| Passion |
[Mar. 2nd, 2006|09:57 pm] |
This is a subject I've been thinking about a lot lately, brought on (not surprisingly to those who know me!) by music. Specifically, a group of acoustic recordings by Matthew Good, a Canadian artist (In a Coma). The sound quality of the CD is such that it seems like he is whispering and wailing right in your ear, and you can hear the emotion infusing every word, creating anticipation for the next note.
Reading a well-written love scene is a lot like that. Your eyes trip over the words in your haste to see what happens - and see is the right verb, too, because images form as fast as the words pass into your head. Whoever said that reading wasn't visual enough never read a great romance novel!
The flipside, of course, is writing a good love scene. The imagery has to make your own heart race before it's worth committing to paper, and when it is, you get charged with the task of finding the words and the narrative flow to make it happen the way it does in your mind. That translation is a lot harder than non-writers realize. What verb tense will make the action pop? Is the ratio of pronouns to descriptives to name usage good? Does it follow the laws of physics - can someone really get into that position? How about when you write explicit love scenes, like I usually do? How does your vocabulary hold out? (Because I'll tell you, there's not a day in my life when the word "penis" has done anything but make me giggle. :D) Did you *gasp* remember to include the feelings in all that sex? And when you re-read it to yourself, does it make YOU squirm in your chair and want more?
That's the ultimate litmus test, really: does it turn you, the author, on? It won't always; you'll know it forwards and backwards and inside out by the time you've edited it and be happy to never see it again, lol. But when it's fresh, when the idea is shiny and new and you've only just ejaculated the words onto paper, and you read it and get all kinds of excited, that's when you know it's good.
This line of thinking is because ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) janajoh posted a while back about the Phaze HeatSurge contest. I had a germ of an idea that I've been working on, but it is not happening. The hero is boring. The heroine keeps telling me to go fuck myself because she does not like the hero, and I can't blame her because neither do I! It really isn't working at all. I'm not excited. I'm not squirmy. In fact, the best description of how what I've got makes me feel is meh, that oh-so-useful pop culture expression coined by The Simpsons. The deadline is a week from tomorrow and unless I have a serious breakthrough, I'm afraid that I simply won't be entering this one. And that's all right, if disappointing. I'd much rather write something wildly passionate that doesn't fit the contest parameters and gets used elsewhere, than turn in something mediocre and lacklustre that won't stand a chance of winning anyway. :-) |
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| Little bit of everything |
[Feb. 15th, 2006|09:57 pm] |
Yesterday was Valentine's Day, a holiday that does rather seem geared towards the romance writer despite its rampant commercialism. Oddly enough, Valentine's for me is more akin to, say, St. Patrick's Day, in that it's a day to celebrate all your loved ones and do silly things. Wear red and ribbons and hand out chocolate or candy to anyone who'll eat it! And give hugs, both the wrap-your-arms-around-someone kind and the verbal or e-kind for those you can't be with in person. All of which I did yesterday, making it a day full of affection and laughter even for a single gal - one of the best kinds to have.
I also, thanks to a gentle nudge from mockingbird39 ;-), finally signed up at the Romance Divas message board. I have yet to post anything, aside from the PM to gain access to the erotica boards, since that's really where I need to be. I can see that it will be quite a treasure trove of information, which is why it's been on my list of places to visit for a while. I guess I needed that little push to join, though, so thanks for that Mel!
