YA Pitch Contest

There's a YA agent pitch contest going on over at YAtopia. Agent Ammi-Joan Paquette from Erin Murphy Literary Agency is taking two line pitches. You have until March 24, 2011 OR until she's received 150 pitches -- so you better get over there fast!

Plothead

In my previous post, I mentioned that I picked up a WIP I had started this summer and temporarily abandoned to write another manuscript, TWENTY-EIGHT AND A HALF WISHES.

Last week I revisited HUNTED. Frankly, I expected a complete rewrite with the exception of the first chapter. But when I read, I realized some of the scenes just needed tweaking-- cutting things out, changing dialogue, adding things back in. The tone of HUNTED changed, the end point was the same, but instead of taking a Greyhound bus, my characters were taking the Bullet train.

And it's just what it needed.

I also posted I had reached the point of running out of old words to use; I'd either used them all or thrown out the rest.

It was all blank pages before me.

I love me a blank page.

I let my imagination loose and scene after scene tumbled in my head and it's a race for my fingers to get it all down. A burning story is like a new lover-- (pft, like I would know...) --you want to be with them constantly.

Only real life gets in my way.

I have five kids living in the house, four of which seem to want my attention at various points of the day. (What's up with that?) Sometimes even all at once. For different things.

But these characters in my head of are demanding bitches. I stop writing to deal with real life and they're there in my head, playing the loop of the next scene in head. Some days, especially like today, when I'm thick in my story and itching to write but dealing with Halloween costumes and laundry and yet another pair of panties full of poop (my three-year-olds, not my own,) I find myself only partially here and the other part of me lost in my head. My kids ask me a question and it takes three tries to hear them. Or I'll watch them play and realize I'm staring at the wall.

I straddle both worlds and some days I'm more in the land of make-believe than real life. This makes me feel badly for my children, whom I know some days aren't getting the attention they need from me. Yet I'm unsure how to change it other than race through the story in my head and purge it from my system.

Imagination is a blessing and a curse.

Are you a Plothead?

Hi, I'm Denise and I'm a Pantser

I'm gonna confess right up front that's not entirely true. It's a huge debate, a line drawn in the sand. It's like a team rivalry -- are you a MU or a KU fan? (Sorry, I'm from Kansas City, it's a HUGE deal here) I've noticed the same thing with writers. Which are you? A Pantser or a Plotter? And depending on where you fall, you've got an ally or a rival, because one type has trouble understanding how the other functions.

I want to know why we have to choose?

The truth for me is I am both. Don't get me wrong, I could never snowflake and an outline seems way too much like eighth grade English class. *shudder* But I don't sit down at my laptop with one line "It was a dark and stormy night" and expect to get an entire novel out of it.

Sure, it takes one idea to get a novel started, and with me one idea can be a combustible tangent-- the idea gets started in my head and explodes into a story in days. And I suppose I do plot, in my own way.

The flow chart for CHOSEN*

*don't look too closely

I flow chart. This is the flow chart I made for CHOSEN on a white board. I even color coded it, 'cause duh, it looks cool. And honestly, it was a pretty good plot. Only what I hadn't planned on, was once I REALLY let my characters take control, they didn't always follow the flow chart. Somewhere along the top line, where it bends to the next line, Will started getting other ideas. And guess what?

His ideas where better.

Wow.

By the last line of the flow chart, I barely hit on the points listed. Hell, the ending even changed. The day I knew I was writing the end, Will started doing things that didn't follow the plan. I literally shouted at my laptop. "What the f--k, Will?" (Fact: When I write Will, my language deteriorates.) But when I calmed down, I realized that I let him loose and it was what he would actually do in that situation. The result was much better than I planned.

Now I'm writing HUNTED, the sequel to CHOSEN. I had a plan. Instead of writing flow chart, I made a nice four page bullet point list. I even color coded things like action, clues, foreshadowing. I ain't gonna lie. I felt really smart.

Guess what? It didn't work. I sputtered and stalled.

Bottom line is I start writing and the characters don't always follow the plan. They don't get crazy and completely change the story, but we don't always get from Point A to Point B and end at Point C the way I planned it.

For me, writing a story is a lot like a multi weeks/months brain storming session. Ideas feed off one another and get my imagination rolling.

Scene: Tina gets into skirmish with John. I write Tina defending herself (I never know exactly how this goes until I write it) I write that Tina kicks John in the crotch.

My brain: Wow, Tina just kicked John in the crotch. What if she crushed the family jewels and John now holds her responsible and plans revenge.

I hadn't planned this twist. I didn't even know Tina was going to kick John, let alone in the crotch. (I can't wait to see the Google searches for this blog post.) And I may or may not use it, but it's idea I wouldn't have until I wrote the scene.

