character surviving the story’s climax, then we need hints at it before your character suddenly displays a new trait or skill. For example – I have to spoil American Gods for this, so skip to the next paragraph if you’d rather read it yourself – Neil Gaiman pits the old gods versus the new gods and leads them up to a final battle that our main character Shadow ends by … talking. He’s this big dude, fresh out of prison at the start of the book, and we’ve seen him fight … but only when he was goaded into it. Gaiman sets Shadow up as this pacifist who looks for other ways around the fight and only wades in when he doesn’t find other options, but that’s the most important part: he sets Shadow up that way so the final battle doesn’t come out of nowhere. We know what kind of guy Shadow is and, even if he’s a bit thrown off by all the other plot Gaiman chucks at him, there’s that core element of character that carries the day.
Spoiler over.
But the other part of Chekov’s gun comes in handling reader expectations.
I was reading the first few chapters of a friend’s book while they were still drafting it – totally alpha-reading – and I commented on a part where they’d spent a long time describing the main character’s dogs. It was something like “Oooh, I can’t wait to see how they’ll play into the book in the future!”
Their response? “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
First, it’s a first draft, so that’s totally okay. You don’t need to make Chekov’s gun work perfectly in the first draft. In fact, if you’re a discovery writer, then Chekov’s gun is totally a second draft issue. It’s absolutely, totally fine if your first draft doesn’t do everything you want your final draft to do. It just needs to do what you need a first draft to do.
Second, apparently this isn’t the usual way of thinking about it, which is why I’ve surprised a few people with those kinds of comments. So:
when you spend a lot of time describing something, you’re signaling to your readers that it’s important.
I think we all know this on a basic level but it’s not always at the front of our minds when we’re writing. Sometimes we’re just having fun describing the setting. Sometimes we’re trying to concentrate on (finally) describing the setting because we know that’s our weak point.
Sometimes it’s a slow words day and we’re just trying to get any words at all to come out.
And again: first drafts are all about getting the words on the page. We don’t judge first drafts. They’re hard-working friends who know they aren’t perfect and do their jobs well.
But, when you get to the second draft and beyond …
Chekov’s gun is a balancing act.
And, as a balancing act, it exists in more than one part of your story. Chekov indicates acts, but it works for all narratives. We need to be introduced to The Thing before we see a character use The Thing, and if we see a character taking their sweet time describing A Thing early on (Ready Player Two, I’m looking at you) then we’re primed for That Thing to show up when the character most needs it.
Once you’ve figured out how your climax and falling action are going to play out, you can look back and make the necessary changes. Did you introduce your Thing early enough? Did you spend too much time describing something that isn’t that Thing (and wasn’t meant to be a red herring)? It’s hard to strike that balance where your beta readers say something like “Wow, I should’ve seen that coming but I didn’t!” but there is middle ground between complete surprise and giving it all away.
Do you think about Chekov’s gun when you write or revise? What’s your favorite example of it being used properly? Or maybe a time when you think it could’ve been finessed just a wee bit more …
Most times it feels like there’s a disconnect between Rebecca the Writer (outside of the high school classroom) and Rebecca the English Teacher (inside the classroom). There’s a shift between teaching writing and engaging in writing, but every so often I’ll mention to my students that, over the weekend, I did something I’ve made them do during their drafting … and they’re still shocked. Wait, these graded steps are things I actually do … when there’s not a grade?
The one I took most recently isn’t really something that could be graded, but I’ve been doing it since grad school, and it still works.
Sometimes I have to bribe myself.
Not every day is a “Golly gee wilikers, I can’t wait to write!” kind of day. I mean, do you wake up every morning absolutely thrilled to go do your job? Even if it’s true more often than it isn’t, there are still … those days. And sometimes terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, but deadlines are real. You still need to get a draft or the edits into someone else’s hands.
I had chapter revisions due by April 30, and the thing is, they weren’t even all that bad. Comments came from a pair of editors, but neither of them was Reviewer 2. I had to clarify a couple things, but mostly … I had to change my citation style. (Oops.)
And I didn’t want to do it, of course. Citation is awful. I always leave it to the end. I’ll put the proper info after each quote, but I’ll put off formatting it as long as possible. Part of me argues that, this way, I’m totally focused on order and capitalization and punctuation, so it’ll all match, but really … I just don’t like doing it.
