After the Song is Over

Strangled Melody is out in the world and I’m here working on other things. I thought it worthwhile to take a moment to comment on the key things I learned from the project. First the obvious: writing is a discipline that must be practiced daily and that there are no excuses for failure to do the work. Do it or don’t. Either way, it’s on your head.

There are several things that came together for me in this project in ways that I don’t think would have occurred without the hellish deadline. There’s something about landing in the deep end of the pond that lends crystalline clarity to your motivation to learn to tread water.

Organization. I’m not talking about your desk or your pencil holder. A story is like a basket of snakes, a writhing, amorphous mass that only makes sense when you tease it apart. Consider your characters, plots (main and subplots), setting (place or world), and the overall picture. Each of them must stand independently, or they will never hang together. Then consider the timeline – the beast that flogs us all and the glue that holds the entire story together. The clock is ticking all the time, don’t lose track of it.

Fortunately, there are tools that make this easier to visualize. Outlook has a feature called My Calendars that allows you to create discrete calendars, separate from your personal/professional calendar. Fictional timelines play out nicely when scheduled day by day in Outlook and they are accessible at the click of a check box.

People often make lists or outlines, but I find these can be quite limiting when dealing with complex subjects like world-building or juggling multiple suspects and pieces of evidence in a crime. Mindmaps are a great tool for capturing and envisioning such multi-dimensional ruminations.

There are lots of tools out there that are used in business or academia that will work just as well for writers building fictional worlds or journalists collecting and developing stories for any media. Screenwriters seem to have figured this out and they make use of many different tools that speed them toward “The End.” The rest of us could take a lesson from them.

Finally, I internalized the fact that writing is both an art and a business. I’ve known that intellectually for years. After all, I’m a businesswoman. But learning that down to the bones has been a struggle until I slapped postage on that box and sent it off. Just in case I don’t get a positive nod from the judges, I’m working on a promotion and marketing plan for the book. And I’ve got a partner who’s just and committed as I am. One way or another, Strangled Melody is going to be published in 2010.

Just Think Differently.