Tag: Writing

My thoughts on the writing process.

Posted in Writing, Writing: Help

WIPMarathon Check -In #1

Posted on by Amy McNulty

Last Check-in Wordcount + ChapterCount: As of last Saturday, I’d just finished the fourth chapter and that took it to 17,480 words. (Long chapters, I know, but they were intro chapters and from now on, the chapters HAVE TO be shorter.)

Current WC + CC:
I outlined on Sunday and then got back to work. Now it’s at seven chapters, 23,839 words.

WIP Issues this week: Figuring out the rest of the plot (which I did with an outline, yay, I feel more confident now) and feeling bad about not writing much toward the end of the week because I was busy with work and then a bit ill.

What I learnt this week in writing: Writing outlines are not the enemy of creativity that pantser-me used to think. Yes, I love discovering the story as I write, but having that outline in place is so reassuring. I’ve tweaked a few things as I write, so it’s not like the outline is something rigid.

What distracted me this week while writing: Work and feeling sick. At least feeling sick let me read a lot, yay.

Last 200 words: Hmm…. Not my favorite passage or scene by any means (and a tiny bit more than 200), but:

“My advice, should you ever find yourself surrounded by an angry mob again.” The voice was alto, deep but melodious. I felt the soft brush of dark hair press against my cheek as he spoke, as the man—the man—ignored my blows and turned the horse backward, back toward the duchy. “Don’t rely on someone in the sky to get down in time to save you.” He flicked the reigns. “Hee-yah!” The horse went speeding forward, the few women and children remaining in that direction scrambling desperately to flee the pounding of hooves taking me away from Mother Flore and Mother Ermessenda, away from Mother Jehanne and the safety of the towers… And off into the burning ember sun, toward the duchy, a sun-kissed, unknown savior seated behind me.

“Why are there no men in the Stargazers, Mother Jehanne? Why must all the boys leave when they come of age?”

Mother Jehanne stroked my hair, lulling me to sleep with the rhythms of her rocking chair. “Ytoile would not permit their savagery. We take their gifts to the tower, it’s true. We might bless them even, if they are devout. But they will never be as dear to Ytoile as are women and children.” Mother Jehanne leaned in, whispering directly into my ear. “Men want women, Cateline. They want them in unspeakable ways. If one ever catches you, let Ytoile guide your hand. Don’t let him defile you.”

I shielded my eyes with my arm at my forehead, feeling the hot burn of the sun demon even through my closed eyelids, taunting me to do what needed doing.

Posted in Writing, Writing: Help

WIPMarathon Intro

Posted on by Amy McNulty

So I don’t usually talk about my WIPs in depth at my blog. Mostly because I have too many of them going at once—or started, anyway—and I feel ashamed that I have nothing to show for it other than sweat and tears and some rough, uncompleted drafts that no one on earth but me has ever seen. Life gets in the way, writer’s block hits, and even well-intentioned “I’m going to write every day and finish this!” goals end in getting stuck at what seemed like the climax of the manuscript. (I’m looking at you, contemporary suspense YA manuscript. I’ve shelved you for a while now, but I swear someday I’ll dust you off and figure out what went wrong.)

Well, I’m tired of having nothing to show for it. It’s been my dream practically all my life to be a published author, and—dare I hope—an author with more than one book to her name. But I’m never going to get there until I have more than one manuscript to shop around!

So luckily, shiny new idea hit in early July. Like I needed another new idea I wouldn’t finish… But how about one I WOULD finish? What if I told myself I’d write almost every single day (I’m sorry, me, but some days I’m just too busy or tired to write even a line, and that’s okay, as long as it’s not often.) and this time, I had an outline ready so I couldn’t possibly wind up stuck at the end?

So that became my goal: write this manuscript and finish it. Stop fretting about all the things people will find wrong with it, that everyone I know will hate it and I’ll have to start another project, and just write it, just have another project in the wings ready to go.

So last week I found out about a group of bloggers devoting the month of August to accomplishing their individual goals in their WIPs, and although I’m late to the game, I’ve also been writing a lot this month (more than last month even), so I decided to join in! Learn more here if you feel like doing the same (yes, you can join late, I asked!).

