On Inspiration

A few weeks ago, I attended a delightful morning coffee with ladies from my neighborhood. I wasn't expecting to chat about my writing process, but someone asked where I get ideas for a novel.

Given my audience was a room full of people casually chatting and not a master class, I kept my answer short: I get ideas while driving. Specifically, while driving to see my out-of-town family. And it's true, if the radio's off and I turn my thoughts toward my current writing project, I always get great ideas. My mother must wonder what's happening every Saturday morning as I pull into her driveway and then sit for ten minutes dictating ideas into a gmail message to myself. 

Later, I open the message and copy/paste the ideas into a Word doc. I bet if I searched my computer for "Car Notes" I'd see a list of 30-40 docs spanning the past seven or eight years, mostly ideas for Lio and Lamb. I don't use all the ideas, maybe just 20%, so this process functions like brainstorming. 

That's the short answer.

The long answer is, well, longer.

I get ideas while reading books, watching movies and television shows, talking to friends, scrolling through Facebook, cleaning and cooking, listening to podcasts like Writing Excuses, weeding, having conversations with random strangers, listening to music, and mowing the yard. Well, not this year. It's so dry that I'm barely mowing. Anyway... 

Here's an example of an inspirational image I saw on Facebook a few weeks ago.

Source:  sweatpantsandcoffee.com 

I relate to many "tiny happy things" on this list, and it made me want my new main character to love some of them as well. I copied the image and pasted it into a Google doc. Then yesterday my main character started reading a novel... and realized she loved that feeling of realizing she loved the book.

This "collection of ideas" is constant. But it is heightened when I'm actively writing a project. My house fills with scraps of paper on which I've jotted random ideas. They accumulate on the kitchen counter until I move them to the chair by my desktop Mac's desk. 

Here's a quick pic of the little notes on the chair today.

The mess on the pink-bordered note is strawberry juice. Apparently I think of ideas while snacking as well.

What I find, and probably all writers find, is that when I'm actively writing a project, I'm in "writer mode." I watch the world more closely. I listen more carefully. And I pay closer attention to the random thoughts that flitter at the edge of my mind.

A Letter to Mary Robinette Kowal

Dear Ms. Kowal, 

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

After architecting my newest novel by cramming 50 pages of notes into a 30 page outline, I was ready to start writing the manuscript this week. I don’t usually write the first page first, but the opening image was so clear in my mind. I sat myself down, started typing, and produced two solid pages.

Then I listened to Writing  Excuses episode 16.29. The idea that the opening pages should deliberately raise questions, several of which are answered right away to gain a reader’s trust, was intriguing. I decided to test the practice by doing the final assignment from 16.27. I scanned Amazon’s best selling books, picked four popular novels in my genre, and started reading opening pages. Three of the four novelists demonstrated your “mini-mysteries” advice perfectly. 

Thanks to your tips, I plan to revise my pages a bit before continuing on, adding more solved and unsolved puzzles. 

With gratitude,

Ann

PS We actually met once -- in line for the a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis Convention Center during Nerdcon: Stories. We chatted a little. It was delightful. Sadly, I looked you up in the program afterwards and thought, "Well, I'll never see her doing puppetry after this weekend, so I guess my 'famous person' encounter won't be a great story to tell later." And then I discovered Writing Excuses and you became one of my writing mentors. Life is great; sometimes it's even better than a perfectly crafted plot.

Toni Morrison

I love this, from Toni Morrison: 

In June and the first half of July, I did the following for my newest novel, Dash Away:

* Reread my notes from last winter

* Settled on names and personality traits for most characters

* Made a progression outline following the Blake Snyder model

* Collected more notes

* Rewatched Notting Hill 

* Sorted all my notes into chapters

That work feels like the thinking and discovering and selecting and ordering and beginning to find meaning part of the writing process. I think it has gone well, though I'm sure much will be trimmed and much added. 

As I make a turn this week toward actually typing the manuscript, I anticipate feeling the "awe and reverence and mystery and magic" of storytelling. 

Okay, muse. Let's go!

