ArmadilloCon Writing Workshop Boot Camp Week 4: What have you got?

We’re About a month out from the June 11 deadline to turn in your work and sign up for the Armadillocon Writing Workshop (of course you can turn in your piece early – hahaha! No, seriously, the door’s open). If you’ve been following this boot camp program you should have a messy zero draft in hand. (If you just found this, it’s not too late to catch up. Scroll back to boot camps one and two for gathering and developing ideas, and week three for writing your zero draft.)

NOTICE: Diverse writers welcomed here!

Diversity is vital to speculative fiction. A genre centered on exploration and encountering the Other must include voices and visions from writers, readers and thinkers of all kinds.

This year the Armadillocon Writing Workshop has sponsored seats for writers of color! Visit the workshop page for more information and to fill out the sponsorship request form!

This week it’s time to set aside your writer’s hat and start revising. But when it comes to revising you’ll need more than one hat. I’ll call this first hat the big picture hat. This is where you need to assess just what exactly you’ve got.

Sometimes our stories are buried beneath our conscious thought. If you wrote your first draft free and fast, new story elements or characters may have emerged or changed direction on you. Instead of forcing things back into your original plan, this is an opportunity to see what this draft has to say to you.

This is big picture editing. Start by simply reading through the mess and listen for the piece’s beating heart. What are the things your characters believe in? Fight for? What is won or lost? Try not to be distracted by scene details or sloppy sentences. Resist the urge to do any housekeeping at this point. Try to get a bead on the essence of the story, the thing that will guide your revisions.

Now that you’ve read your draft for you, it’s time to pick up your pen (or put your document into revision mode) and read through it with your readers in mind. Is your story coherent or are there places where you might lose your reader logically or emotionally? This first revision is where it’s easiest to make big structural changes. Move the furniture around, write new material, change a character’s motivation, age, gender if you need to, try different dialogue.

Oscar Wilde's handwritten manuscript 

page of The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mostly, I’m drawing with my red pen here, circling text to be moved, crossing out chunks, writing brief notes for new scenes or dialogue. Here are some things to think about:

Plot:

Is there a beginning, middle and end to the story? Does the protagonist change in some way? Do they succeed or fail at something? Do they have a goal or desire? Did the characters get side tracked? If so and if the story lost its focus you can either redirect the characters to your original idea or explore the alternate story that the sidetrack suggests. It can be helpful to write a brief reverse outline here. Make a list of each thing that happens to see if you have cause-and-effect chain of events running through your story.

Pacing:

May be wonky at this point. Frankly, pacing can be tricky in shorter forms. Five thousand words can go by in a flash, so check for long stretches of description or rambling characterizations. Try to keep things concise and make sure events are progressing in a way that increases the tension (i.e. keep tightening the thumb screws on the protagonist).

Clarity:

Are there logic holes or missing steps in the chain of events that will confuse the reader? Are there places where you can adjust the description or characterization that will make the ending resonate more powerfully? In theater, early rehearsals are devoted to blocking out the actors’ stage movements. Think in terms of blocking. Make sure it’s clear to your reader where your character is in the room/woods/spaceship/etc., and in relation to other characters.

With scribbled up draft in hand or on screen, you are ready for your first big rewrite. You’re not shooting for perfection here, just improvement. Try to improve the overall shape of the story, dial up the conflict if you need to, refine the characters and their desires. You can rinse and repeat this process throughout the week. Hell, if the zero draft isn’t cooperating, you have time to start over from scratch. Maybe there’s some moment within your first try at a story that branches off, intrigues you, go ahead and see where that one leads you. Your goal is to come out of the week with something rough but cohesive, something with all the moving parts in the right places.

All of this advice holds for an older piece that you want to refurbish. Except that what you have may be more polished, and it might be harder for you to scrap big sections, rearrange or take the story in a new direction. If so, this is the week you kill your darlings. No matter how beautiful your sentences, how shapely your paragraphs, if the story isn’t working it’s going to have to change and probably change into something very different than your original idea. Sometimes I feel better if I keep the stuff I amputate in a folder with the idea of using these scraps in something new someday.

Next week will be a rest/catch up week. I will also talk about revising for style and grace (that other editor’s hat) for writers who may want to fast track and get their story in early.

ArmadilloCon Writing Workshop Bootcamp Week 3: Time to Write Your Zero Draft!

Francis Bacon's Studio is a mess. Read about artists making a mess here.

We’re now five weeks away from the June 11 deadline to enroll and submit your short story to the ArmadilloCon Writing Workshop. You’ve, gathered ideas from the world around you (and from what you’ve been reading and watching). Maybe you’ve pulled out an old story or novel chapter that isn’t working yet. You’ve spent a little time developing one or two of these ideas by noodling out some scenarios or creating some characters or both.

Now it’s time to commit and write a Zero draft.

Technically this is your “first” draft, but even the thought of creating a first draft can be daunting, especially if you have a strong vision of what you want the story to become. Personally, my zero drafts are abominations; a mess of ugly writing where the only thing I’ve succeeded at was mangling the idea. (TBH, sometimes I will get a story that just rolls off my fingers in pretty good shape, but those are gifts, and it seems more useful to talk about what it takes to create a story the hard way.)

This zero draft is the one that nobody but you gets to see. I don’t outline my short stories, but I usually have a little collection of notes, a few random lines of dialogue, and an idea of the beginning, middle, and end. With that in hand, I sit down and try to write the story through to the end. Try to lock your critical mind away in a box and just write. Try to write, if not fast, then with deliberate speed. Try not to look back. I try to write at least 1,000 words in a day. If you’re pushing ahead, not stopping to edit or polish anything, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can lay down 1,000 words. I often write more. Since I’m not editing at this stage, if a scene really isn’t working, I’ll just write a different version of the scene or write a different scene altogether. For the zero draft, don’t be afraid to write scenes that may not make it into your final draft. The next day when you return to the work, you can weigh both scenes and move forward from the one that works.

