deadlines

How to Recognize the Finish Line

November 8, 2018 By Kathryn Craft 7 Comments

A story a dancer once told me: It’s opening night. Six dancers wait in the wings, nerves taut. Their entrance is imminent—the overture has begun and they are counting the music—when the choreographer, heeding an infamous penchant for change, rushes over to them aflame with last-minute inspiration. The dancers do the only self-preserving thing they can do—stick their fingers in their ears and ignore him.

You’d think writing is more set—after a certain point, you are limited to the little black marks on the printed page, right? Ha—that’s what the “delete” key is for! And I’ve seen more than one author pause a public reading to decipher last-minute changes scribbled in the margins.

Truth is, we could tinker forever. But all artists—painters, poets, and novelists alike—eventually have to trust that it’s time to let a project go.

Deadlines and other useful delimiters

This post was pulled from a larger collection of wisdom than I could use, but I was limited by: 1) how much I could cram into a reasonable word limit, and 2) my deadline. But is reaching imposed limits reason enough to consider a piece “finished”?

In some cases, preset parameters can both inform a project’s conception and provide a sense of its completion, says writer and painter Joe Skrapits (Allentown, PA). This is particularly true in one of his specialties, plein-air landscape painting.

“The light is at a certain angle, or of a certain quality, or the shadows are in a certain place, and so you give yourself an hour or two to state what that is,” says Joe. “When the light changes, you don’t keep changing. It puts a limit on your participation of that day, anyway. And sometimes that’s good.”

A novel can’t be written in a few hours, but Skrapits offers a useful metaphor. Creating limits around your work is one way to practice walking away from it. A baby’s nap can give you an hour or two to free write. A contest provides a deadline. NaNoWriMo sets a one-month, 50K word-count goal. Creating limits will bring your finish line into clearer focus.

Perfecting vs. finishing

So how can you be sure you’ve come up with the perfect combination of the 90,000 words in your manuscript?

Of course, you can’t.

You will use the word “finished” many times in the life of your novel (you’ll finish… each draft. Developmental edits. Beta reader edits. Concision edits. Agent edits. Publisher edits. Copy edits.) But beyond the mechanics of writing “The End,” from whence comes your sense of completion?

“A piece is finished when it satisfies the artist’s intention,” Skrapits says, adding that his definition presupposes that the artist has a fairly clear vision of what he or she wants to achieve.

That leads us into the first of many ways to define “finished.”

Philosophical: What were you trying to say, and have you said it? Such a simple question and yet we can forget to ask it. Writing a new synopsis after each draft will help determine if your accumulation of words has indeed fulfilled your intention.

Editorial: Is it as tight as it can possibly be? Readers won’t want to wade through excess verbiage to find your story and publishers won’t want to cut down one more tree than necessary to print your book. Make every word count. [Read more…]

How to Write When Life Sucks

December 2, 2016 By Cathy Yardley

“Writers write.” It’s the action that defines us.

What do you do, then, when you feel like you can’t write?

Maybe something horrible has happened: illness (your own, or someone you care about), financial issues, break-ups. Any number of physical and emotional stressors.

Or it could be the result of a gradual build up. You’ve tried being too strong, for too long, and now the gradual accumulation of life’s indignities has made you brittle as sugar glass.

Looking at the world around you, you feel hopeless. Looking at the page, you feel panic.

Whether it’s topical or gradual, sometimes life feels overwhelming and terrifying.

For some, that is exactly when they bow their heads down and bull through, taking solace in their fictional worlds, living someone else’s life as they compose it on the page. They replenish through the writing itself.

Alas, I am not one of these people.

If you’re not either, then here are some tips and tricks that can help you write when, for whatever reason, life sucks and you’re having a tough time of it. [Read more…]

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The Book Monster: When Writing Gets Hard

October 9, 2016 By Guest

8500504133_d41dbdc2a0_z — By Daniel Parks, Flickr Creative Commons

We’re excited to welcome Kate Moretti as our guest today. Kate is a New York Times bestselling author of women’s fiction and suspense novels. Her newest novel The Vanishing Year (Atria/S&S, September 2016) is available wherever books are sold. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two kids. She’s worked in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years as a scientist, and has been an avid fiction reader her entire life.

I always thought that real writers had this thing nailed. That if I was struggling, it meant that I was a hack, an amateur. But sometimes it feels the more I write, the harder this thing gets, which I think just means I’m learning. The book I handed in was 4 POVs, two colliding timelines and I couldn’t tell if I’d made a mess of it or if the challenge meant that it was the best thing I’d ever done. I was inspired to write about what I came to call my Monster Book because I now know that I’m not alone. Some stories fly out of you, almost writing themselves and others are monsters and both ends of the spectrum are okay. It means nothing about you, as a writer. At least, this is what I tell myself.

Connect with Kate on Facebook and Twitter.

The Book Monster: When Writing Gets Hard

I’ve heard other writers say this: eventually you’ll struggle with a book. The plot will unravel, the characters will elude you, the theme will mishmash until you’re wondering what you were trying to say in the first place.

I just turned in my fourth novel, and I’m so happy to be rid of the Book Monster.

Nothing came easily. Maybe it’s a sign that I wasn’t supposed to write this book. Maybe I should have put it away, stuck it in a drawer, left to gather dust for a few years until all the flaws were clear. But, I was on a deadline and this was the book I used to want to write, back when I wanted to write anything, which honestly felt like eons ago.

There are signs you’re writing a book monster, you know. In some ways, it can vague, kind of Supreme-Court-you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it. You’re one-hundred pages in and what used to feel easy suddenly feels like slog. Is it just the murky middle…Or something more? [Read more…]

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