So, a week ago Saturday, I bribed myself into doing those edits.
I went up to Keweenaw Coffee Works to get brunch and a fancy coffee and told myself that, since I got all that and came all this way, I wasn’t allowed to leave until my edits were done.
Like I said, I’ve been doing this since grad school. I can go to 5th and Elm for lunch and a coffee, but only if I get through this reading. I can grab a cinnamon roll (sadly no longer available) from Cyberia, but only if I finish writing this paper for grad school. (Where’s that “food motivated” meme when I need it?)
Now, clearly, I know I’m bribing myself. And I know that there aren’t really any immediate consequences to going out, sitting there with my coffee and snack, and not doing the work. I’ll be in trouble if I don’t submit the thing I’ve promised, but it’s not like I’m going to send myself to bed without supper. So it doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me. And I’ve told so many people it works for me.
And they’re still surprised to see me out at a coffee shop, working on something.
I get that some people can’t work in coffee shops, but it’s like with my students: when I break down the writing process into steps, it’s because that’s how I, personally, do those steps. My seniors had to write scripts for their presentations, and I started them off with dictating their scripts while running through their draft slides … and then did the same thing for my own PCA presentation.
The thing is, it’s not like a presentation (or a chapter, or a book, or a blog post) just springs fully formed from my head. There are so many steps that go into them, and I don’t always want to do all of those steps. Knowing those steps is a good thing, because at least I can plan out what I need to do in order to produce the thing, but doing those steps is the next hurdle.
And that’s why I bribe myself with a Brekkie Gallette and a fancy latte from KCW so I can edit my citations.
Have you ever bribed yourself to finish your writing? What’s your favorite bribe?
Stephen King says “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” and I’m in agreement with him on that one, but I think I want to add a little wrinkle: if you want to be a writer, you must read a lot about writing.
I’ve already talked a bit how there are so many books about writing because we all write differently. Our brains aren’t the same. Our backgrounds aren’t the same. We haven’t read the same books or stayed up too late for the same tropes or drooled over the same authors. So of course we’re not all the same writers, and writing advice isn’t one size fits all. Different strokes (advice) for different folks (authors).
Except I’ve got another wrinkle for you.
I’m not the same author I was a year ago, and definitely not the same author I was when I started writing. Remember how you only learn to write the book you’ve just written and you have to keep learning if you want to keep writing? Writing is all about growth and learning what works for you, but … you change. You grow.
If a man looks at the world when he is 50 the same way he looked at it when he was 20 and it hasn’t changed, then he has wasted 30 years of his life.
So the fun (?) part is that it doesn’t take a whole 30 years to see that you’ve changed as a writer. The question mark comes because this frequently means reading something you wrote a bit ago – something you thought was amazing at the time – and grimacing and wanting to throw the whole thing into an incinerator.
Cringing at your past self is a sign of growth.
I remember the first time I went back to a novel I’d written and didn’t cringe every other page or so. Granted, I find a lot in that manuscript to cringe about now, but we’re talking at a distance of about a year. Prior to that, I’d pick up something I’d written and see already how much I’d grown, both as a person and as a writer. (The perks of writing when you’re a teenager, I guess.) This was one I’d written during my freshman year of college and, when I looked back on it as a slightly older college student, I remember thinking “Hey, I’ve actually got something here.”
I don’t have an accurate count of how many complete or abandoned projects I’d written before getting to that one – the story of how being Robin Hood’s son wouldn’t really be any better than being his daughter, if you must know, and yes I’d seen the Keira Knightley movie shortly before coming up with the idea – but I’d written a lot by then. There’d been a lot to improve since my first attempts, and I’d made enough strides that my learning curve stopped being quite so exponential by then.
But I’m still growing and changing.
And it’s not just about how the stories I want to tell now are different from the stories I wanted to tell a couple decades ago. (Look it really helped that I was in a mediaeval history class with a professor totally willing and able to answer my obscure questions while I was writing the Robin Hood thing. Shoutout to Dr. Wickstrom from Kalamazoo College.) It’s also how I don’t go about writing the same way now as I did then.