As I mentioned, I stalled on HUNTED. I had 38,000 words written this summer and knew the last 8-10K were just wrong. The problem was I couldn't figure out why. For a many reasons I won't go into here, I let it sit and moved on to TWENTY-EIGHT AND A HALF WISHES. I pulled it back out this week, and after a recent revision of CHOSEN I figured out the problem.

And with that realization the dam of ideas broke loose.

I've spent the last few days revising what I had previously written on HUNTED, moving scenes around, changing dialogue, adding new scenes and I'm finally at a place where the old words are either used or will be trashed. I have my old color coded four pages of plot points to tell me where to go next but I realize a lot of the old ideas don't work anymore. I know the end, but I have a wide open crevasse to get across from here to there.

It is simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.

As I took my children to buy pumpkins, the scene that happens next came to me. And a few scenes after that. I see a hazy path to the end, the end I planned months ago. But I've grown enough to be flexible to not freak out. I've decided to embrace this foggy unknown and run with it. I'm excited to see what happens to the story during the next few weeks.

I can't wait to look back from the other side. Hopefully.

Theme Song for Rose

When I wrote Chosen, I had songs that related to different chapters and scenes, but with Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, I didn't have the same experience. I'm sure it's partially because it just tumbled out so quickly. Or maybe it's because TEHW is a different kind of book, lighter and quirkier. I listened to a lot of Evans Blue and Death Cab for Cutie while I wrote, but when I edited I discovered Sky Sailing.

The lead singer and creater of Sky Sailing is by Adam Young, the lead singer of Owl City. They sound a lot like Owl City but with less electronic key board and more accoustic guitar. I'd be embarrassed to tell you how many times my iTunes says I've listened to it, but I'll admit it just broke three digits.

Sky Sailing's CD An Airplane Carried Me to Bed is light, sweet and a little bit wistful. Like Rose. A lot like Rose. So I found that the entire CD is a fitting playlist for Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, as weird as that is. But here's what's weirder: Rose has a theme song on the CD. The words aren't necessarily appropriate to her character but the melody itself IS her. Sweet, wistful, yearning. Rose spends a lot of time yearning for something else, something better in her life. I hear this song and to me it is Rose. You can hear the yearning between the chorus and the verse and this sums up Rose's life. But at the end of the song, it's resolved, the yearning breaks and she finds what she's looking for and the beautiful part is it was inside her the whole time. She just had to find it.

Query for Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes

Ah, the dreaded query letter, the nemesis of most writers. The one page that can open a door or slam it shut, so much packed into so few words. With Chosen, for some reason I had a hard time boiling my book's plot down into few paragraphs. With Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, I had a hard time getting the voice, because with this book, the voice is EVERYTHING.

I struggled and wrote and rewrote and then I remembered hearing a piece of advice to write the query in character and then switch to third person.

(Never, and I mean NEVER send your query as your character in first person. NEVER. EVER. I hope I got my point across.)

Okay.

So I wrote my query letter as Rose, not hard since I wrote the book in first person anyway. And that right there was the key for me to turn it around. I captured Rose's voice and then switched all my I's and me's to Rose and she's. The result is what you see below:

--------------------------------------

Dear Superstar Agent:

For Rose Gardner, working at the DMV on a Friday afternoon is bad enough even before she sees a vision of herself dead. Rose is used to seeing visions. She sees plenty of ‘em like Mr. Althouse’s toilet overflowing, but she never saw one of herself before, especially dead. So when Momma winds up murdered on her sofa instead, two things are certain: There ain’t enough hydrogen peroxide in the state of Arkansas to get out of that stain and Rose is the prime suspect. After twenty-four years of just accepting things, Rose shouts to Momma hours earlier to get her own damn pies out of the oven, in front of the neighbors, no less.

While Rose waits to go from the prison of living with her overbearing mother to the county jail the Henryetta’s police are eager to throw her into, she decides she’s got a lot of living left to do. She makes a list on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt of twenty-eight things she wants to accomplish before she gets locked away. Rose is well on her way with the help of her next door neighbor Joe, who has no trouble teaching Rose the rules of drinking but stubbornly refuses to help her with item number fifteen: do more with a man. Joe’s new to town, but it doesn’t take a vision for Rose to realize he’s got as many secrets as a Sunday school teacher makin’ moonshine in his back shed.

Turns out there’s more to worry about than Joe and the Henryetta Police Department. Rose’s house is broken into, a bartender she just met is murdered and suddenly dying a virgin in the Fenton County jail isn’t her biggest worry after all. Somebody thinks Rose has something they want, and they’ll do anything to get it.

TWENTY-EIGHT AND A HALF WISHES is a mystery complete at 100,000 words. It is a standalone novel with the potential for sequels. Thank you for your consideration.

Denise Grover Swank

An Unexpected Side Effect of Writing

The Blessing (and the Curse) of the Alpha Reader

Hi, I'm Denise and I use alpha readers.

