Titling a novel (a love story)
I love good titles and I work hard at coming up with them. But I had a lot of trouble with the title for Matchbox Girls.
I think a good title needs to both sum up a central element of the story and, if possible, provide additional insight into the whole story. It’s the capstone of the project: what is first seen and often last applied. At least half of my projects have only working title until more than halfway through the first draft, until I can gather up everything I want the title to convey and analyze it and dig through dictionaries and thesauri.
The first title I remember for Matchbox Girls was Under Bridges. I was pretty sure that it was just a working title; I knew conceptually what I was referring to, but it was a stretch and mostly made me think of trolls instead of celestial entities. When I finally sat down to brainstorm, I’d decided I wanted the title of the book to focus attention on the relationship between Marley and the twins. And I wanted a reference to something small, and I wanted a reference to fire. So I made a list of various words and combined them into titles.
(Oh, and I wanted something that could set up a scheme that could apply to a whole series of books.)
And Matchbox Girls just came to me. I loved it immediately. But I wouldn’t let myself have it. “It sounds too much like a totally unrelated Hans Christian Anderson story,” I told myself, and I settled rather glumly on Sparksister.
But secretly, my brain kept whispering Matchbox Girls, Matchbox Girls. I’d Google the term late at night to see if anybody else had used it (not really), or how often it led to a HCA story (practically never). I’d argue with myself about all the reasons it was perfect (which I won’t inflict on you). I asked my housemates about it. Then I asked them again. I told my friends how perfect it was, and how tragic it was that I couldn’t use it.
I whispered it so much to myself that it finally wore through the HCA block. “It’s striking,” I admitted to myself (“Hah, I see what you did there,” myself whispered.) “I guess I’ll let book and title come together, and somebody else can suggest changing it.” I figured it couldn’t hurt any more than Sparksister, which sounded to me like it belonged on an other-world fantasy with witches and forests. (I was really rather irritated at poor Sparksister by then.)
So I sent out the book to agents, and, well, I didn’t get many nibbles. Maybe the title was to blame! But it was too late to change it! So I moved onto publishers, and Candlemark & Gleam accepted it! No title change required!
So my manuscript and its title got a Happily Ever After. Yay!
(Hmm. Story needs more conflict. Exclamation points do not substitute for tension, except maybe in a silly blog post.)
Oh so busy revising and writing and driving
Well, the Handy Small Child has started preschool, and I’ve started working through the Matchbox Girls edit notes in earnest. The lazy days of summer, when all I had to do was write a Nightlights scene a day and do chores, have drifted away like autumn leaves.
Of course, it’s the hottest weather we’ve had all summer right now. I mean, my tomatoes don’t care, they’re still stubbornly staying green, because they’re conspiring against me. But still, hot weather.
Anyhow, this weekly post is supposed to be about Matchbox Girls. It’s my novel! It’s coming out in February! I’m going through it closely for the first time in at least six months. It hasn’t faded as much as I thought it might, but I did spend three years weeping tears of blood over it. Maybe it takes more than six months for those to fade.
Yes, okay, hyperbole. I don’t think I even cried salt tears over it. I did, however, reach the 3/4th point in the original draft, then decide it was All Crap and wrote it all over again from scratch. And it took a long time. Three+ years from start to finish, as I said (and for comparison, I’ve written 111,000 words since starting Nightlights in April).
A few scenes from the initial draft made it into the second draft mostly unmodified, but there were huge, huge changes, too. Characters cut, characters added, sub-plots expanded, sub-plots removed. Sometimes I run into brainstorming from before I even started the initial draft and it’s barely recognizable.
One thing I’ve noticed I do in the process of refining a story idea is that I strip information from the protagonist. In early iterations of an idea, the protagonist is often well-informed, with clear instructions and knowledgeable mentors. This makes maintaining tension harder, which affects pacing. So I throw out most of the information and make acquiring it part of the plot. What I do is probably a bit of a cheat, and I’m sure many excellent authors are able to provide a well-paced story without throwing characters in over their heads.
But it seems to be an effective cheat.
Okay, going through editorial comments and changes probably adds a lot of tension to the reading process for me. But while every scene is still laser-engraved in my memory, I still picked up this sense of growing anxiety and dread from the story, an awful sense of ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen next?’ Ridiculous, because I know. I wrote it. Ridiculous and weird. A couple of beta readers mentioned that they’d read most of the story in one sitting, which I dismissed at the time as ‘they were trying to get through it fast’. (Sorry, beta readers! Please forgive me!) Now, I’m wondering if I maybe did something right.