Some of the writing “rules” I read about and dismissed because they didn’t apply to me … now apply to me.
Okay, some of that might’ve been the “I’m a special snowflake” thinking – you can’t tell me how to write because you don’t understand me – but not all of it was. I collected various pieces of writing advice and sorted through them, but even the ones that made me roll my eyes haven’t entirely been forgotten.
You have to read widely about writing not just to see how other people think, but because you won’t always think the way you do right now. The trick that never fails to work for you today might not be such a failsafe a decade from now. And, if you decide to engage in writing on a professional basis, there will be days when you really need to force yourself to get words down because deadlines are deadlines, and you don’t have the luxury of time to take a break and do your usual approaches.
For example, let’s take Hemmingway:
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Past Rebecca definitely thought “Hah okay, Papa, maybe that works for you, but that’s not how I roll.” And Past Rebecca didn’t roll that way. She liked her ridiculous NaNoWriMo word count graphs. (And this Past Rebecca wasn’t actually too long ago, either …)
But today – literally today; I started a new draft for April Camp NaNoWriMo – I hit a word count … and stop, even if I think there’s still some water left in the well. Lately that’s what’s been working for me: hitting a goal that’s a challenge but not too high, and then … doing something else. Letting the ideas percolate in the background instead of trying to force more words and hit the next word count goal.
I’m sure there are many other changes to my process, and many other pieces of writing advice that I used to scorn but now (maybe begrudgingly) agree have their merits, but that’s the obvious one to me today. The biggest sign that I, personally, can see as to how I’ve grown and changed.
Read widely about writing advice, because you never know when you’re going to need it.
What’s your least favorite piece of writing advice? Has it changed over the years? Is there any “popular” advice you used to reject that you’ve now come to embrace?
There are lots of cool things about having knitting as a hobby. For one, if you happen to knit a sweater that turns out to be too small, you can just frog it and reuse the yarn – there’s no materials waste. And, if you have leftovers from a project, you can make something out of those scraps, the same way you can make a quilt out of fabric scraps. But the scary thing about knitting is dropping a stitch: all it takes is one of them sliding off your needle and laddering down, and there goes your project.
Example of a dropped stitch from The Knitting Network. The horror!
Well. It feels like that when you start, at any rate.
When you’re struggling through your very first dishcloth or scarf or other general rectangle of a project, you’re terrified of dropped stitches, or adding a stitch, or just messing up in general. You count your stitches after every row, sometimes twice, because the idea of making a mistake is terrifying. And yeah, maybe you tell yourself that you have to be bad at something before you can be good, but you still want it to be right even if it’s not quite perfect.
That hasn’t been me for quite a while now. My grandmother first taught me to knit when I was about 8 years old, and that was definitely me back then. Part of it was how much of a struggle it was to simply create every stitch. It didn’t feel natural, or confident, and I definitely didn’t want to rip back to fix something because that meant tearing out hours of highly concentrated effort.
After more than a couple decades, I even braved the shock and furor of internet strangers to document the frogging process on Twitter about a year ago.
Non-knitters, you might want to look away now.
Knitters (and other yarn benders): thus shrug has never fit properly and I found a new pattern. Shawl we 🐸? pic.twitter.com/ZpDAQVPRc7
A twitter thread where I document frogging (ripping out) a shrug that I only wore once because it just didn’t fit.
Part of it has to be a state of mind.
I took a lot of time knitting that shrug and making sure it would be the size the pattern said it should be, and it was a struggle, because I had to rewrite some of the charts that came with the pattern. (Knitters generally have a strong preference for charts, which are visual, or written instructions, and patterns tend to tell you which one they are … unless they’re mislabeled or misrepresent themselves.) So yes, I know full well how much time and effort I’d put into it, thank you.
I also knew that I couldn’t easily get that very lovely yarn anymore. And that not many people are actually knitworthy, and come on, I really want a nice cabled shrug for me, that I can wear. Forget sunk costs. I wanted to have something I could use out of that precious yarn, so I reclaimed it.
Frogging might look more foolish than fearless, but bear with me.
