I am not good at relaxing and it stresses me out.

I turned in the manuscript for STAY on Wednesday. It was the second round of revisions. There may be more changes, but this is probably the last round of major changes. Everyone I've talked with since has encouraged me to relax, take some time off, and/or chill out.

The problem is that I can't. Firstly, while working on my manuscript, I left a lot of things undone. There's a small forest growing in gutters. The weed situation in my garden is completely and totally out of control. Bills must be paid. Laundry done. Dog hair vacuumed. That kind of stuff.

And then there's the exciting stuff. Starting a new book, or going back to one of the projects I'd been working on before we sold STAY. Author photos. A website. Some cool stuff that's going to happen with Allie's Answers next week. A burning desire to start playing guitar again. My new workout routine (hello, biceps!).

Plus, I want to get rid of all the stuff we're not using so it's easier to keep the house clean when I do get back to work. And I'm thinking about removing the drop ceiling in the basement because the tiles are old and dirty and buying new tiles seems wasteful. And can I actually redo a bathroom by myself? I don't know. Should I try?

When I think about spending a week or two "relaxing," I start getting tense. I start thinking about all the projects that need to be tackled and what will will be waiting for me when I'm done relaxing. But when I think about getting things done, moving forward, heading toward what's next, I am joyous, excited, and raring to go.

I will, however, take a little time to read a few chapters of The Embers, and enjoy the fancy root beer a dear friend left on my doorstep last night.

"I went to bed with gum in my mouth..."

Do you remember that book?

I didn't wake up with gum in my hair yesterday, but I wasn't having the greatest of days. I woke up feeling kind of eh all over, and then a bunch of stupid little things went wrong. Everything was getting to me and I was feeling like I was on the verge of tears even though I couldn't pinpoint any one single thing that was really worth crying about.

When I was out running errands in the morning, I decided, as an attempt to cheer myself up, I'd buy a six pack of fancy root beer, even though it was way more expensive than what I would usually pay for junk food. It seemed like the perfect, motivating, afternoon treat.

After lunch, I sat down to work and got stuck and frustrated and decided it was time for a break and that nice big icy glass of root beer. A simple little indulgence to pull me through the day. But there are two problems with basing your sanity in little rewards.

1. The little rewards usually don't work as fully as you'd like
2. Sometimes you forget the root beer on the bottom rack of the effing grocery cart and don't realize it until you're at your absolute wits end and then you get mad at yourself for crying over lost root beer, because it's utterly ridiculous to cry over root beer, even though it isn't really about the root beer, is it? (Anyone who talked to me yesterday is probably like, "Oh my god! Will she shut eff up about the effing root beer?" and they'd be totally justified in doing so.)

But, after a good phone chat with an amazing person, and applying Corinne's Post-It technique (we have a very interesting kitchen wall art now) to my problem, I got through my work confusion and climbed back into bed to watch Bridget Jones until it was time for writing group.

On the way to writing group, it rained so hard I could barely see the road, and then I stepped in a huge puddle as soon as I got out of my car. But, I had a wonderful time with wonderful ladies who are so amazingly considerate that they make sure they always bring wheat-free snacks for me (seriously, how sweet is that?), and got to hear some fantastic work.

When I got home, J met me out in the garage. He had a weird look on his face.
"What?" I asked.
"Um. . ." he was kind of smiling.
"Yes?" I asked, giggling nervously, assuming it had something to do with one of the members of our multi-pet household pooping in an inappropriate place.
"Where's the mop?"

And then I walked in the kitchen and saw a brand new Great Lake right there on the floor, complete with a tiny island made from the 8 paper towels J had used in a weak attempt to clean it up.

We have a dishwasher that hooks up to the sink instead of a built in. J needed to use the sink, so he paused the wash cycle and unhooked it. Then he forgot about it and walked away. But the pause feature pauses for half an hour and then turns back on automatically. From the other room, he suddenly heard water splashing and realized that the washer had started up and was now draining water directly onto the floor.

After the day I had, I fully expected to start crying. I fully expected to get that, "Oh, and now this," feeling and just loose it completely. But all I could do was laugh. Because it's funny. Because I couldn't stop picturing what J's face must have looked like when he realized what he'd done. Because our kitchen floor was disgusting anyway, and now it's much cleaner. Because I love spending time with J, even if it's spent mopping up dirty dishwasher water with old towels.
Because good friends are always going to be a much better fix than root beer. And it's not like anyone made me eat lima beans.