I realized over this past weekend, while reading something that had some similar themes in it, that the deadline for winner notification in the Writer's Digest short-short story contest I entered back in December was last week. Obviously I didn't win anything, lol. I had in fact completely forgotten about it until I was reminded of my story. I suppose that I've sort of gotten my first rejection letter. Albeit it was a contest, not a submission for publication, but the end result was still "no," and that's okay. I'm pleased that I did submit it, and I still think it's a good story. And now I can start looking at where else I can send it. Onward with the baby steps. :) |
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| Nothing is ever lost |
[Feb. 5th, 2006|11:18 pm] |
Recently I was listening to some demo versions of songs that I know the album versions of very well, and it's cool to try to pinpoint the changes - and to see what made it onto that album as-is, and what waited until even several albums down the road to see the light of day. It's analogous to the process of producing several drafts of a manuscript and how the most polished one you could possibly produce is still not finished when you send it to an editor for consideration for publication. Your editor is like a band's music producer, massaging your work into its final form before it's released to the world at large. And in both worlds, some are better at this massaging than others. In literature, it's usually the agent's job to find an editor who can do this polishing for an author - making that match is what they do. I'm not really sure there's an equivalent in music, exactly, but then I'm an observer only there, if a passionate one. :)
I also read an article, in Writer's Digest I believe, about how nothing you ever write is wasted. I remember reading an interview with Terry Brooks about writing his original groundbreaking trilogy, The Sword of Shannara, and how the first book had gone so smoothly that he was caught off guard by the massive problems he ran into with the second. In the end, the 200+ pages that he cut out of that book (ouch!) became the seeds for the third novel, and both were the stronger for it.
It's a comforting thought, isn't it? That the ideas and words that you've had don't simply disappear in a puff of smoke, even if no one else ever sees them in their origial form. It's perhaps especially comforting for someone like me, whose venture back into the joy of writing happened via the medium of fanfiction: unpublishability at its finest. It would be easy to dismiss that as valid - to be elitist and say that it doesn't matter because it's just for fun, that it can't possibly mean anything when you play in someone else's universe with someone else's characters. That it is, in fact, only that: play.
But how much of what we learn about how to be who we are is through play? Adults often forget just how powerful it can be to play. To let the imagination roam completely free of barriers and simply experience and try to understand how what emerges relates to you and what that might mean. That's the attitude I take towards fanfiction. It's an opportunity to let everything go and see what comes out. A lot of the time, that may be too deeply rooted in whatever fandom to even make sense anywhere else, or too extreme in one fashion or another to ever be saleable even with original characters, and that's okay. It's practice, and it's a learning curve, and it means that you're writing. The only way to get good, and then get even better, is to keep writing. It comes back to the concept that nothing is ever wasted. The ideas you use in an unsaleable format aren't lost; they're still there, in your head, waiting for a new character to find them and put their own spin on any given situation.
And sometimes, it just feels really damned good to play. :) |
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| Soundtracks and moodiness (the role of music in my writing) |
[Jan. 27th, 2006|08:37 pm] |
Earlier this week, mockingbird39 posted a blog entry on her site Novelist in Progress entitled Mood Music, in which she elaborated on her process of choosing music to form a writing soundtrack for any given project and posed the questions, "How do you find the right music?" and, "How do you know when it's right?"
Anyone who knows me at all knows that music is critical to just about everything in my life, and writing is no exception to that. Every major writing project I've done in the last five years (since coming off "hiatus," so to speak) has had an accompanying soundtrack. Music allows me to place myself in the headspace of whatever universe I'm trying to write about, and if I've done a proper job of constructing the soundtrack, it can often shoot me into that headspace when I can't seem to get there any other way. So yes, I take it very seriously indeed.
How do I find songs? The same way as most people, I would imagine. I'm somewhat of an audiophile so I have ridiculous CD and mp3 collections, as somewhere to begin. Sometimes a song that I loved several years ago will pop its head up as being perfect for character X. I also belong to several different music newsletters/sites/communities where people talk about what's out there and why they like it. Plain old word of mouth, too: as an example, a friend of mine recently posted about a particular song that was excellent to listen to whilst in a rage. Or I'll ask friends who are familiar with my WIP if anything comes to mind, and I have received some incredible suggestions that way. Occasionally I'll do a random search on lyrics or mp3 sites and see what results get spit out. And lastly, I can't recommend eMusic.com highly enough. It's a digital music subscription service that has a flat monthly rate for anywhere from 40 mp3s on up, beginning at a crazy low price, and features any and all independent label artists in a bazillion different genres, from punk to jazz to pop to classical. That place is like crack for a music obsessive, I'm telling you! And if you can't find anything appropriate at the rate of 40+ songs/month, then you need more help than I can give you, lol.