I am more willing to try new (and possibly questionable) techniques because frogging is one of the tools I have in my toolbox. The thing is, if you Google “dropped stitches,” the top results are about fixing them, not defining them. A dropped stitch isn’t the end of the world (or your project) if you have the skills and techniques to fix it.
And knitting is full of all kinds of skills and techniques to help you fix mistakes in your projects. There’s more than one way to do every single technique in knitting – and yes, even knitting itself. (Continental? English? Portuguese? Combination? And those are just the major styles.) If one way doesn’t work well for you, try another. The longer you knit, the more techniques you come across, try out, and relegate to one of your major columns: use it more often, keep it around in case you need it, or heck no – always find an alterative to this one.
And the more knitting tips and tricks you amass, the more fearless you can be about knitting a new pattern or trying a new technique, because you have so many ways to “fix” it if things go wrong.
Hang on, isn’t this usually a writing blog?
I’m so glad you asked.
The more tips, tricks, tools, and techniques you know, the more fearless you can be in your first draft … whether it’s knitting or writing. It doesn’t matter as much if things go wrong, because you know you can deal with them. It’s neither a mystery nor a tangled mess.
When you start writing, you might think it has to be perfect straight off. I know when I started, I thought of them as “stories” instead of “drafts” – and certainly not “a first draft.” A first draft implies there will be other drafts that follow.
It might even imply imperfection.
I’ve already talked a bit about how I don’t think of writing rules while I’m writing, and that plays into the apparent fearlessness of a first draft. When I’m drafting, and it’s going well, there’s a lot I don’t worry about. I just … write, and know that any issues can be fixed later.
You still have to know all those expectations, and you still need to end up with a book (or a shrug) that fits the intended recipient, but the start can look like a big tangled mess if that’s what it takes to get started … or to get a draft finished.
What do your first drafts look like? Would you ever show them to someone else?
It’s a frequent question in writer circles: can I set my story in a place I’ve never been? How much research do I really need to put into my setting? Can I name real places in my book?
There are about as many answers as there are writers, but here’s my two cents.
In Not Your Mary Sue, the first half of the book takes place “on an island in Lake Superior” and the second in an unidentified town in Illinois, so you can probably guess some of my answers from that. There are plenty of islands in Lake Superior, so just because you’ve never seen an island like the one I described, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. (I’ve also had to explain to multiple people that yes, the water goes all the way to the horizon – largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world, after all – because Superior is hard to imagine if you’ve never been here.)
Jay’s unnamed private island was my solution to the challenge of finding a location in the 21st century where my main character could be held captive and not be able to call for help. In Misery, Stephen King traps Paul Sheldon by a combination of factors including a dead landline (King didn’t have to deal with cell phones in 1987) and a pair of broken legs keeping him from escaping the isolated house in which he found himself. NYMS was written in 2017 and published in 2022, so I had to figure out the cell phone problem.
Cell phone coverage has increased in the UP since I first moved here, but it can still be slow or completely absent. Before we moved into our house we had to check and see if the internet even reached it, so not all of these technological advances are a given. When you drive across the UP, there are places where you phone goes wild because it suddenly has signal again and pings everything at once. And there aren’t cell towers in the middle of the lake. Add in the fact that Marcy can’t swim …
So it looks like I lean toward making it all up.
Especially with that unidentified Illinois city in the second half, right? Except, for the story, that location didn’t matter as much. Marcy wouldn’t have gravitated toward Chicago, because she didn’t need to be near another Great Lake, and it had to be still somewhere in the Midwest for plot travel time reasons, but otherwise … it wasn’t as restricted. There was nothing particularly special that meant I wanted, or needed, to tie it down to a single location. Let me put things where I want them, because there it’s the relationships and interactions that matter.
On the island, knowing about the location mattered.
Remember these?
I went to various beaches and took these photos because of how much Superior played into the story. I knew about the isolation and the cell phone signal issues and water as far as you can see. If I’d never been to the UP or lived in these rural areas, it wouldn’t have occurred to me as a solution to my isolation issue. But I do live here, and I know what it’s like to live here, and isn’t Superior gorgeous after a storm?