Posts like this are hard for me. The idea that saying something good about myself or my work will backfire on me is deeply, deeply ingrained. But I also need to do lots of self-promotion to succeed in this new publishing world. Or at least– I need to do some self-promotion. I still firmly believe that quality should rise to the top, but I’ve grudgingly come to admit that it can’t happen if it’s hidden in a closet. It’s easier for introverted me to work on quality improvement over selling myself, but I’ve got to work on both.
So, Matchbox Girls. Every sixty pages or so, it changes gears, always going faster. I think people will like it. And you’ll probably be hearing more from me about it.
Now or Later
I’m not as good of a writer as I’d like to be.
I’m really, really not. There’s all these stories I’d like to tell. There’s techniques I’d like to incorporate. And I can’t do it. Sometimes I don’t even know where to start.
It feels a little like trying to sing well. I know how I want my voice to sound, and the notes I’d like to reach but I just don’t have the control to do it.
This is not, I’m convinced, a matter of ‘gift’ or ‘talent’. I just haven’t trained the skills. I haven’t practiced enough.
Sometimes the knowledge that I haven’t practiced enough haunts me– usually when a scene I’m writing is falling short of my goals. Then I want to give up, tuck the story away and do something else: read a book on technique, or start a new project that won’t be so difficult, or take a nap and hope I wake up feeling better.
But books on technique don’t make up for practice and repetition, and one thing I know I need to practice is finishing works, and I can take a nap later. I have to sacrifice some of my ideas on the altar of self-improvement. If I don’t write, I’m not going to get better. And if I don’t get better I won’t ever be able to tell those other stories I want to tell, the ones that dance in my head out of reach because I haven’t climbed high enough yet.
If I want to write all the stories I dream of writing, I have to write. Now or later. Better to suck it up now, yes?
As somebody wise told me about the handy small child’s first attempt at making a peanut butter sandwich: good jobs often follow terrible ones.
PS: I don’t think NIGHTLIGHTS is terrible. But it could be. It’s probably not the astonishing work of unexpected brilliance I’d like it to be, either. You’ll have to let me know in July.
Voices in the flame
People in publishing talk a lot about voice.
Here’s my secret confession: if I have a voice in my formal writing, I can’t see it. Sometimes I get a glimpse of it, and I don’t like it. It’s too… me. Pedantic, labored, overachieving.
But I DO have a different voice– and I think quite a strong one– in my casual writing. I write for Play By Email games, and there, where I don’t worry about vulgarity, or proper sentence structure, or narrative flow from one paragraph to the next, my voice is strong. Sometimes I’ll write small snippets in response to a challenge on a blog– usually in a comment thread, nowhere that will be seen. Then my voice comes out, too.
I quite like my writing voice, when it shows up. But I can’t seem to summon it on demand. When I try, it hides.
Back when I used to draw regularly, the same thing happened with my art. All the work I’d do carefully would have a flavor to it I just didn’t like. The strokes of the pencil, the careful lines and the elegant shading would make me frustrated and miserable. But when I’d pick up a pen and sketch something quickly, to show somebody a thought or to make a tool for myself– those quick little ink sketches I’d love. They were imperfect, tangled, messy– but I always felt like the true spirit of what I was trying to draw shone through.
That could have just been me, I suppose. But it meant a lot that I was happy with those little pictures.
I keep thinking: oh, I should just write a paragraph right now, in my casual voice. Right now! Maybe nobody else will see a difference, but I will and I’ll like it! And then I think: but what will I write? And then I freeze up. After all, a lot of people don’t like swearing. And it will come off sounding too contrived! And I use way too many exclamation points– even more than I do when I’m being all formal and focused. Yes, that’s the truth.
I think I have to be in a hurry to release my voice. And I’m far too nervous a writer to write blog posts and whole novels in a hurry. I have to do my best if I want to succeed!
All right, though. If anybody wants to give me a prompt, I’ll try to write at least 300 words in a comment, or a whole post, in five minutes, to see if I can unleash my voice.
Let’s rule the universe together
Everybody has a personal narrative. Everybody tells themselves a story that helps them place themselves in the universe. It isn’t something most people do consciously, and the complexity of the story depends on the person.
It could be quite simple:
- My life is a struggle against overwhelming odds.
- I work hard and play hard.
- I don’t have to grow up.
It’s often more complex:
- I’m smart and talented, but I have really bad luck. I try hard but things never work out.
- My life is pretty good thanks to the other people around me. I can never pay them back, but I should try anyhow.
- People will take as much as they can from me, because that’s human nature. But if I try hard, I can get more than they can.
Sometimes it gets really complicated:
- Hard work is required for success, and I’ve worked hard. If I fail, it’s because I need to work even harder. I could be working harder. Therefore, I am failing.
These narratives usually evolve slowly over time. Sometimes, something happens to drastically disrupt or contradict a personal narrative, and then… problems can result. The personal narrative has to be rebuilt.
