The Brilliant Joy of Writing Out of Order

The most fun I've had writing, I wrote out of order. I'd think about a scene, get really excited about it, and when I sat down to write it, the words flow, like pouring coffee into a text document. A scene with lavish imagery. A neat bit of introspection. The big reveal! The first kiss! A single line of dialogue that's going to be hilarious. I write what I'm excited about writing, and then the writing is fun. I get the idea out of my head and onto paper before it slips away or loses itself in the mess of scenes that have gone stale in my head.

Now, this means that my most recent project, as fresh and new as it is, is as much of a mess as you can make in an Open Office file. Let's take a look at what I have:

• A two line synopsis. I like the punchline, but the setup needs some ironing before it really works. Why did I write a two line synopsis? Beats me!
• The first chapter, which is in decent shape and a decent length. I could end it where it is, but I think I can add a section about curly fries, and if you ever have the opportunity to add a section about curly fries, you should.
• Four blank lines, the phrase “fight with knives?” and three more blank lines. This is kinda funny, because I think there's going to be a whole other chapter before the fight scene, but I didn't bother leaving myself a note for that. Also, four cartridge returns seems a bit excessive.
• Three lines of ominous forewarning that the twist is coming, followed by a joke.
• Followed by The Twist. These two pages will probably have a chapter break in the middle because it's all “dun dun DUN!” and then abruptly changes tone.
• Seven pages of dialogue from the next dozen or so scenes in no particular order.
• An unordered, unannotated list of nicknames that I came up with while driving. These nicknames are various levels of appropriate, and I'm not sure who I was describing or who was saying the name “Peach Pit.”
• Descriptions of people standing or sitting too close to each other.

So, of course, this process involves a lot of going back over what I've already written to find out where the next scene I want to write fits. But I don't think of this like a bad thing, because each time I read through a section, I can clean it up and make it sharper or leave myself a note that it's not really doing what I want it to do. (Kind of going back to this post.) And, yeah, this goes against the idea to just vomit out everything until it's all there, but I've decided that method doesn't work for me completely and I need to do some revisions just to keep myself sane and keep myself excited about what I've written.

When I was writing Immortal Queen, I did this thing called “prompt bingo” where I would make myself a bingo card filled with one word, random prompts and when one of them spoke to me, I'd write that scene, cross off the box, and eventually get five crossed off boxes in a row and get a bingo and feel accomplished. Eventually, I had a file full of scenes that were roughly in order without transitions, and together I could see the structure of the story.

Of course, then I had to go back and string them together with things like transitions (ick), but I find that if I actually get to the point in a project where it's time to insert these transitions, I'm A. so close to having something ready to go that I don't mind writing them anymore, and B. in a place where I can figure out how to arrange the structure to not write the boring parts. (Because if it's boring to write, it's boring to read, so don't write boring things.)

I've got a few friends who prefer to write in order, and they have really decent reasons for doing so. One is that if you write in order, the narrative can surprise them. It's like driving down a road in the dark with just your headlights to guide you. You can only see so far ahead. But that doesn't work for me because I usually start a story with the climax in mind, and I really want to get to that point. If I start at the beginning and work my way to the climax, that removes the point of letting the narrative surprise me, it can sometimes take a bit of narrative acrobatics and questionable character intentions to get to the scene I have in mind, and I have to wade through boring bits I don't care about in order to get to the thing I really want to write. I lose steam, and then the project dies.

The other good reason I've heard to write in order is that that way the characters grow naturally. Their evolution feels organic. But I generally have a character arc in mind and I'm pretty good at pinpointing where each scene is in an arc (because this is a talent I have, and you bet I'm going to brag about it). Aside from that, once I have a bunch of scenes in order, I can iron out the character arc and fix anything that's out of place. I can make adjustments, and those are fun adjustments to make. (So maybe this isn't really a skill I have, and I'm just pretending it's a skill, but actually a result of hundreds of hours of editing so you'll think I'm naturally talented and then be impressed with me. Have I impressed you? Haha, don't answer that. Of course I have.)