It’s probably the more expected version of “Write what you know.” The book opens in Cyberia Cafe, in Houghton, Michigan – I could point you to the exact table where Skye waits with her theory that her twin sister isn’t dead, but a murderer in hiding. Characters meet at the KBC (Keweenaw Brewing Company, for the uninitiated) and get burritos from Rodeo and eat at The Library (which is near the one with the books) and get fishbowls at the Ambassador and celebrate at McLain State Park with cakes from Roy’s Bakery and and and …
You could go to all these specific locations because they exist. (Well, at least for now – the parking deck won’t be around much longer, and 5th and Elm moved across the canal to Hancock, but the book’s set in 2019.) I know how long it takes to travel various places, how to navigate the Yooper Loop, and how you can expect traffic to stop when the bridge lifts for the Ranger to come back through. I was at Michigan Tech for graduate work from 2007-2015, and I’m still close enough to easily visit, so I know the area. I don’t have to depend on Google street view.
And, as a reader, I’ve been burned before.
There’s a certain disappointment when you read a book that specifically names the location as, say, the city you grew up in … and then completely botches the layout. I once read a book where the chapter title listed my hometown, city and state, and then said the character was in the parking lot outside of two stores … that have never been next to each other. (It went downhill from there.)
Now I understand that the author wasn’t from Michigan. In this particular case, the author wasn’t American. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the author had ever been to my hometown, or at least hadn’t gone looking for those business to get the lay of the land. (It’s not just that they’ve never been next to each other – a character got into the surrounding area and it wasn’t realistic, either. If you’ve never been to my hometown or haven’t paid attention to those businesses, you wouldn’t know, either.
But I knew, and it bothered me.
Which probably explains my own personal response:
Keep the location vague so I can make it up entirely, or make it something I know quite well.
That’s my two cents. How about you? Have you set a book in a place you’ve never been? How did you handle the research?
I was giving a talk this weekend about … myself, really. How I’ve come to know what I know, research what I research, and write what I write. I talked about all of my books, and read from the first few pages of Not Your Mary Sue, and gave a teaser about what happens in the rest of the book. And then one of the audience members raised a hand and asked if Marcy falls in love with Jay.
And I didn’t answer.
It seems like a simple question, right? Either she does or she doesn’t, so yes or no.
You might even think that you’d be able to ask the character herself. Maybe she says it somewhere I could quote and cite and all the rest, except … it’s also possible that characters don’t always want to admit the truth. (If you were the daughter of a famous televangelist who’d been stuck on an island with a confessed serial killer for weeks as he told you his life story and was rescued in such a condition where you were taken straight to the hospital, would you ever conceive of a situation where you’d say “Yes”?)
Look, I engage in literary criticism myself. I’ve analyzed books about Jack the Ripper and I’ve analyzed books by Stephen King. I’ve heard how Tony Magistrale gave a presentation about one of King’s short stories and King himself was in the audience, stood up at the end, and told him he was wrong … and how Tony told him that, whatever King thought, Tony was able to find evidence to support his point. (This was of course back when Stephen King attended conferences where people talked about him and his work, but I’m not sure how close it was to when he stopped this practice.)
Once you publish a book, it’s no longer your own … and maybe it’s only when other people read it that you realize exactly how much of yourself you put between the pages, and how many things you said without fully intending to say them.
On the one hand it’s great fun to see how other people read your work.
I had people I knew from high school catching teachers’ names or telling me they couldn’t stop picturing our high school choir director. (Who looks nothing like Jay. If you need to remember, this is the portrait of Jay I commissioned. That particular reader sighed with relief, stopped picturing our old choir director, and was able to move ahead.)
My own mother-in-law told me she cracked up on the very first page when Marcy starts to realize something’s weird not just because of the manacle around her ankle, but because her toothbrush is on the wrong side of the sink.
My high school kids were reading selections from Bird by Bird and asked how, exactly, authors can tell the truth if they’re writing fiction, so I read them those same first pages and asked them to call out how much of that was me.
There are things that I meant, and things that I’ve realized since publication, and – I’m sure – things I still have no idea about.
But I told them that I can’t actually tell them whether Marcy falls in love with Jay.
I do have an idea about that one. I know what I believe and I know how I meant it, but that doesn’t mean that’s how you read it.
This is actually something I have very strong feelings about, but I also don’t think it’s really my right to tell you, outside of the book, what the right answer is.
