Finding the Writing Magic

Something struck me this morning. Sipping on coffee and thinking about gearing up to write, I suddenly asked myself why it was so easy to write backstory and have everything fall into place. I mean, the first draft can be an agonizing process, slow, torturous, feeling like you're walking through quicksand that's halfway up your thighs. And that's on a halfway decent day. Why doesn't it work that way with backstory?

Why is freeing yourself from self-imposed shackles so hard? And how do you cut them off?

Nora Roberts said once (in some interview I read somewhere) that you just have to vomit out the first draft, and then fix it up later. When I think about that, I find it much easier to work. When I lose sight of that direction, everything becomes murky and confused. Nora's advice gets me through Nano every year. But I sure have problems remembering it from day to day.

What do you use to motivate yourself on days when the vision eludes you?

BTW, I still plan on blogging during our down time between sessions, so feel free to pop on by.

Happy creating!

Lara

Losing Werewolf Bits

I'm continuing to get better. So much so that I'm feeling guilty about not hitting the gym quite yet. My day will come.

Something really crappy happened on Wednesday (which is probably why I forgot my semi-weekly post!). I wrote a relatively long bit of material on werewolf genetics. I went through about 5 or 6 pages, deciding recessives, dominants, reproductive cycles, hormones, pheremones - the whole thing. I loved it. Then I lost it.

I checked my computer. I checked my house. I even checked with my writer friend Olivia, because we'd gotten together earlier in the week. Nothing. It vanished. Poof. Into thin air. I came to the painful but necessary decision to rewrite it. And, boy, am I glad I did!

In the process of pulling it all back together, I discovered an incongruity. If werewolves and shifters reproductive systems only kick into gear when they meet their perfect genetic match, they would only reproduce with other weres or shifters. Anything else would be less than ideal, and would not be in keeping with species survival. So...it turns out there's a combination of genes that need to be inherited for the shifting or the were ability to be actually expressed. And that's better, because...

Our twin werewolves each "recognize" a person who is not a shifter, or not pack. However, both of these mundanes are of Italian descent. It turns out they each carry a few genes from that original Etruscan werewolf pack. Potential problem solved. Whew!

Now, how to solve the problem of writing what appears right now to be pure dreck...? Today it all seems like it's blowing chunks. I mean, do my readers really need to know what Dawar's compound looks like? I'm bored writing it, so I can only imagine people would be bored reading it.

But, I will take La Nora's advice. In a nutshell, it's this, paraphrased: vomit it out and get it on paper. You can always fix it later. But you can't edit a blank page. I'm going to try and make that my mantra. And, while I'm sitting here in the bookstore waiting for one of my students, I'm going to yank out a blank page and keep going.

(No, I'm still not caught up....)