How do I know when the songs are right? This is a bit harder of a question, as might well be expected, and the answer is twofold in that I create two types of playlists. I have mood soundtracks first of all, which are exactly what they sound like: a collection of songs that fit a certain kind of mood. The three that I rely on most are angsty, angry, and sexy, lol. For these, I mostly throw together playlists as I go, picking songs that fit the mood I'm looking for and letting it run, and also changing it relatively often - especially the angsty one, which is usually entitled Aching month/year. Sometimes I create a "formal" mix of a mood, and I recently did a new one of these of sexy songs, entitled Slow Wet Kisses '05 (songlist at end).
My story soundtracks all fall into the "formal mix" category. To use SWK05 as an example, it took me the better part of a month to compile and finalise the mix. The majority of that time involved auditioning songs and then auditioning song sequences, i.e., studying the transition from song to song and evaluating the overall flow of the mix. I usually start by throwing everything that could possibly work into my playlist and eliminating immediately the ones that don't fit the atmosphere I'm looking for. For SWK05, a sexy song like Paula Cole's Feelin' Love from the City of Angels soundtrack didn't fit because it felt too jazzy in a mix that ended up being guitar- and keyboard-focused. Or Puddle of Mudd's Control, which didn't fit because it was just a little too hard-edged for the mix, no matter how I love it otherwise!
Once I whip a playlist into shape, I burn it to CD to audition it as a whole. I'm lucky enough to be able to listen to music at work, so I'll stick Version 1 in the discman and submerge into it. This is when any problematic transitions will bop me on the head, as well as any songs that simply don't fit. I usually have anywhere from 2-5 versions that get as far as being burned to CD. Heh, and my friends are generally happy to take the earlier ones off my hands since they're perfectly good, just not perfect. ;-) Then I have the final product, which I write the name on as neatly as possible instead of the Version X dated scrawl, and will oftentimes play around and output some cover art as well. And yes, I do always make my mixes of appropriate length to fit onto a CD. I like the constraints of having a time limit, plus I don't actually own an mp3 player yet, lol.
Where story soundtracks differ, of course, is that it isn't all about just the sound of the music or the lyrics fitting a theme, but about fitting the characters and the plotline of the story in question as well. And really there's only one way to find what may work: audition, audition, audition. Anything that reminds me of some aspect of the story will get thrown into the master playlist and it's usually a considerably more eclectic collection than a mood playlist, so it takes more effort to distill it to a group of songs that works together musically and also captures what I need it to for the story. But the overall process is essentially the same, and that very eclecticism is why I sometimes end up with more than one CD for a particular story soundtrack.
Interestingly, in exploring my soundtrack composition process, I didn't fail to notice that I do not yet have a soundtrack for my paranormal romance WIP, and that is a situation that I need to rectify very soon. So I will take my own advice for a change, and ask if anyone has any suggestions for unusual/not well-known songs that might fit a story with a heroine who is aristocratic by birth but hates standing on ceremony and a hero who is a halfbreed mage. :D There's some travelling involved and of course lots of sexual tension...
( Slow Wet Kisses '05 (songlist) ) |
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| Birthing characters |
[Jan. 22nd, 2006|07:52 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | characters, names | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  good | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Breathless by Emm Gryner (The Corrs cover) | ] |
One of the reasons that writing is going glacially slowly right now is because nobody is talking to me. Obviously I don't mean on LJ here *waves at Jo*; I mean in my head. The various people that make up my works-in-progress are frustratingly silent, so I'm working on other things at the moment to at least keep a creative hand in while I wrestle with imaginary soldiers.