If you read the book, and find evidence for a different answer than the one I feel, then I can’t really tell you that you’re wrong. I might want to point out all this other evidence that argues my side, but that doesn’t mean the evidence you found isn’t there.
It’s complex. And it’s not just mine anymore.
And that, for me, is the scariest thing.
What do you think: was Marcy in love with Jay? (Was Jay in love with Marcy?) And do you, personally, feel like your readers might indeed sometimes be wrong?
I feel like I should do some sort of end-of-year wrap-up because hey, social pressure says that’s hot right now, but … well. I’m never really sure how to approach those kinds of things.
There’s the total high points version
(please imagine that font in sparkles and with accompanying trumpets)
I signed contracts for my next two books – one fiction and one nonfiction!
I got a new job teaching high school English!
… and those are all awesome things, totally deserving of exclamation points. They’re also the sorts of things we’re used to seeing on these year-end wrap-ups or, say, in your relative’s holiday letters.
Nobody wants to make depressing lists in the middle of winter.
Like, as a completely non-specific example …
Okay I just added this up and now I don’t want to say it.
82 rejections.
That’s across multiple projects. Multiple rounds of querying. Various places. Over the entire year. So and on and so forth, but … ouch.
Or, hey, if we want to go with “middle of the night depressed thinking,” how about the number of manuscripts I’ve written this year that probably won’t be read by more than my usual small group of friends?
4, if we’re going most pessimistic. Because hey, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to come back and check one of them off. But … well. I’ve drafted 4 novels this year (1 rewrite and 3 new ideas) and right now they’re all in various stages of revision that may or may not end up, eventually, one day, with publication.
Or! How about the number of files I’ve opened and started typing, but haven’t finished? That looks like an even dozen. And oof, one of them I’ve been trying to write for over a decade now, but I still haven’t found my way in. (Flashback to the one about failure.)
I know, I know: that’s the most “glass half empty” way to think about things.
Not my earlier post about failure. That one’s very “glass half full.” Because it shows how I’ve kept trying. And all of these stats, both the “yay!” and the “:sadface:” stats, show all of that, too.
I don’t want to end with toxic positivity (Rejections mean you’re putting yourself out there! Abandoned-for-now projects are proof you’re trying!) but it definitely feels better to acknowledge both sides of the year. To say “Buy my debut novel!” but also to allow a peek behind the curtain a bit at the piles of work that don’t always show, for example.
The stuff that can feel like failure.
I’m not good at New Year’s resolutions, for the record.
It feels like too much pressure. And I know that the whole measure of success of “don’t break the chain!” is when you miss a day and just hop right back into building a new chain, but … that’s never really worked for me. (I guess that’s why there’s so much self-help advice – like writing advice, it’s definitely not one size fits all.)
So I’m looking ahead to 2023 more as challenges and deadlines (the good kind, because these deadlines come from a yes! instead of a rejection) and opportunities, and I’m hoping the sparkle font list and the depressing list keep balancing each other out.
Here’s to you and yours being happy and healthy in 2023.
I’d ask where the time went, except I know the answer to that one: NaNoWriMo. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, especially since it’s my 13th November, but no. Apparently I just have to keep learning this over and over:
You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.
For NaNoWriMo, I decided to write a thriller set in the UP. I’ve done that before, so that should make things easier, right? Well.
Normally I write my novels chronologically. I’m more of a discovery writer than an outliner. In NaNo parlance I’m a plantser. Before I start writing a novel, I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about things like setting and my characters’ backstories. I tend to go into things knowing the opening scene and the first big thing I’m going to throw at them, and I’ve done enough prep that I can be fairly certain how these characters are going to react. Then, in the words of my high school mythology teacher Mr. Noller, I kick the characters in the butt and follow them.
For this November, I was dealing with a cold case. Here’s the basic setup – what I knew before going into November 1.
Ten years ago, Ollie's mom and sister were killed while she and her dad were out at the family cabin. Her high school boyfriend was put on trial for the murders and found legally not guilty, but the community decided otherwise. Recently a serial killer took responsibility for the murders, and a true crime reporter has been contracted to write a book about the case. He's on his way to Ollie so he can visit her hometown and collect interviews when she gets a call that the serial killer actually has an alibi for that night, so the case is far from solved.