Non-writing

There's a part of my writing process that involves not writing. And not only is it not writing, but it's not doing much of anything productive at all. It's not doing dishes and not doing laundry and not vacuuming. It's not paying bills and not mowing the lawn and not going grocery shopping. It is basically sitting on my butt and reading, or watching movies, or playing Scramble on my phone until my thumb starts to hurt.

This, for me, is the hardest part of writing, because even though I know I need it, I have a really hard time justifying it to myself. I need downtime to be productive. I need to clear my head and give things time to percolate. I've come to recognize this as a part of my process. But I still feel guilty when J comes home after a long day of work, to do more work, and I'm like, "Sorry there's a mess in the kitchen, and we have no food, but I had to watch Henry decapitate people for two hours today and there just wasn't time." Thankfully, J is incredibly understanding and supportive. When I'm done with this round of rewrites, I'm totally going to start buying food again, so he doesn't waste away to nothing.

I guess, no matter what we do for work, everyone is entitled to their downtime, right? No one can be productive 24/7, and if we don't refresh, we can't keep going. What do you do for downtime? Do you have a guilt-complex about chilling out, or is it just me?

Writing exercises

When commenting on the last post, Dingo said:

"Thanks for sharing this process. It's really eye opening. So, tell us, where do you get your writing exercises? Do you still do them? How do you know if what you've written is any good?"

I got a lot of the writing exercises I use through taking creative writing classes both in college and after college. There are tons of books and websites dedicated to writing prompts and ideas to give your brain a jump start.

I don't use writing exercises in a formal way as much as I used to. I use writing exercises primarily to develop characters, and right now, I have several characters I've developed that I want to work with once my rewrites are done. I do, however, allow myself to free-write things about my characters that aren't necessarily relevant to the story I'm telling. These little detours often get edited out later, but writing them is very helpful.

I was a theatre major when I was at Ithaca. When we did scenes in class, we were encouraged to know the back story of the characters we were playing. I had a teacher who would ask us things like, "What's your character's favorite meal?" or "What was her first day of first grade like? Did the other kids like her? Did she have a pretty new dress, or did she wear badly patched hand-me-downs?" These weren't questions that related to the scene at hand. And they didn't have answers that could be found anywhere in the script. We had to decide these things ourselves, using the other clues we had about the character to create stories for them that were consistent with who they appeared to be.

As habit, I still make it my business to know these kinds of things about the characters I'm working with, even though now I work with characters in a very different way. Sometimes, if I'm really stuck, I write these stories down. I'll make a list of favorites, or a 100 Things type of list of random facts about my characters. Other times, it's just about thinking about them. In the car, waiting at the stoplight, I'll play with the radio until I find a station my character would stop on, instead of the one I would choose. Listening to music can shake up all sorts of ideas. Why does a particular song mean something to your character? Was it the song they listened to over and over during a painful breakup? Was it playing the first time they ever got asked to slow dance? It doesn't have to ever end up in your story, but the more you know about your character, the more you'll feel confident in making decisions for them.

If you're looking for a simple writing exercise, use the Explore section of Flickr to find an image that attracts you. Then write about it. What happened 5 minutes before the picture was taken? Are the emotions in the picture genuine or forced? Is someone pretending to be happy when they aren't? If the photo is just a location and there aren't any people in it, who would inhabit that space? Do they fit in or stick out like a sore thumb?

Or hit shuffle on your iPod, pick a line from the first song you hit, and use it as the first line of your writing exercise. Set a timer for five minutes, and just write. Don't edit yourself. Don't worry if it's stupid of it doesn't make sense. You're not writing a story. It's just an exercise. Just write.

If there's even the tiniest little glimmer of something you like in one of your writing exercises, work with it. Ask yourself more questions and see where the answers take you.

How do I know if it's any good? Well, for starters, I read everything I write out loud to myself. It's a great way of catching bad dialogue, sticky sentences, and to put yourself in the position of being a reader. I also meet with a writing group regularly. It's important to find people who will give you honest and constructive feedback. And now, I'm lucky enough to have an agent and an editor who are both wonderful with giving constructive feedback and sharing their ideas. There's also something to be said for that gut feeling. Trust it.

"Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear."

You get so many points if you know what movie that line comes from. At Ithaca, when Lady and I got really stressed out and needed to decompress, we'd to run to Wegmans and buy a box of popsicles, the red, white & blue kind that look like rocket. Then we'd sit in my dorm room and watch that movie over and over again and eat all the popsicles, because it's not like anyone ever kept anything frozen in the little teeny tiny freezer section of a college fridge. After half a box of popsicles and two to three rounds of reciting the lines along with the movie, we'd be ready to conquer the world again.

That story is, in some ways, a major digression from what I want to tell you. I want to tell you how Van, my main character, came into existence. In some ways, she did just appear.

When I went back to school, I took an advanced fiction class with the brilliant Sarah Freligh. She gave us a writing exercise. It was a conceit. She gave us a handout. We had to take a word from column A and another word from column B and put them together to make a sentence. I chose randomly. Separation and battle were my words. "Separation is a battle" was my sentence.

Then we had to scribble down a paragraph or two, putting our sentence into dialogue in a scene of our choosing. I wrote this god-awful, melodramatic, piece of crap about a man who's fiance was breaking up with him. They were standing in a field and her hair was blowing and she was giving him the ring back and she said something awful like, "Separation is a battle. It's a battle no one can win. We fight to hold on, but it's searing and hot and we reach our threshold and we have to let go." It was the kind of dreck that you write and then you pray you don't die before you get a chance to destroy it or write something better to redeem yourself. I'm not being humble or anything. It was that bad.

Later in the semester, Sarah had us take an old exercise and rewrite it three different ways, changing something major like tense, or setting, or point of view. I chose the Separation exercise, because it was so bad that I figured I'd have a lot of room for improvement. By my third rewrite, I had Van. She was the fiance. She was a smart ass, but she had a lot of heart. There was something about her that made me want to know more.

I wrote a fifty page story about Van running into Starbucks to tell her best friend, Janie, how she just broke up with her fiance. She was heartbroken, but she was trying to be tough and witty about it. Van had some fantastic lines. Her relationship with Janie was really complicated. I worked on the story for a month and then sent it in to Zoetrope: All-Story.

It was my first submission ever (and I was so overly ambitious in my choice of where to send it, that it's embarrassing). I got a personalized rejection. They liked the story, but the dialogue was weird. It wasn't for them, but I should keep trying, because there was something there. I didn't keep trying. I shoved the story in my file cabinet. I celebrated getting a personal rejection, but I was busy writing a novel. A painful, SERIOUS, heartbreaking novel that was so literary no one could even understand what was happening, not even me - it was just that DEEP. But, I hated working on it. It was like pulling teeth to get myself to sit in that chair and type. And it wasn't good, because (and I know this is horribly cheesy) I wasn't being true to myself.

After graduation, I tried to freelance, but I couldn't make enough to pay my health insurance. I met J. I got a job. I got promoted. I got promoted again. We bought a house. We got married. I worked more hours than any human being should ever work (you know the epsiode of Friends where Phoebe is a stockbroker? That was me). Some other things happened (but that's another story for another time). I didn't write, and I didn't feel like me anymore.

I changed jobs. This one was just as soul-sucking and horrible as the last one, but Sarah asked me to join a new writing group she was starting, and it made me feel a little more optimistic about everything. J encouraged me to do it.

I brought that story of Van and Janie in Starbucks. There was a line in it where Van says, sarcastically, "I am winning battles all over the place today," as she tears the head off the Starbucks lady on her napkin. I felt like I needed to win a battle. I decided I'd fix the dialogue in that story and send it out again and it would get published and I'd feel like a writer. Instead, I accidentally wrote a novel.

I kept wondering what happened before that scene in Starbucks. What was really going on with Van and Janie? Van's fiance wasn't relevant. He had to go. Van and Janie, and Janie's fiance, Peter - they were interesting. So I wrote about them.

We got Argo. I got stuck. I realized Van needed a dog too. One day, when I was raking leaves in the back yard, everything else fell into place in my head. Of the original fifty pages, there's about a page and a half that made it into the novel. No one ever goes to Starbucks, and I've deleted way more than I've kept. The story isn't at all the same, and Van has evolved so much, but I would never have gotten here without spending time with Van and Janie in Starbucks.