Your Preteen Should Read Hemingway

I wrote an article this week about getting your preteen to read when your preteen hates reading.  It's really a shame that it was such a short article, because I could have gone on and on. 

When I'm writing an article, I like to poke around first and see what other people are writing in their articles that hit the same topics.  I want to make sure I'm not repeating what's already out there (as much as that's possible), and I want to see the state of the conversation which I'm entering.  But this week's article took me by surprise because so many of them revolved around the topic of "What to do when your boy child hates reading."

From just reading the titles, my interest was piqued.  I usually hear about how girl children decide they hate science and math.  This is especially prominent once they hit middle school and suddenly there are all sorts of social pressures that tell them they shouldn't be good at math anymore because this is a masculine thing and they need to be focusing on feminine things.  (Like...pants?  I was very concerned with finding the perfect pair of pants in junior high because I thought they'd make my ass look awesome and get me a boyfriend, and I had this idea that that was a thing I wanted.  But now I'm thinking about it, "pants" aren't really that feminine of a thing.)  It's pretty clear that this decision to hate numbers and graphs is a product of indoctrination from societal forces and not because the girls are particularly bad at math (with their girl brains and their...nail polish? Nail polish makes you bad at math, right?  The fumes?)  So I thought to myself, Oh! Is there a similar effect on boy children who decide in junior high that it's not cool to read because our culture has decided that that's a feminine characteristic?  How fascinating!

But no.

That is not what these articles were about.

They, in fact, just fed the monster, not mentioning (until I dug deeper on a second go around) that there are societal pressures, and thereby ignoring that they exist and what the real problem here is.  Almost all of them encouraged parents to find books about trucks and sports and "not girly" things, because MAN FOLK READ MAN BOOK!  (Boy brains are made of snails and snails can't read.  It's science.) 

So, okay, I get that if your boy child is feeling the need to be all macho, and you want to appeal to his interests, he's going to gravitate towards stereotypically masculine topics.  (Like whiskey.  Or the first world war.)  But why phrase it as "not girly" topics? (That's a quote, by the way.)  Why not phrase it as "topics in which your kid is interested, whatever that happens to be?" 

(For example: your kid is interested in pie, even though all baked goods are inherently girly.  But wait.  Are they?  I'm confusing myself.  On the one hand, I assume all pie is baked by 1950s housewives with aprons and lipstick and heels, which would make pie a feminine thing.  But then, that's insane because, like I said, everyone likes pie.  Placing food on a gender scale is stupid.  So is labeling things like sports or space travel or pants.)

By this logic, would Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or A Series of Unfortunate Events be masculine enough to get recommended to an apathetic middle grade reader?  (Is Jesus more or less masculine than pants?) This is baffling to me.

One article suggested getting your son a mainly space in which to read, like a tree house (or a leather arm chair).  This is so the boy child's masculinity remains firmly intact even as they do the less-than-manly activity of reading. 

So this advice is basically saying, if your boy child is suffering from the fallout of gender stereotypes, you should help them by pushing them even further into those gender norms!

Books and Moving

These are the books I packed and moved on this last round of uprooting my entire life and moving it down the street and around the corner.

I have a lot of friends who talk about how they go into bookstores and buy everything.  How do they manage?  I haven't bought a hard copy of a book in a year and a half because it's so much easier to hide what I'm reading when it's on a kindle, and I have the vague image in my head of the last time I had to pack up my books.

Funny thing is that the harrowing tower of books in my memories is still not this big. 

Books are flipin' heavy.  This isn't that much of a problem, except for the fact that they also fit really well in boxes.  With a little bit of of spatial reasoning, you can really pack them in there.  But then once you fill a box, you go to lift it, only to find that you basically just filled a box with bricks.

So you have to sacrifice efficient packing for not pulling all the muscles in your back.  For some reason, this irritates me, because efficient packing is a beautiful thing.  But that means that the saving grace here is that these boxes are actually only half full of books and half full of outerwear and towels.  This also irks me, because think of how awesome it would be in the packing process to get to move a super light box full of linens.  Especially after you've moved a super heavy box of books.