Figuring out the personal narratives of characters in a novel is an important task. Understanding how they view themselves and their position in the world can create a nuanced character, especially when the character’s personal narrative doesn’t fit nicely into other characters’ perceptions of them. Personal narratives can overstate or utterly ignore both virtues and flaws that loom in somebody else’s eyes. If actions support both perceptions, really interesting characters and relationships can develop.
A lot of literary, character-focused fiction is focused on exploring the most complicated narratives and their evolutions. The best non-literary fiction also explores the personal narrative, too. Well, I would say that– I tend to tell stories that are partially about the disruption and reconstruction of a personal narrative. Sometimes the emphasis is on the reconstruction, and sometimes the emphasis is on building to a disruption, and the reconstruction flows naturally from accepting the disruption.
Who am I?
Who does the world think I am?
Oh God, they clash! Now what?
Who am I now?
Confession of an Introvert
Hello!
Spring is finally coming to the Pacific Northwest. We’ve had two sunny days in a week! Woohoo! I hope wherever you are is getting even more sun than we are. I’ve been outside mixing up dirt and planting seeds when the rain and free time allows. Eventually, there will be flowers. And zucchini.
I’ve moved to a new writing schedule, which starts much earlier in the morning than I’d rather get up. But I discovered that if I have a fixed writing goal (like ‘finish this scene’) and I start right after I wake up, I work until I finish it– even if it takes me five hours or so. I do have to deal with interruptions and resist distractions, but I’m definitely making progress. Go me!
Today, I suppose I’ll be all meta, and blog about blogging.
I have another blog, a personal one. Long ago, I used it as a catch-all but eventually I decided that it wasn’t working very well as such, because there were a lot of things I didn’t post about because my audience was a mixture of everybody I knew and I thought some people would be bored no matter what topic I chose. So, for example, I didn’t write much about writing. Then Facebook and Twitter came along, and I started just using my other blog as a repository for status updates. I occasionally post something longer there, but so much of what I want to say to a general audience of friends and family fits so well within a tweet or two!
I’m kind of an introvert. I can be vocal and opinionated if I have something to say, but I’m really not very good at finding other people to talk to. But it’s the internet! Surely there must be people out there.
So, I started this blog. And I promised myself I’d write a post at least once a week. And I beat my fears that nobody would read it by not telling anybody about it! A stellar plan!
Actually, it worked pretty well. If I was confident nobody was reading it, I couldn’t waste time worrying about whether what I was writing would be interesting to anybody but me! Sometimes the posts are pretty short but at least they’re there.
In the spirit of a true confession, I’ll say more! One reason I wanted to develop a blog rather than, say, simply frequenting other blogs (although I try to do that too) is because I wanted to Build A Platform*. (I hear ominous music everytime I read that phrase.)
Dear reader, I want you in my life. I write, ultimately, to be read. But it turns out finding readers when you spend all your time sitting quietly at home reading by yourself is kind of hard! Who knew?
But let’s be honest. Bland blog posts, once a week, aren’t going to draw in the readers like bees to nectar. In order to lure in new readers, you need to have a spectacular blogging voice, be intrinsically interesting, or provide useful content.
Oh, or have giveaways.**
I don’t feel as if I have a spectacular blogging voice. And I think the only way I’m intrinsically interesting is the stories in my head. So that leaves me with ‘provide useful content’. (Or giveaways.)
I don’t know so much about useful content. If I weren’t spending so much time on the writing, I’m sure I could find some useful service to provide. I have a few skills. I like collecting and analyzing data, which is handy in so many arenas, This could, for example, be a kickass blog about playing clerics in a variety of MMOs!
But– I don’t think I can do that AND write stories. My personal life is not that open. Possibly I spend too much time analyzing data.
So I can’t provide useful content. But I can provide entertainment, I hope. I can provide the stories in my head. That’s why, eventually, I’m going to start posting my serial novel. Hopefully, it will find readers. In a way, these weekly posts, and the Follow Friday, are the soil I’m mixing up so that I can plant some seeds. And maybe eventually those seeds will sprout. There will be flowers! Tasty nectar! Great stories, and people to read them!
See, you thought that was just a tangent above, but it all tied together. Awww. I’m surprised, too.
* I don’t think I’m really building a platform. I think you need more for a platform than a couple of blog posts a week. ‘Making friends’ sounds much nicer, don’t you think? Although I don’t think you do that by blogging alone… Giveaways!
** I am, in fact, planning on a giveaway later in the summer. I just, er, need to figure out what to give away and what kind of theme to attach. Part of my introversion is a dislike of self-promotion, so I don’t think I can theme it as ‘Bribing People To Look At My Blog’ without dying of shame.