Preptober: Pantsing and Plotting

Those are two words you won’t be able to get away from this month: Pantsing and Plotting. To Pants is to write by the seat of one’s pants and to Plot is to well, plot it out. There are varying degrees of Pantsing and Plotting, and the way to set yourself up for success is to usually aim for a mixture of the two. You need to foster the Pantser spirit, to fly with your creativity to keep those words flowing. But, you also need to plan – and that’s where the plotting comes in.

If you want to set yourself up for success with NaNo, you need a road map. The twists and turns of NaNoWriMo can be brutal and by having a map you’ll be able to keep your story on track, check in with your progress and help prevent any story muddling.

You don’t have to have all your plot points nailed down, you don’t even have to be set on your ending – but you need to know your narrator, your protagonist and your antagonist, the conflict and some ideas for how it may be resolved.

You can be as vague or as detailed as you want in whatever outlining system you chose, even if it’s only in your head. Whether you go with a one paragraph synopsis of your story and a few character blurbs or you decide to chart it out by chapter – that’s up to you. Today, I’m going to go over some of my favorite outline styles that I’ve used to help keep me on task as I work on a draft!

The basic Synopsis: this can be a great thing to practice because many literary agents would ask for this alongside a Query letter. The synopsis varies in length, but tends to stick to around 500-800 words. It’s pretty self explanatory: the synopsis is just that, a synopsis of your story arc, the action and the resolution. (And again, don’t sweat it if you don’t know your ending – that’s okay! Just have some ideas!)

The Mountain: This is a great picture of what I’m talking about – it’s the same basic plot structure I think we all likely learned in elementary school. This is my go to favorite. I like to leave a lot of room so I can add in plot details as I’m writing and future inspiration hits. It helps me be able to visualize where I’m at in the progress of my story so I also can check in with pacing. I usually make one of these diagrams for every draft I work on. Even if I only start with five points filled out, I usually end up with the front and back covered by the time the draft is done.

Three Acts: You may have noticed that the “mountain” is divided into three sections – beginning, middle, end – or “Acts.” These also help you pace out your story and are a great tool when outlining. 1. Beginning/Set Up – 2. Middle/Conflict – 3. End/Resolution. You can use this outlining system alongside the “mountain” or independently. I find using an act based outline helpful for NaNo, because I can break the number of words through the act. It may look something like: 20k/20k/10k or even 15k/20k/15k. Just like with any other outline method, you can write as little or as much as you want for summarizing each act.

Five Acts: Same concept as with Three Acts, but breaking the story into more parts. With a Five Act Structure, your outline would look more like: 1. Prologue/Set Up – 2. Conflicts Appear – 3. Rising Action/Things get bad – 4. Falling Action – 5. Resolution/Tying up loose ends. The climax of the draft would occur as Act 3 ends and Act 4 begins. I love using this system because it gives me so much structure. If you’re a pantser this probably is too much structure. I really love this system because it’s easy to break down each act into 10k words to also help keep you on track!

I know it can all be overwhelming, but just remember: the right way to prep and outline is the way that is going to work best for you! Think about what works best and what you need to hit the ground running – November will be here before we know it! 😉

Happy Preptober!

Hello WriMos!

It’s been a while since I have posted anything on this blog, but a new NaNo approaching seems like the perfect time to dust it off and start again. If you’re new to NaNo – Welcome! If you’re not new to NaNo – Welcome back!

You’ll see me break NaNoWriMo into NaNo and WriMo a lot. While NaNoWriMo is the shortened moniker of National Novel Writing Month, the community breaks that into two parts. NaNo references the event itself, and WriMo(s) references the writers!

This year marks my ninth year as a NaNo participant and I’m so excited about NaNo this year, and hope that our all virtual climate will help with productivity and less distractions. (I can get really chatty at meet ups, haha).

Regardless of how many times you’ve participated in NaNo I want everyone to remember one thing: the point of NaNoWriMo is to get writing. The only success is whether or not you wrote more, whether you pushed yourself to do things that are outside of your comfort zone, whether you finally tried to write that novel.

This year has been full of challenges and obstacles and created a unique atmosphere where that struggle is not uniquely mine, it is not uniquely yours, it is a collective struggle that we are all experiencing simultaneously. I want you to remember this November to be kind to yourself. To celebrate that you are creating the world inside your head on paper and not get too hung up on your word count.

The first step to preparing for NaNoWriMo: shifting your mindset. Turn off your inner editor, turn off your inner critique and just write. That is a lot easier to say than it is do, I know that as much as anyone.