Now some of you are saying "What? What is she talking about? WTF is an alpha reader?" and others are now looking down your nose with contempt. No real writer uses alpha readers.

And a few of you, some who are too ashamed to admit it, are nodding your head and whispering "I do too."

What is an alpha reader?

An alpha reader is a person who reads your book while it's in first draft.

Okay, I'm going to let a few of you get yourselves back together before I continue on, because some of you would rather face a firing squad than show people your first draft. And guess what? That's okay.

Just like some people use detailed outlines, snowflake methods, or whatever else people use to intricately plot out their books, others just "pants" it and go. I fall somewhere in the middle, which if I had to guess, I think most writers do too. If someone tried to force me to use an an outline you would find me laying on the floor next to my computer throwing a temper tantrum in frustration. The rigidness of an outline is like a cork to my creativity. It forces it into a one way trickle and my imagination doesn't work that way. Some of my best writing, both technique and plot, comes from knowing where the scene starts and a "hope" of where it ends. I set my characters in their places and let them go.

If you told an outliner to do this, they'd probably break out into a spontaneous case of Ebola.

So now you're saying, "Yeah, that's awesome Denise, but I thought this was about alpha readers." And you would be so right.

It's widely accepted that people write in different ways (see above) so why is it so hard to accept that writers have readers at different stages?

I use alpha readers, in the very beginning to see what they think. Do they like the characters? Do they like the set up? Basically, it's to give me positive (or negative) reinforcement. Nothing spurs you on like someone telling you that they love what you just wrote.

Towards the middle, the alpha reader needs to be flexible and unafraid to raise concerns. Its not unusual for me to send out chapters to alpha readers with notes like:*

• Oh yeah, I'm introducing a new character named Jeb three chapters back when the velociraptor jumps out of the jungle, but not until I do revisions. He's a hunter with some magical skills and a mysterious past. So when you see Jeb mentioned, you'll know it's him.

• You know how that vampire kicked Jessica's ass? Well, I'm changing it so that Marcus rushes in and saves her. But I'll fix that in revisions.

• This whole subplot with Marlena trying to infiltrate the werewolf lair isn't working out so well, I'm going to take it out in revisions, so I won't mention it in the rest of the book.

* Actual plot notes not used. Feel free to borrow.

Notice a trend here? I'm often throwing changes at my readers and telling them to deal with it. (And also putting it off until revisions.) Your alpha reader needs to be able to handle this kind of "stress."

Your alpha reader needs to be honest, because if they aren't honest, they are worthless to you. (Yes, that deserved italics AND bold and possibly repeating.)

**If your alpha readers aren't honest they are WORTHLESS.**

There, I feel better.

In Chosen, I had Will figuring out details sooner than I wanted but I didn't want him to look stupid; he was a smart guy, so I wrote him figuring out clues. But my alpha reader Brandy pointed out that it was too big a leap for him, she didn't see it happening. Her comment saved me some MAJOR rewrites because she was right. It was too big of a leap for him. When I am writing first draft, I usually have trouble turning the story off in my head. It's always there. (Which explains the daze you will often find me in.) I am living this story 24/7 and it's all so obvious to me. It helps to get that outside opinion.

In Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, I have a plot and two subplots. I was constantly asking my alpha readers if they felt something was lacking, if things were working. Did something need to appear sooner?

At the end, I was asking things like Is this too big an info dump? Do you have enough information about fill in the blank? Was the end too long? Too short? Satisfying? Boring?

I finished Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes on a Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday morning I sent them a long email with concerns I had, my thoughts about those concerns and asked for their input. When I start editing in a few weeks, I'll be several steps ahead of the game.

Now you're thinking, "Wow! Who wouldn't want an alpha reader?"

Here's where I explain the curse. Your readers are sometimes reading utter crap. This weekend I sent a chapter with the header "the last half of this chapter isn't working" I knew it, they knew it, some had suggestions about what wasn't working, Kristi simply said "I wasn't feeling it." Even though it's tough to get criticism, it's also good to get confirmation that it really isn't working.

This weekend I wrote dialogue explaining information about the mystery. I struggled with what to expose, if it was enough or too soon. I wrote and rewrote, so by the end I mostly had straight dialogue, very few tags. Why put those tags in if I was changing it five minutes later? My alpha readers end up reading this "script," without the tags, because I wanted my alpha readers opinions: Did this work? You are sometimes sending sub par writing just to make sure you are getting the plot.

Which brings me to the main reason I use alpha readers. I tell my alphas that there will be times my writing SUCKS, ignore that, as hard as it is to send. And some days it's HARD. The only thing that let's me press send is knowing that they know I am capable of writing; they're just not seeing it in this email. Their job is to look at story, plot and characters. And to tell me that they love it.

But only if they mean it.

Do YOU use alpha readers? Had you ever heard of them before?