What’s Working: Licking the Wounds

Just as a tree's wounds get separated from the body of the tree and protected by thickened bark, so too do the wounds your character has get protected as they grow.  Part of your job as a writer is to take your characters on a process of healing (or not) their wounds so they can either move forward, self-destruct, or continue acting in ways that the reader will find compelling. Image copyright Lori Gravley. 

If you’ve spent any time in therapy, you know that most of us who’ve made it past toddlerhood have survived mostly intact, but with some emotional scars that show up at inopportune times: a fight with your partner, your child’s bad decisions, a work project that frustrates you, a driver ahead of you on a two-lane road.  

These scars become wounds, sensitivities close to the surface or deeply hidden, that become hidden drivers of our behavior.  

A character arc is generally the path the character takes to recognize and resolve the wounds that childhood, past relationships, and the background you’ve given the character have created for that character.  A character in a romance, for example, may start the novel unable to trust someone in a relationship. The character meets someone who makes them want to try but then your character’s past or future goals get in the way of being able to commit to a relationship, even if the character wants to.  Through a series of plot developments and pressure from the world of your novel and other characters, your character has to face her wounds so that she can end up happy at the end of the novel.  

I’ve just finished Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, and though it is Book 5 in the series, Mercy Thompson is still working on the wounds that make it hard for her to feel completely connected to an individual or completely connected to a community.  

Personal Pressure: The beginning of the novel finds Mercy choosing not to share her concerns about her former love and current roommate/friend’s state as a werewolf whose wolf is taking over.  

Community Pressure: She’s in a relationship with the pack Alpha, and their relationship continues to be strained by members of the pack who don’t trust/like Mercy since she’s a coyote shifter and not a werewolf.  

Both of these pressures are activating her deepest wound, the belief that she doesn’t belong and that if people love her they will eventually be destroyed because of that love.  

Towards the climax of the novel, this wound is actually given a visual metaphor as a rope that has been frayed, cut, and broken and has been inexpertly mended. 

During the denouement/atonement of the novel, this same connection is seen as a beautiful, shimmering, solid golden rope with no evidence of previous damage.  

The steps both Mercy and her community take heal Mercy’s wounds, heal her community as well (at-one-ment as Joseph Campbell calls it). 

I’m skipping over some important plot points here as I don’t want to spoil this delightful read for you, but hopefully, you get the message.  Your character’s past has given him or her disordered ways of living in the world and interacting with others.  Your characters don’t need therapists to heal their wounds though, they have you.  

You can find a lot more information on exploring your character’s wounds at K.M. Weiland’s Site: Helping Writers Become Authors and in her book Creating Character Arcs.

Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s book, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, is another helpful reference.  

If you get stuck moving your story forward, think about what you need to do to move your character forward and it might give you some story momentum to speed you into Week 2 of NaNoWriMo.  

A Look at My NaNoWriMo Writing Sessions

It's nice to play with words for a warm-up before you settle into your novel writing. Image copyright Lori Gravley

Generally, I write 1,000 words an hour.  That means that most NaNo sessions for me are roughly two hours unless I’m trying to replace the ceiling in my kitchen.

Still, two hours is a good chunk out of a busy day, so I try to optimize my time.  Often my writing sessions take place right after a meal.  If I’m at a write-in, I eat and get to work. If I’m at home, I’ll have some fruit and tea and sit down to write. I write better when I’m not hungry. 

Once I have sated the rumbly in my tumbly, I settle in and open my document.  

I’ll often write some sort of warm-up, like this one, and though I’m mostly a traditional NaNo writer, I do write all my words for November, even blog posts, in a single document.  So I open up my November document and either move to the last day’s writing on my novel or to the end of the document where I right reflections on the process, blog posts, and questions to answer in my manuscript later. 

Some days, I’ll write a poem or type up notes for a poem. I’ve been known to warm up with a picture book draft.  So long as it’s writing meant for an audience (not business writing, but fiction or non-fiction related to writing.  It goes in my November document and gets counted in my word count. 

It often won’t be a part of what I count at the end of the month for NaNo words, but it helps me feel like I’m moving forward even through the messy middle or, this year, in the muddled beginning.  

Once I’m warmed up, I scroll back up to my draft and read the last 1,000 words or so.  When life is busy and frenetic, as it is right now with our kitchen renovation, my writing happens in a sort of fugue state.  I don’t always remember exactly what I wrote the day before, so re-reading reminds me of my world and my concerns. 

And, most of the time, once I’ve read those words, I’m ready to write.  Of course, that is aided by the fact that I never end at the end of something.  I end my words for the day in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of drama, in the middle of some action so that the next thing I write will be clear the next day.  

Then I write.  I finish the previous scene and start a new one. I take a look at my scene cards and my notes about the character arc.  I put myself in the setting and wander around in my imagination to see what comes up. 

Sometimes, I’ll make a deal with myself that I can’t get up from my chair, not for anything, until I’ve written a thousand words or the day’s words.  

Some days, I don’t reach my target, actually, every day since the start I’ve missed my target number of words, but at this point, I’m still writing every day and a few 5,000 word days will get my caught up to the desired NaNo total. 

Okay, eat something, get a cup of tea, visit the necessary room, and get those words done. 

What’s Working: Beat It

 

Beat cards based on Romancing the Beat. Image copyright Lori Gravley.

Okay, so I’m back to working on my original NaNo project.  I like the characters, I love their voices, and I’m interested in seeing where they’ll take me. My Wild Things revision will have to wait until December or at least until I've replaced the ceiling in the kitchen. 

The thing is, I did not plan this novel out and pantsing doesn’t work for me.  When I write by the seat of my pants, the novel seems too much of a mess to even consider revising.  

But even though I still don’t have a plan, I’m not really pantsing.  For revisions, I’ve created several decks of index cards to help guide me through character arcs and beats. Using the work of a number of authors who discuss beats, I’ve got cards that I link to my plot points.  I have another set of cards that look at character arc. 

For this novel, so far, I’ve been working through my romance beats. Using my beat cards to hit the main plot beats.  I write a beat and then I let it take me along for a few thousand words, and then I look at the next beat card.  

It’s working so far.  If you’ve never heard of beats, you might check out the screenwriting book, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. It’s one of the first books where a screenwriter shared tips for creating scripts that hit all the high points of movie making. Writers like C.S. Lakin (12 Key Pillars) and Jessica Brody (Save the Cat Writes a Novel) have taken the screenwriting beats and adapted them to fiction.  Gwen Hayes (Romancing the Beat) has taken the basic beats and applied them to romance.  

If you are a pantser and want to bring a little bit of structure to your writing or if you're a pantser and you're feeling stuck, you might check out beats.  You'll find a simplified discussion over at Storyfix.com.

Today, I start on my Young Adult Romance Beat #4, No Way #1.  My notes about this beat say

• ·     H1 (the female main character) explains out loud or internally why she will not fall in love, not now, not ever but especially with H2 (the love interest).
• ·     They both protest too much.  

So, H1’s POV scene has her committing to her current path that doesn’t include love.  Often the love interest POV scene (if you have dual POVs) will include a recognition that H1is the girl (or guy) for him (or her).  But it will also show the reader how this character’s wounds and H1s wounds are going to cause problems for their relationship as it progresses. 

If you don’t know what I mean by wounds, stay tuned. I’ll talk about wounds a little later. 

I hope your words are flowing whether they are flowing from you like a river or being directed by you in some way by your planning. The joy of writing, especially at this point in your story, is often discovering things about your character you didn’t really expect.  

Have fun. Take joy. Write when you can. Progress, not perfection.