A Big Bag of Inspiration

My big bag of inspiration (Thanks, Jude).  This has carried over 800 picture books back and 

forth from the library this year.  A dependable bag indeed.  (Image © Lori Gravley)

I had waited until the last minute to write my monthly picture book.   I found one idea, then discovered a  picture book about her had already been published.  I hadn’t finished the research for the book I thought I would write.  I was starting to feel panicked. 

To assuage the sense of writer’s anxiety, I looked at the picture books I had just collected from the library.  A big bag of inspiration.

I sat down, pulled up my Goodreads account (LoriGravley), and immersed myself in this amazing world we picture book writers and readers live in where pictures and stories live together in joy and wonder. 

I read a book about pirates.  I read a book about a pharaoh’s cat.  I read a few books by Dianna Hutts Ashton and Sylvia Long.  I read some other books (46 total for yesterday, though I stopped to write half-way through).

Then I got up to get a cup of coffee, opened a Word document, and wrote a draft.   Doing a quick first read through this morning before I send it out to my new critique group, I could see all the books I read yesterday in the words I had written: an attention to a very specific detail, a conflict inspired by a little snippet in the pirate book, a detail inspired by a period in history in one of the books.  I had to go online and look some things up, so research is in there, too. My trip to Arizona last month is in there, too.  Something I found in Arizona set the story off. 

The book is nothing like the books I read yesterday, except that it’s a picture book.  However, the books I read yesterday showed up in my book in small ways. 

I am almost done with my picture book challenge (956/1000 books read, woot!).  My librarian asked me what I would do when the challenge was over, and my reply was immediate.  Keep reading.  I may not commit to reading 1,000 picture books next year, but I will still read picture books.  Because I love them.  Because I write them. 

Because they inspire me.

Hanging Words in Air

Elizabeth Bishop used to hang her poems up around the house and read them as she passed by in order to get new eyes for revision.  

Robert Lowell wrote a poem for her that describes her practice:

Do

you still hang your words in air, ten years

unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps

or empties for the unimaginable phrase—

unerring muse who makes the casual perfect?

The wonderful find of a huge chalkboard with metal backing on the Yellow Springs garage sale page (thanks, Miracle), led to this adaptation of the practice. I may not have Bishop's talent or patience, but I'm looking forward to finding ways to make "the casual perfect."

Here's to seeing with new eyes.

Remington or the Dangers of Working from Home

When I'm not working at my consulting job, I'm sitting at home (or at the Emporium in Yellow Springs, Ohio), working on the latest novel, poem, blog post, etc.  One day, I looked over at the typewriting sitting on my shelf and thought, "I bet he'd like to head outside."  

Sitting alone all day can lead to anthropomorphizing objects, I'm told. 

Anyway, it was good excuse to head outside. I took my phone with me to record our little journey.  So began my series of Facebook and Instagram posts with Remington. You can check out my social media page for more photos and follow me to see what sort of adventures he finds in the future.

For now, I'm sitting in a hotel, and he's sitting at home waiting for my return so that we can finally take the walk to Clifton Gorge I've been promising him. 

Braids: A Writing and Revision Technique

Heather Seller’s wonderful book, Chapter by Chapter, discusses a technique called braiding. Now that I know the term, I see it everywhere. Even before I had a name for it, I’d been noticing it in books I enjoy. But I hadn’t found a way to keep track of the emotional, physical, psychological, and other sub plots and arcs that ran through my stories. I’d tried several paper models, but they hadn’t been effective in helping me see my novel clearly.

But, with my spreadsheet and a new understanding of braiding in hand, I thought, what if I make a new spreadsheet page to visualize the braids. Voila.

I used the information from my original spreadsheet to look at how the plot lines in Knowingintertwined. I could see when I left one plot for two long. I could see how plot lines and character arcs balanced and played off each other. I could see where there were holes and missing parts and I could make plans to fill them in.

In Knowing, Alex and Sophie have a cat named Ginger. While she isn’t a sub plot in herself, I found that I didn’t always use her well to reveal character and tension, so I gave Ginger her own small column in the Threads spreadsheet.

I’ve wondered if I might skip the plot-tracking step of the first spreadsheet and just make a threads spreadsheet. I might try that for later stories in the series where keeping track of what we know about each character might become less important, but for now, both the plot spreadsheet and the thread spreadsheet help me see my novel clearly so that I can make it an even better read.

Revision: Going Small as a First Step

My actual first step to revision has been to try and fail repeatedly at revision. There's something to be said about trying, failing, and trying again. But I said a lot of it in my last post.

So, here I'll share the one thing that helped moved the revision forward. I single-spaced my manuscript, made the margins .5 all around and shrunk the font to 7 pts.

Viola. A little mini-me manuscript.

I got the idea of shrinking the manuscript from Darcy Pattison over at writetodone.com (the post is here http://writetodone.com/revise-novel-glance/). Thanks to fellow Sunday morning writer Jude Whelley for sending the link.

I didn't follow any of Pattison’s other advice on what to do once the manuscript was shrunk, but shrinking it down was the perfect first step for the others that followed.

I am a whole-to-part learner. I can write a novel one page, one day at a time, with only a vague plan and a bevy of characters, but once my novel was written, I couldn't see it. I tried spreadsheets, notecards, and post-it notes. All those things asked me to look at parts to envision a whole. That didn't work for me. But 7 pt. font did.

Once I had my manuscript down into a manageable pile, everything was visible (so long as I took off my glasses and put my nose right on top of the paper). With my 34-page novel, I could update my spreadsheet more easily. I could track the character and plot arcs, I could make a visual key for where my characters appeared and where they seemed to disappear for no reason.

And, I could carry those 34 pages with me in a medium binder clip with my character quick notes, my plot braid, my novel calendar, and my character's class schedules. It was easier to get my papers out and flip through each chapter to look for continuity problems.

I’ll talk about those other elements later, but for now, I’ll leave you with this step. Feeling stuck? Shrink your novel in order to see it more clearly.

Some things I’m going to try this week before I print Bed of Bones to revise.

1) Find character names and replace them with highlighted character names (a different color for each character). This will allow me to skip the scan and highlight step I took this time around.

2) Search for common locations. In my novel, the Louvre, Hotel St. Pol, the Seine, the King’s Garden, and Rue this and that are important places that it might be helpful to track. I can search these and highlight them in order to see the movement through space better.