Character creation is a fascinating and very confusing process. I know there are books and lists out there of the 20 Most Common Traits or whatever, with descriptions of personalities and how every fictional character falls into one of these handy dandy categories, but I don't use any of that. I can't simply construct a character from bits and pieces of personality and make it work. My characters suffer a form of birth like that of Athena, who sprang fully-grown from Zeus's head. Quite frankly, they tend to just show up and yell at me until I start listening. (Current silent treatment notwithstanding.) There are adjustments, to be sure, and most of those come when I learn their names.
The heroine in my fantasy romance WIP has a long, formal-sounding name that shortens to a nickname, and this is appropriate as it corresponds to her social status *and* to her personality (she's not big on the formality). But when I first conceived of her, she had a different name because the seeds for this novel actually came from a dream, and in the dream the heroine was played by a particular actress so shared her looks, etc. when I scribbled out my first notes. And it wasn't until my novel's heroine told me her full, real name that I realised that she's not a blonde, lol. That in fact, her physical appearance is very different from that actress's. Interestingly, neither the hero's name nor his appearance has changed one iota from my initial imaginings. He seems to be content that I was listening properly the first time!
It's always rather amusing to have this type of discussion with someone who doesn't write, because really, it does sound a little like you should be expecting people in white coats to show up soon to escort you to a room with nice, soft walls. :D People living in my head? Talking to me? Well...yes. LOL. And my best work generally is done when those people are screaming so loudly that they're all I can hear until everything they're shouting about has transferred itself to paper via my fingers. Because for me, that's the core of any good writing: interaction between the people. That drives the plot, even when it's a delicate, intricate kind of plot. The human element is everything. |
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| Inaugural post |
[Jan. 14th, 2006|07:17 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | introduction | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | content | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Minnesota Girl by Green Day | ] |
Shiny new journal that looks remarkably sad with no posts in it. I suppose I need to remedy that, eh? Here we go with the very first of what I expect to be many!
To tell you a little more about me than the wee bio in my userinfo conveys, I am indeed a writer who is as yet unpublished. Of course, completing an entire manuscript that I'm actually happy enough with to submit somewhere would be a good place to start on the goal of getting published, and that's one of the roster of things I'm hoping to accomplish in 2006: moving a little - or a lot! - closer to that prize. (Maybe right on top of it? A girl can dream!) I expect that this journal will consist of rants, like possible yelling at my recalcitrant characters ;-), some links to interesting places, and musing about the creative process in general and how it applies to me specifically as well. If I get some particularly lovely rejection letters, I'll be sure to share those as well, lol. And anything else that pops into my unpredictable head that shares the minutest relationship to writing!
So, what do I write? Romance. Genre romance, really; the paranormal and the fantasy subgenres in particular draw me. I like my romances mixed with a little weird, lol. My favourite writer in this area is Jayne Castle, which is Jayne Ann Krentz's paranormal alterego. My own writing tends to be on the more explicit end of things - some of it can definitely be classified as pure erotica - but my style also incorporates a healthy dose of humour and always, always my work is emotion- and character-driven. I'm a firm believer in establishing people that the reader actually cares about before throwing them to the wolves, because otherwise, who's going to want to rush to the rescue?
I have a fantasy romance novel in the works. It's very much in the early stages yet but it's there and I'm working on it, albeit slowly at the moment. I have a literary fiction novel on the backburner for now, too. I'm also interested in potentially pursuing e-publishing, especially for my more erotic pieces. There's a good, growing market for that, and I'd be lying if I claimed I wasn't interested in the paycheque part of writing as well. But I'll keep writing no matter what, because it's what I do. It's who I am, or a large part thereof. I see images or hear songs, listen to other people's conversations, and some part of my brain translates it all into words that want to go somewhere. I'm simply hoping to direct them to a good place. :) |
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