So right away I started with a bang: the reporter’s about to show up, but Ollie gets this phone call, and where do you go from there? I knew it was going to be a lot about relationships: Ollie and her dad, Ollie and her mom, Ollie and her sister, Ollie and the high school boyfriend … Ollie and the reporter … so Ollie was going to be at the center of a lot of it, but there was also a lot she didn’t, or couldn’t, know. She wasn’t there that night. She didn’t actually know what her mom and her sister were thinking. So. How could I deal with it?
This is where I tried something new.
Part of the novel – every other scene – follows Ollie Today as she gets the news and things unfold in reaction to it. The other parts aren’t in chronological order and are made up of false documents that largely rely on my reporter’s interviews with other people about Ollie’s mom and sister and what they think happened. Which is confusing on its own, because they’re all recalling something that happened a decade ago, when they’ve had all this time to mold and shape their memories to fit the dominant narrative (in this case, of the former boyfriend’s guilt).
Because I’m not an outliner, I wasn’t sure how it would work. If I’d have enough interview transcripts or newspaper clippings or what have you to continue alternating between the “Now” and these other elements.
I also made things more complicated for myself because that meant figuring out a lot of the old friends and neighbors, or parents of the old friends, and what their points of view would add to the narrative … or, of course, complicate about it. There’s an incident involving the sister, for example, that we see from the dad’s, a friend’s, a friend’s mom’s and a former babysitter’s points of view. Who heard which variation, and what details do they want to pass on? All of this jumping back and forth where you first think you’ve got a handle on it, and then realize hey, actually, we all do this, don’t we? Pick which parts of ourselves to share with which other people, and why.
So I continued doing these jumps, back and forth between the plot I was discovering and the past I was pretty sure I had a handle on, fleshing things out and working toward the climax.
… and I think it worked?
I’m not going to be more certain about it for a while yet, since I’m still too close to the story, but the writing part worked. I was able to sit down and keep up with my intended word count each day while at the same time moving back and forth between Now and Supplementary Documents. It forced me to think about things in new days, with new depths that I don’t usually find until it’s time for the second draft.
It does need time to sit, though, and get out of my immediate consciousness so I can come back to it in a couple months with a less-biased eye. It’s impossible to be completely unbiased about your own work, but the pause can certainly help. Plus by then my usual immediate readers might’ve had the chance to go through it and tell me their initial thoughts.
Because that, of course, is the next scary but necessary step: finding out if other people think it worked. If maybe I overdid it. If it’s too confusing even for a thriller with false documents and unreliable narration. It’s not just about a search for the truth of that one night, but one of my favorite topics: personal identity. Who really knows who we are? Do we even know that about ourselves?
All in all, I think it was a productive November and not just a busy one. I’ve got a complete draft, at any rate, and even if nothing comes of it, I’ve got these new experiences from writing it. I kind of doubt the rest of the year will slow down at all, but at least I know where November went – I’ve got the document to prove it.
Did you participate in NaNoWriMo this year? How did that go? Did you learn anything new about yourself and your writing?
It’s almost November, one of my favorite months of the year. If you’ve yet to hear the good news of NaNoWriMo …
I’ve been participating in National Novel Writing Month since 2010, when my friend Karen mentioned it to me and suggested I might enjoy it. Well, she was right. I’ve been hooked.
Although there are rebels and the “rules” have relaxed a bit since those old days, the main goal of NaNoWriMo is to quickly write the first draft of a novel during a single month. To “win,” you write 50,000 words over the 30 days of November, which averages out to 1,667 words a day. (Although there aren’t any NaNo police. There’s no penalty for signing up, trying, and not hitting 50k. No police, but plenty of cheerleaders if you want to sign up.)
I had no idea what to expect of myself that first November.
I’d written stories before, sure, and long ones, but I’d never tried to hit a certain word count goal with a specific timeline. I signed up for NaNo on October 6, 2010 (coincidentally that’s my dad’s birthday – you know, my biggest cheerleader?) and then spent the rest of October working my way through not only three different plots, but working out an entire village of characters. (I’ve still got that notebook. I worked out the hours of each shop on the village main street, for crying out loud.)