So here’s my intro, soon followed by my check-in:

Marathon Goal: As close to finishing the first draft of this project as possible. I originally gave myself until the end of the year, but I feel more pumped. I’m hoping I can finish long before that. I did also have a goal of writing my outline this month after finishing the first four (long) chapters in July (I wanted to get a feel for the characters before I decided the rest of the plot), and I did that last weekend, yay.

Stage of writing: Writing the first draft of my sixth novel project. (Of the previous five, one is completely retired, one is finished and got me an agent :D, and the other three are in various stages of being on hiatus.)

What inspired my current project: It’s YA fantasy. I want to say Game of Thrones meets Marvel Comics’ Runaways, but every YA fantasy these days has the “YA version of Game of Thrones” tag already, so… yeah. Also, it’s my first project with multiple POVs. Four to be precise. Because I’m crazy like that.

What might slow down my marathon goal: Getting distracted, getting busy, and having too much work to do. I write for a living, too, and if I spend all day staring at my computer, pulling the creative juices out of my brain writing for work, sometimes I’m simply too exhausted to keep doing that for my own stuff. (Seriously, I wish I had like a Kindle screen just for typing. I get so tired of staring at a glowing screen.)

Posted in Writing, Writing: Help

Character Voice and First Person Point of View

Posted on by Amy McNulty

I’m a fan of first person narrative. I love reading it, and I love writing it, and thankfully it’s pretty common in my favorite genre (YA). There’s something so immediate about first person narrative that lets you slip into a character’s head better than third person, to picture the action from his or her point of view. Through one character’s eyes, you go on an adventure you’d probably never get to experience, you get romanced (sometimes~) and, in YA at least, are free to regress to a younger age when you were just getting used to the unfairness of the world (and overreacting to it), and you viewed things through a not-yet-adult-no-longer-a-child point of view.

I love writing when first person voice is unreliable especially. As the writer, you know your character isn’t seeing things as they truly are, but it’s fine manipulating the reader into seeing things from the skewed point of view, only to turn it on its head later.

My only problem as a writer of first person perhaps? Learning to give each narrative voice its own flavor. So far I have one completed manuscript in first person and two works in progress in first person—the newest will actually have four different first persons at that. I know, I’m crazy, but that’s the story I want to tell. (My other two works in progress are in third person and I’ve yet to become as attached to them, perhaps because I don’t feel as immersed in them.) I’ve seen multiple points of view first person done well (among them, one I’ve beta read and hope you all see someday), and I think I can come up with some strategies for trying to make each voice different. (We’ll see if others agree I’ve done a decent job distinguishing them, since I’ve yet to share more than one first person narrative with a single human being… My cat, though, she’s seen them while getting fur all over my laptop screen.):

  • Try to figure out who the narrator is before you start writing. What makes him or her different from the other characters you’ve written before? What are their strengths, and what are their weaknesses?
  • How would you write dialogue for this character? Chances are, you “get inside the heads” of dozens of characters all the time anyway when they speak to your narrator. This time you just have to think of how the new character would describe everything unfolding in the room.
  • How are they unreliable? Everyone is, to a certain extent. Figure out the “truth” of the scene, and then figure out how the character would interpret that truth. How would they describe a scene in a different way than the last character from whose point of view you wrote?
  • Don’t go overboard with the voice differences. Having one character drop the “g” off of “ings” seems like a good idea to remind the reader that this is Character B speaking, not Character A, but it’s really just distracting. If Character A is serious and Character B takes everything as a joke, there are ways to express that better than speech differences, like smarmy commentary.

What other tips and strategies do you have for writing different first person points of views? Share them with me!

Posted in News, Reading

Buy The Sight Seer today!

Posted on by Amy McNulty

It’s a day early than I expected, but the Kindle version of Melissa Giorgio‘s The Sight Seer is available today! And for only $2.99! For less than a cup of coffee, you can be swept up in the YA paranormal thriller adventure of Gabi Harkins and swoon-worthy Rafe Fitzgerald.

Buy it now!

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If you don’t have a Kindle and don’t want to use the free Kindle app to read it on PCs, Macs, tablets, smartphones and web browsers, or you just love holding a book in your hands and keeping it on your shelf, the paperback version of The Sight Seer is due soon, probably within a few weeks. I’ll keep you posted when I see it for sale!