2020: Part 2

After a productive summer, wherein I did complete the Haven draft (yay!), we started the new school year with plans for hybrid learning instead of full distance teaching. Determined to avoid the mistakes of spring, 2020, I vowed to finish my school work each day by 5:00 pm in order to give myself a break each night. That meant giving up 10-14 hours of my weekend (on Sundays) to prepare for the week. It was a sacrifice I was prepared to make to restore balance to my weekdays. Friday nights and Saturdays became a sacred recovery time with no thoughts of work allowed. My own private sabbath.

Despite fluctuating between hybrid and distance learning seven times during semester 1, teaching did go better. If spring of 2020 earned a D-, fall of 2020 earned a C-. Progress through curriculum was slow and some students were still entirely disengaged despite my and my colleagues' best efforts. But I learned to let go of former expectations and to allow students to make poor choices without blaming myself. 

My new schedule worked, but it once again allowed no time for writing. Or, to be more accurate, I didn't prioritize writing. So I didn't write. Finishing the Haven draft over the summer felt like coming to a natural stopping point. And picking a draft to revise? It felt like too big a job to do piecemeal. 

Still, by the holiday break, I was itching to start something new. 

I had been reading the latest Beth O'Leary novels, modern British romances, after falling in love with her cover art. 

That's what I wanted to try.

So I did.

2020: Part 1

 

A recap: I started 2020 flush with writing plans and goals, primarily to finish a draft of Haven and then circle back to Aco and fix my pace and character arc problems in both drafts. I made some progress, but my writing was (predictably) derailed when the spring musical started up... and then both the musical and my writing met their premature end due to COVID. 

Across America, schools were closed and teachers and students alike were sent home. And so it was in my small district. For about a week. And then, because we are fortunate to have a supportive community that funded a technology referendum to supply laptops in a 1:1 initiative, we began full time distance learning. 

For me, DL meant sleeping in until 7:30 (no alarm clock needed), shlepping to the shower and making coffee in time to check that my Google Classroom lessons had posted (automatically set for 8:00), and then sitting down in front of a screen for the next 14 hours. Seriously. My routine typically included a short break for lunch from 2:30-3:00 and supper with a TV show from 7:00-8:00. And then back at it until all emails had been answered, online work had been graded, and new lessons were ready for the next day. On an "early" day I was finished by 10:00 pm. Sometimes I worked past midnight.

It was physically grueling, and sitting so long in front of the mac messed up my back. 

But the emotional impact was far worse. As a teacher, you strive to meet each student where they are and inspire them to achieve as much as they can. I was able to continue being that sort of teacher for a few amazing students. But too many of my seniors decided their MO for the rest of the year would be doing the minimal needed in order to pass and graduate. And that meant disengagement and rampant cheating. Let me give an example.

Let's say, during the study of Macbeth, I create a lesson on Lady Macbeth in act 1, scene 5. I am thrilled when I find a wonderful (short) video of Niamh Cusack rehearsing the scene for the RSC and create a lesson with a recorded introduction by me (with a funny personal story from a time I saw Niamh on stage), a link to myshakespeare.com so they can read the scene with vocab and explanatory help, and an interactive Google Doc where they can watch the actress dissect and perform the scene and react to her performance choices in writing. It takes me a little over two hours to put together (typical). I guess that it will take the students maybe 20 minutes to work through. That's only half of a class period, but I don't have another two hours to make more content and frankly, within days I realized that students were unwilling to do any assignment that lasted longer than 20 minutes anyway. I have two other preps to address before crawling into bed... It'll have to do. 

I post the assignment. When I start grading assignments a day later, I realize most of the students have skipped the reading entirely and watched maybe 3 minutes of the 11 minute video before composing their reactions. Some of the reactions make no sense as they are copied straight from the internet, probably after they took my prompt question and pasted it into the search bar at Google. And 5-6 students have the exact same personal response, down to the type-o's and grammar errors. 

From a distance, I could not have made the scene more simple and engaging. I was overly proud, in fact, of how clever I had been. They didn't care. And now I faced another 4 acts worth of lessons to create knowing that no matter how I addressed the lack of effort and outright cheating, no matter how clever I was in creating technology-forward, learner-friendly lessons, I would face similar choices by the students. What more could I do? It was emotionally crushing. 