And then, come November, I ignored every last bit of my outlines and just … went for it. I wrote at a speed that felt good for me and ended up writing 120,039 words, so that means averaging 4k/day while being excited and pushing myself, but not too hard.
My second year, in 2011, I pushed harder and ended up with 180,508 words. The site keeps track of such things for you. Sadly my first year’s data got lost, but I still have the file for my final word count. From 2011 on I can go back and look at graphs like this one:
The gray line shows the proposed steady progress of the magical 1,667 words per day. My blue line shows how I sped up and over 180k. (And the story still wasn’t done – I’d written myself into a bit of a corner with this epic, but in April 2018, for a Camp NaNoWriMo session, I ended up finishing it. Whatever little idea I’d had at the start of November 2011 turned into five books of an epic that became a whopping 249,152 words.)
By 2011, I’d already started seeing a pattern in my NaNo that has more or less continued to this day:
I go into it knowing more or less the first half of the story.
Usually less. When I prep, I build up locations (that’s become easier since I’ve moved from fantasy to real-life places and I pick the ones I know well) and character’s bios up until the moment we meet them on the first page. I do a lot of work fleshing out who they all are, so I have a good idea of how they’ll react when I throw different things their way. Then, in the words of Mr. Noller, my twelfth-grade mythology teacher (who, I believe, was passing on something one of his college professors told him), “Kick your characters in the butt and follow them.”
For me, NaNo is a lot of following. I know (more or less … sometimes a lot less) where they’re going for the first half of the novel, and then …
The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist.
I don’t know how many times I’ve gone back and read this pep talk because I really, really need it.
(The solution, in case you’re wondering, isn’t giving up and becoming a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook, or marine biologist. It’s to keep writing.)
So the rest has to come one word at a time.
Which, to be fair, is how the fun first part gets written, too. It just happens a lot faster when the idea is new and shiny and I’m closest to the bit I already know: the opening scene. The further I get from there, the more things veer off.
What I’ve learned about myself and my writing, though, is that I need to be consistent. Like seriously consistent. Some of my more recent graphs clock in at almost exactly 5,000 words a day for every. Single. Day.
Remember how my original 2010 speed of 4k.day was pushing myself, but not too hard? Let’s have a peek at my graph from 2020 for comparison.
Yeah we don’t even need the whole month on this one. In case you’re wondering, my word count for November 1 was 31,423. I hit my 50k before 8pm on November 2. Why? Because in 2019 I’d hit 50k on November 3, so I wanted to push it. This was my Everest: why climb it? Because it’s there.
Look sometimes we have to go too far and then spend a long time afterward babying our hands and getting Dragon to dictate things instead of type them before we’re willing to try something like moderation.
My 2020 novel is still unfinished. It was a rush to hit 50k that quickly, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the process. Maybe even all of the fun, in the end. I barely slept on the first, and man, November 2 was pretty darn awful, because I had to force myself through the muddy middle at record speed. Not recommended.
Since then, I’ve stuck with my own personal Goldilocks number. On the fast days, I hit my 5k pretty early … and then push back from the keyboard and go do something else. (Put some words back in, you might say.) Then, on the muddy middle days, I push through … up to 5k. I don’t let myself stop, but I don’t force it like I did in 2020, either. I have goals, but I am allowed breaks.
So I imagine this November will be about the same.
I’ll sit down tomorrow to write the scene where I’m 99% sure I know what’s going to happen. The first week, maybe more, will be coasting on that energy and my general idea of where my characters are headed. I don’t know for sure if I’ll be able to do the 5k/day thing with everything else going on in my life, but, aside from my local region’s writing marathon scheduled for the 5th, I won’t be aiming for more than 5k.
I do want to write every day, no matter what the word count, to help push my way through that muddy middle. That, at least, should be doable – if nothing else, I can steal 20 minutes here and there between grading and prep, and chant to myself “A change is as good as a rest.” Like I said, November is busy. But I’ve got goals, and I’ve got experience on my side. Writer, know thyself.
Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? Have you done it before? What tips and tricks do you have for other Wrimos out there staring down the next 30 days?
Rebecca Frost 