Posted in Geek Out, Reading, Writing

The Fanfiction in My Head

Posted on by Amy McNulty

I read a tumblr post recently (sorry, lost the link!) in which someone asked a professor what he (she?) thought of fanfiction. The overall point seemed to be “write what you enjoy, and actually, all writing is fanfiction to a degree and has been for hundreds and hundreds of years.” The professor also said something about how before this stress on originality (and even then, how 100% original can we be?), readers really only wanted what was essentially fanfiction. A writer would take something like a King Arthur tale, for example, and make it even better than ever before.

In any case, the post got me thinking about fanfiction and my own experiences with it. I actually have never read much of it (for one, the best source for it is the Internet and I don’t like staring at a computer screen to read text for long, long periods if it can be helped), but I did write some when I was pre-teen and early teen. One was a relatively short pure Mary Sue about a “Sailor Universe” in the realm of Sailor Moon who had ALL of the senshi’s powers (before I knew about Sailor Cosmos, by the way). Another was a somewhat more original seven-chapter series about Genbu no Miko, a prequel to Fushigi Yuugi. In the original manga and anime, Watase hinted at a girl who had been the Genbu priestess in the past, but she hadn’t yet fully developed the story, so I took her hints and spun my own tale. Years later, Watase did her own version, which of course was infinitely better than mine.

They’re actually still on the Internet under a pseudonym (yes, we had Internet when I was that young, ha, although it looked a whoooole lot different), if you tinker around with the way back machine, but I’m not going to link you to it. Geh! I just visited the page and found another short fanfiction I’d forgotten all about: Usagi from Sailor Moon wishing she could leave Mamoru for Seiya. Too bad for Chibiusa, eh?

But then I was thinking, what other writing did I do back then? It may not have been fanfiction, but it was inspired by my love for something at the time. I read The Chronicles of Prydain, and I was writing my own (unintentionally hilarious!) attempt at high fantasy. I saw and read Centennial, and all of sudden I was writing a Western historical. And it sometimes still happens today. I got back into a Regency and Victorian era kick recently (not that I ever stopped liking them), and an idea for a Regency historical started kicking around in my head.

Perhaps most embarrassingly of all to admit, but ever since I could remember, I’ve “performed” (?) fanfiction in my head. Not as much these days since I have less trouble hitting the hay, but when I was younger, it’d take me quite a while to fall asleep after I went to bed. If sleep wasn’t happening, I imagined whatever book/movie/show/comic/anime was new to me or a favorite thing at the time, only with… Me. Basically, with a Mary Sue. And the very worst kind of Mary Sue, who has greater powers than the other X-Men, for example (a favorite “power” to give my Sue, as you can see from the Sailor Universe thing above, is having EVERYONE else’s powers, ha, like a single being wouldn’t like explode with the sheer force), and who’s befriended by all of her favorite characters. Now that I know what a Mary Sue is (I did start doing this in elementary school), it’s extremely mortifying to admit that that entertained me, but I guess it entertains a lot of people. The term exists for a reason, right?

That said, short of my young days of writing those few fanfiction, I don’t pretend that a Mary Sue I come up with would entertain anyone else. As a reader, I would hate to read about a perfect, deus-ex-machina character. (Not that I haven’t come across a few…) In fact, even in the fanfiction in my head, I prefer drama to everything magically going the Mary Sue’s way. There’s something about arguments, misunderstandings, obstacles and characters learning to improve themselves along the way that perfect Mary Sues just don’t hold a candle to.

Then again, apparently people are entertained by fanfiction and Mary Sues. I’m not even talking about the tons of free fanfiction available online to those who seek it—read what you love, and enjoy the well written stuff out there. But I just love informing the random women I come across who love a certain extremely insane-selling erotic book series how it’s a Twilight fanfiction. These types of women don’t usually know what fanfiction is, but once I explain the Twilight parallels (and how the author originally uploaded it for free with the Twilight characters’ names in tact and basically just did a search-and-replace with new names for publication)*, they start understanding: they love fanfiction! They love erotic fanfiction at that. And for them, that’s okay. Apparently I love fanfiction in my head, so who am I to judge? (Just maybe, the next fanfiction to get published could have a little better character development and prose? ಠ_ಠ)

*How do I know so much about these books? No, I haven’t read them, but I have read samples and articles explaining the original Twilight connection. That’s my story (but it’s truel!) and I’m sticking to it.