There's a part of writing that is actual work, and then there's a part of writing that's just letting things happen - letting your brain do what it wants to do while the rest of your body is just being, or doing yard work, or taking a shower, or going for a run. That's why writing exercises work. You have a set time and a set task and it gives you permission to stop thinking so you can actually create something.

So, here's my advice for developing characters:

1. Writing exercises work. Do them, even if you think they're silly.
2. Delete fearlessly and don't be afraid to make major changes. (I keep copies of each version so I can go back if I need to. It makes it easier to hit the delete key, but I almost never go back to salvage anything.)
3. Don't write what you think you should be writing. Write what you want to write. Fall in love with your characters, and if you can't, create new characters. If you don't love them, nobody else will.
4. Ask yourself what's interesting about your characters. What do you want to know about them? The answers might give you a lead on where to take them. Ask yourself questions about them that may not even seem relevant to the story. Allow yourself to write their back stories, even if you don't think you'll ever use that material. It will give you a better understanding of who they are.
5. If it's not working, don't force it. Take a break. Watch a movie. Go for a walk. Rake leaves. Let yourself daydream. Not all writing happens while sitting at a computer.
6. Popsicles are very important, as are best friends, supportive husbands, and writing groups (not necessarily in that order).

A few weeks ago, I was really and truly stuck. I sat down with a popsicle (just one, and it was the kind made with real fruit and no food coloring, because I am older now and concerned about things like artificial ingredients and too many calories) and watched that movie again - the one Lady and I used to watch ad nauseum. I gave my brain a break, and when the movie was over, I was ready to make things appear again.

Um. . .

So, you know how yesterday I said that CALIFORNICATION was excellent? Well, the first six episodes were. There were subtle complextities in the characters and their relationships. The story lines were interesting, moving, and funny. The second six? Total nosedive. It all just became gratuitous. And I'm not even talking about the nudity or the obscenities. I'm talking about the stiff scenes, overly "clever" and smarmy lines, and the forced storyline. When we got to the end, we thought maybe the show had gotten canceled and they were trying way too hard to tie up all the story lines. But there are two more seasons to be saved on Netflix, so there's no excuse for that horribly cheesy ending, punctuated with a freeze-frame shot like it was an 80's Brat Pack movie.

Also, I can't take Bill seriously. He's Bus Driver Stu Benedict, from the greatest kids TV show ever made, and he always will be.

I am disappointed.

ANYBODY OUT THERE, however, just keeps getting more awesome, and threatens to infringe on my ability to be productive. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Tweaking

I know you haven't heard from me all that much lately. It's because I'm back in the rewrite process. The last round was pretty significant. This round is more about tweaking. A little more here, a little less there, some technical things, a few reworded sentences. But it's still hard to dive back in.

I think the editing process requires a lot more attention than the writing process. For me, writing is something that happens in conjunction with everything else I do - I'm driving to the grocery store and I think about my main character - I'm doing yard work and suddenly I know the back story of one of my secondary characters. Writing is a freeing process that's about getting my ideas down. Editing is about getting my ass in the chair. It's about drowning out everything else that's calling to me (and trust me, even laundry can start to look appealing when the daunting task of rewrites is at hand) and just sitting there and putting myself in my book and problem solving.

I enjoy the process, but it feels heavier. It requires me to keep 90,000 plus words in my head. Can I describe his eyes that way, or did I use those words to describe them already back on page 136? If I condense these two chapters into one, how do I get my main character from point A to point B? It's a lot different from that unplanned road trip, throw some snacks in the car, make sure you have money for tolls, see where you end up, kind of feeling that goes along with writing a first draft.

If I can get in a good 3-4 hours of rewrite work in a day, I'm thrilled (and mentally exhausted). And then all I want to do is read or watch TV - (currently ANYBODY OUT THERE and CALIFORNICATION - both are excellent).

And as much as a part of me wishes I could just fast-forward to it all being done, another part of me is clinging to every second I can get with Van (my main character). Because, the work will get done, and then Van and I are going to go our separate ways for awhile. If you're not a writer, this is going to sound crazy, but I'm going to miss Van so much that the idea of it makes me a little weepy. She may just be a figment of my imagination, but she's still one of my favorite people.