This led to my realization and DL mantra: You can stay up until midnight creating beautiful, detailed maps leading straight to the freshest water, but you can't stop a horse from using Google Maps to find a short cut that leads to a brackish swamp. 

By the end of each week, I was so physically and emotionally drained that I collapsed for the weekend. Teaching, which is usually fun, became drudgery. I was ready to quit education entirely. I spent more than one moment dreaming of early retirement and looking at the help wanted ads in the local paper . And through it all, there was literally NO time to write. 

Until summer.

That's when the pandemic's restrictions became convenient excuses to indulge myself in days of gardening, quiet time recovering from the soul-devouring atrocity of DL, and finishing my Haven draft. 

So that's what I did.

My New Project (2021)

One of my guilty pleasures is reading romance novels. I have favorite authors and series, but I'll read passably edited self-published digital work as well. Admittedly, this is a waste of time. But maybe... maybe it's research?

An idea came to me mid-winter. An idea for a romance novel. A reverse Notting Hill, where the famous movie star is British and is rescued and enchanted by a book-loving American gal. During a Minnesota snowstorm. I ran with it and spent Christmas vacation of 2020 and January-February of 2021 collecting ideas, creating my protagonists and their world, and digging into the characters' psyches with a goal of actually having character arcs from the get-go. It was distracting, indulgent, energizing work. 

And then the defunct spring musical sprang back to life. I had to choose a direction; with the time-consuming demands of teaching both face-to-face and distance learning simultaneously (a fresh hell), there was room for just one creative endeavor in my life. I couldn't imagine not being a part of the musical, so I chose that direction. By the time it ended, my focus was on graduation activities and the romance was pushed so far to the back of my head I had literally forgotten the characters' names. 

But now it is June. Summer. My time.

First, I printed all my notes from last winter. Aha! Elly Calder. That's your name! Or Charlie. I was thinking about changing it. And Eddie Ashton-Clarke. Plus all your cohorts and family. There you are.

After reacquainting myself with the world of Hartley, Minnesota, I reread Jessica Brody's Blake Snyder-inspired Save the Cat! Writes a Novel to reacquaint myself with his beat system of outlining a plot. 

Next comes the actual outlining. I had solid progress working off a well built outline for SPOTD, so that's the plan. Lio and Lamb probably suffered a bit because I outlined less, unsure of exactly where the story was going. I had a double column day progression excel sheet at one point, but it was more reactive than pre-organized and mostly built to help me follow separated characters over time.

Then it'll be off to the races! For the first time, I'll be using Microsoft 365 instead of installed software. The dynamism of Word + the device sharing of Google Docs? Yes, please. 

I have two favorite bits in the new series. The first is where the female protagonist lives. Instead of a row-house with a striking blue door, Elly (for now) lives in a white farmhouse in Minnesota's rural lake country. It's based on a farmhouse I visited last summer when I was considering a premature end to my teaching career and a move closer to family. I fell in love with the house, but I realized the timing for such a drastic move was wrong. Using it as my character's home was a way to own it without buying it. 

There are very few parallels between my first series (middle grade modern fantasy), my second series (YA traditional fantasy in a created world), and this piece (contemporary romance). And yet, one major inspiration for each was a physical space. For SPOTD, it was the barn at the end of the street where Chase lived. For Lio and Lamb, it was castles. And for Dash Away, it is the farmhouse. 

My second delight is Eddie's imdb.com filmography list. It was delightful imagining a sort of Downton Abbey meets Bridgewater series that has made Eddie famous, although that fame was disrupted by the pandemic. I based the series off actual historical figures from a precise time and place, bringing together people who may or may not have actually met in the 1800's England. 

And nearly as fun to work out was Eddie's next move, which involves one of my favorite London performance spaces, the outdoor theater in Regent's Park. Even though I won't be visiting London again until travel is less fraught and shows have returned to the West End, at least I can visit in my mind.