Posted in Reading, Writing

The Reading and Writing Never Ends

Posted on by Amy McNulty

I don’t remember exactly what J.K. Rowling interview I saw (or read, which would be more appropriate to this post, but I do think it was something I saw), but I remember her talking about how she can never stop reading, even if she has to read the ingredients in a bottle of shampoo when in someone else’s bathroom. It clicked with me because I’m much the same. All day, every day, I read and write and live in a world of words bouncing silently around in my head. I think it must be much the same for other writers.

I work as a writer, and I prefer communicating with my clients (or with most anyone) by email, so I’ve never actually spoken with a number of clients who’ve offered me work, even those who’ve offered me work for years. I’m better at communicating my ideas in writing, and it was my strong suit in school. (And I’m grateful for the wonderful teachers in high school and college who encouraged me and helped me grow as a writer!)

I’m introverted (which is NOT the same as lonely, I enjoy solitude)—always have been—and besides my boyfriend and family, I don’t do much with friends. I do, however, have a wide network of dear friends to whom I once wrote handwritten letters. (I still do write to many of them by hand, but not anywhere near as often.) I’ve had pen pals since I was 7 years old! The Internet has made it easier to keep in touch with most of them online these days more often than not, but rarely a day goes by where I don’t check in with a number of them. And I keep in touch with school friends online, too. I almost feel like we’re reading each other’s minds. All of this communication happening thanks to words you never speak aloud. Kind of trippy in a way!

As for reading, well, most of the distractions on the Internet I enjoy consist of reading rather than watching videos. (Not that I never watch videos!) It’s always been easier for me to understand and learn something written down than via a visual or audio lecture about the topic for some reason. At breakfast and when I step away from the computer for lunch and I’m alone (and sometimes even when not), I read the newspaper or a catalog or anything within reach, whether I actually care about the topic or not. People sometimes lecture me for reading while eating, and I respond with a line that connected with me from the Steam Detectives manga a decade or more ago: “I’m not reading while eating. I’m eating while reading.”

This habit means you would expect me to finish more books in a timely manner, but it is rare for me to read for pleasure for long periods at a time other than right before bed. And sometimes even then, I prefer gaming.

I do watch TV and I love going to the cinema, but I also watch a lot of foreign language shows (mostly anime), so even then, I’m still reading thanks to subtitles. I think the only other times when I’m not reading or writing is when driving, doing chores, showering (baths are a great place to read, though!), exercising, eating with others (and even then, not always) and sleeping. I can’t stand to be caught without something to occupy my mind for more than a few moments if it can be helped. If I’m leaving the house and expecting even a minute of downtime, I bring a book or newspaper with me.

Are you a non-stop reader and writer? Do you think this helps you improve your writing?

Posted in News

Happy News!

Posted on by Amy McNulty

What’s this?

Two posts in one day? Impossible for me, you might say. But no sooner had I finished the last post than I noticed this piece of news on my Twitter feed:

booknews

Melissa is one of my best friends and beta readers, and we’ve known each other for almost 14 years. We even got agents the same year! We’ve both counted ourselves among a circle of friends who shared a dream of being published authors, and Melissa is the first of us to make her dream come true! She’s worked hard for many years to get to this point. I’m honored to be one of her beta readers, and I know you’re going to love The Sight Seer as much as I did. Stay tuned and please support her book when it comes out!

Posted in Writing

Your Writing Accessories

Posted on by Amy McNulty

You’ve set aside a block of time in order to write. You’ve got your fingers poised over the keyboard (or piece of paper with pen in hand) and you’re ready for the words to start flowing. So what are the must-have accessories with which you surround yourself? For me, these include:

  • A mug of hot tea (or if it’s really warm out, a glass of iced tea will do)
  • A bottle of water (you can never be too hydrated)
  • A cozy blanket (but if it’s really hot, probably a blowing fan instead)
  • A pile of pillows
  • A tube of lip balm so I don’t have to get up every twenty minutes to apply it
  • Hand cream. I wash my hands a lot.
  • Tissues and a trash can (TMI? I blow my nose a lot even without colds or allergies!)
  • A wrist support strap, for those times every few months when too much typing makes me my wrist start hurting
  • My phone, in case the outside world needs to get in touch (landline phone, so there are no fancy cell phone gimmicks to distract me—the Internet’s enough for that already)
  • A flash drive to back up the session’s work
  • A cat. But only if she feels like visiting.