Creating something new is messy, so give yourself permission to make a mess. Keep moving forward writing as fast as you comfortably can. Often the first few paragraphs are a kind of throat clearing, don’t worry you can cut it later. In the meantime, clear away. Keep looking for a way into the story. If you can’t find a door, look for a window and climb in. My first paragraphs often have more to do with these flailing attempts at entry, and I almost always cut them in revision. Resist the temptation to polish your opening lines and paragraphs before you move on. Just try to keep the basic story in focus and keep pushing the narrative forward.

The trick here, especially with short fiction, is to scale your story to the word count limit. Mostly this is something that comes with practice. Writers from Bradbury to Jay Lake made a practice of writing a short story a week. Check out Charlie Jane Anders' great post about writing prolifically.

For now, just keep your cast of characters limited to two to four “speaking parts,” and focus on one life-changing event or revelatory moment for the protagonist. You can also try Vylar Kaftan’s super cool short story formula.

All of the above will work for both short stories and novel chapters – first chapters, especially, should be a tight, dramatic unit of storytelling.

If you can sit down for an hour a day, you should be able to generate a zero draft of a short story or novel chapter in a week or less. Think more about the general size of the story as opposed to the specific word count limit at this stage. Shoot to tell the story in 3,000 and 6,000 words, as the final word count will change in revision.

Don’t forget to keep reading short stories and novels. Pay attention to how the stories or chapters are structured.

OK. Pick up your pens and get out your keyboards and write your zero draft! 

April's Poetry Posting Wrap-up

In Celebration of National Poetry Month, I posted a poem to my Facebook page every day in April. I didn’t do any advance planning, just a quick internet search, sometimes on a particular subject, sometimes just visiting my favorite internet poetry haunts. With only a couple exceptions, every poem I posted was new to me, and I think It was one of the favorite things I’ve ever done on Facebook. Since these poems are soon to be buried in the inexorable roll of new posts, I’ve gathered all the links below in a kind of ad hoc and personal anthology.

Here are the poems posted for each day of April:

1. April by Alicia Ostriker

2. Barking by Jim Harrison -- yes that Jim Harrison, who just passed last year.

3. Leaves by Philip Levine, U.S. Poet Laureate 2011-2012

4. An excerpt from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams

It is difficult 

to get the news from poems

yet me die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

5. Where the Tides Ebb and Flow by Lord Dunsany (check out his masterful micro fictions, too!)

6. The Cats Will Know by Cesare Pavese

7. Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, inspired by this quote:

"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies." ~William Faulkner

8. A Light Exists in Spring by Emily Dickinson

9. America by Claude McKay, written in 1921, it feels grimly prescient today.

10. In the rap as poetry category here's Taking Off by Clipping. BTW, their album Splendor and Misery is up for a Hugo this year.

11. One of my favorites, Child's Talk in April by Christina Georgina Rossetti

12. Fantastic Breasts and Where to Find Them by Brenna Twohy. Yeah, you read that right. Feminist spoken word that's funny with a sting at the end. Just excellent, scroll to the bottom for the video.

13. In the Airport by Eleni Sikélianòs

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad,  he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field 

14. The world seems... by Gregory Orr

15. Old Mama Saturday by Marie Ponsot

16. A sonnet for Easter Sunday, 1985 by Charles Martin. The link includes some good commentary.

17. Monday by Billy Collins
18. Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth, another sonnet (The Prelude is one of my favorite long poems.)
19. The Body by Marianne Boruch:

has its little hobbies. The lung

likes its air best after supper,

goes deeper there to trade up

for oxygen, give everything else

away. (And before supper, yes,

during too, but there’s

something about evening, that

slow breath of the day noticed: oh good,

still coming, still going ... ) As for

bones—femur, spine,

the tribe of them in there—they harden

with use. The body would like

a small mile or two. Thank you.

It would like it on a bike

or a run. Or in the water. Blue.

And food. A habit that involves

a larger circumference where a garden’s

involved, beer is brewed, cows

wake the farmer with their fullness,

a field surrenders its wheat, and wheat

understands I will be crushed

into flour and starry-dust

the whole room, the baker

sweating, opening a window

to acknowledge such remarkable

confetti. And the brain,

locked in its strange

dual citizenship, idles there in the body,

neatly terraced and landscaped.

Or left to ruin, such a brain,

wild roses growing

next to the sea. The body is

gracious about that. Oh, their

scent sometimes. Their

tangle. In truth, in secret,

the first thing 

in morning the eye longs to see. 

20. For Women Who Are Difficult to Love by Warsan Shire
21. Catfish by Claudia Emerson (one of my favorite poets)
22. For Earth Day: Projection by Anna M. Evans 
23. The Song of the Ungirt Runners by Charles Hamilton Sorley. Written shortly before he was killed in World War 1. Follow the link to read about the poem and the poet.
24. The Hidden by Truong Tran
25. The Young by Roddy Lumsden
26. Algebra of the Sky by David Hernandez found in Copper Nickel, an excellent place to find new poetry.
27. Cry of the Loon by Kai Carlson-Wee. Check out Button Poetry for lots of great spoken word poetry.
28. Completely Friday by Luis Garcia Montero
29. The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden. This poem is easy to find so here's an excellent essay.
30. The Mushroom Hunters by Neil Gaiman, read by Amanda Palmer.