At one time I might have said a thesaurus or dictionary, but since I type all of my writing from the get-go, Word’s built-in function or the Internet can do the job for any word look-ups and research.

What are your must-have writing accessories?

Posted in Writing

Writing vs. Editing: Which Do You Prefer?

Posted on by Amy McNulty

I’ve been neglecting this blog the past couple of months, so I apologize for the delay in updates! Post holidays, I had a lot of work projects, but I managed to fit in writing and editing for my own creative projects, too, which inspired the topic for this post:

Do you prefer writing the first draft or editing it later?

I’ve heard people on both sides of the fence. I love my wonderfully inspired moments when I’m first drafting a project, but those aren’t as frequent as I’d like, and most days I only write a very little. When I’m drafting, sometimes the task ahead of me can seem gargantuan, which can be a bit overwhelming. So unless I’m struck by that “magic” where I pump out thousands of words in a writing session instead of hundreds, I prefer editing.

Strangely, editing can be just as gargantuan a task as drafting—perhaps more so—but it doesn’t feel that way to me when I’m working. I have hundreds of pages of text to work with, to cut and slash and move around. And yes, to add to, but for some reason, even adding an entire chapter or two (or ten!) doesn’t seem so bad when I think, “Well, I’ve still got hundreds of pages here already!”

Editing never seems to end, really! (At least perhaps until it’s finally locked in and printed.) But it doesn’t seem too difficult a task because you’ve spent so much time in your world by the time you’re on draft two or five that you feel like it’s just a matter of fixing this or that, rather than scrapping everything and starting over completely.

…Which I hope I don’t have to do with one of my WIPs that seems profoundly broken, even though I’m in the last chapter or two. Sadly, editing isn’t always magic enough to fix things.

But in my work, I tend to prefer editing to writing, too, and I enjoyed my time as a writing tutor helping people improve their essays. That’s another reason I love beta reading, too!

Posted in Writing

Was I Here or Was I There? Tricky Narration

Posted on by Amy McNulty

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of beta reading a friend’s latest manuscript.I’ve done this in the past with her works, but this time she thought to ask, “Why do you keep changing my ‘here’s”to ‘there’s, my ‘this’es to ‘that’s, my ‘last night’s to ‘the previous night’ or ‘the night before’?” We’re talking in her first-person past-tense narration, by the way. I leave them alone in dialogue or in internal monologue, and I would have left them alone in present-tense narration.

But why do I change present-tense words to the past tense? Especially since, as I’ve been doing some editing of some of my own work lately, I still find instances of ‘here,’ ‘this,’ ‘now’ and the like in my own narration? (Which I then promptly change, but still, when I originally wrote them, they must have seemed natural to me!) And we both have found examples of the present tense in past tense narration in published works. She found one that had both “this” and “that” in the same sentence and it didn’t make much sense to me!

But that’s just it–I guess I change these words because they don’t make sense to me. I know that narration isn’t supposed to be a literal representation of the character talking about what happened in the past. (Who speaks in novel form, for one?) But that’s how I picture it. The character sitting with you now, in your living room, for example, talking about things that happened to them last week, last month or years ago, somewhere else. To me, if the narrator says “here” in the narration, she’s talking about your living room then. If she says “last night,” she’s talking about the night before you’re currently reading, not the night before action that took place days, weeks, months, years before.

My friend says she pictures the narrator like “cataloging” the events in real time, so she’s still talking about the past, but it’s just happened. She’s still wherever “here” is, she’s still one day away from “last night,” she’s just talking play-by-play as things happen, only in the past tense. So in other words, where my friend would write something like:

This key in my hand was how I was going to get out of here.

I’d prefer:

That key in my hand was how I was going to get out of there.

And if I wanted some immediate thought with “here” and “this,” I’d change it to internal monologue. Of course, this is editor-me speaking. Writer-me sometimes forgets that and I don’t catch it for a long time. And other readers don’t change it, either; it’s not necessarily “incorrect,” it just sounds weird to me!

Have you noticed the changes in tense in your writing or in published works? Do you prefer one style over the other, or haven’t you thought about it before?