To help make this a little easier, here are some of my tricks:

Sometimes when I’m in a funk and trying to write through it, everything that’s coming out just sounds wrong. When this happens, I try to keep my typing line at the very top of the word processor, even if it means scrolling up frequently so I cannot see the words I’ve typed previously. This helps me focus on writing forward, and not writing backward. Out of sight, out of mind, they say…and it usually works.

If that’s not seeming to do the trick and you still feel like you’re in a funk and the problem is you don’t know where you’re going, stop and ask yourself questions: how is my character feeling? What is my character trying to achieve from their actions? What are the supporting character’s goals in their actions? Etc, etc. If the characters can’t help to pull you out of a scene, you can always look to your setting and see how that living, breathing, world could alter the events unfolding further – sometimes changing the setting is all you need to get the ball rolling.

Some writers prefer to play devil’s advocate when they’re in a block – you can try making the character do the opposite of what you intended to do. This can be a little tricky at times because you obviously don’t want to do anything that would derail your plot completely, but it can definitely help shift your perspective on a scene and help get it flowing.

It is never a bad idea to back track in the scene and figure out where you feel like you got off track and start rewriting from that point. You can save what is now technically draft one – I do this either by using the strike through feature in the editor and keeping it in place in the document or by “dumping” all of these things at the beginning of the document. I do think it’s easier for later if you leave it in place in the story and do something that differentiates this section of text from the rest of the novel because then it’ll be easier to piece into the novel when you’re editing. This is particularly nice because sometimes when you do go back to edit, you’ll realize that you prefer the first way or maybe something that melds them together.

If you’ve tried all of the above but you can’t get the scene to work because you’re too focused on a future scene, tab down a few lines and start working on that future scene. Don’t be afraid to write non-linearly during NaNo! Just remember to go back and connect the dots before you get too far into the future of your draft.

With our virtual NaNo this year, we will be heavily relying on social media. One way that I plan to use the @NaNoLexington instagram account is by sharing prompts, pictures and plot bunnies to help inspire you if you get stuck! I will do a mix of word prompts, photos and scene ideas.

I was a little afraid of using photos as a prompt until I attended a workshop on photo prompts, and found that their method really worked for me. You start by finding a photo – I like to create a folder on my computer, phone or Pinterest of pictures that invoke the feel of my project just so I’m prepared with a lot of really great imagery – but that is not necessary. You can google in the moment for a picture that helps mirror the scene you’re trying to write.

I like to set a timer for 60-90 seconds to give myself a chance to really absorb the photograph. Focus solely on it, take in all the details, think about how things would smell, how the weather would feel, how you’d interact with the details in the photograph. In the workshop I participated in, they had us scribble spirals on a scrap sheet of paper while we were honing in on the photograph, this was to help make sure that your mind was focused on the photograph and wouldn’t be easily distracted by outside noises, etc. It sounds like it would be counter productive to scribble spirals if the point is to focus intently, but it really makes the most difference to me.

Once your timer goes off, jump back into your scene.

One of the favorite pieces that I have ever written was produced during this workshop.

Go ahead and try it now and let me know how it works for you! You can hunt for your own photo if you’d like but I chose the photograph at the beginning of this post for that reason specifically!

Over the next few weeks, try to create a collection of prompts for yourself: write them on post it notes that you stick up around your work space, write them on index cards you can keep easily on hand, create a Pinterest board – whatever sounds like it would be the easiest for you. You’ll thank yourselves in November! 😉

sleepy; writer brain

There’s a project that I’ve been working on for about a year – it’s been very up and down, up and down. Truthfully, I already wrote it – three years ago for NaNo. But I wrote it on scraps of paper, and I lost most of them, and the story didn’t develop quite as I wanted to, so I gave it a rest but couldn’t leave it alone. The only thing that survived my carelessness was the first chapter – a chapter that has been praised by peers as the single greatest snippet of something I have ever written.

Maybe that’s why I’m having a hard time working on it, haha. It definitely holds me to a pretty high bar for the rest of it. I do feel pressure to keep the manuscript up to the same level, but I don’t lose sleep about it at night. After all, that is precisely why one edits.

Anyway, I’m starting office plans and set up should be executing very, very soon. I’ll blog more about that later and all about my DIY desk (it’s going to have a huge work surface and I am so excited I almost cannot stand it). When the desk is done and I’m typing away in the designated room instead of the kitchen table, I plan on sitting down and really starting to focus again.

Tonight, I took out a notebook – I ripped out some pages, and I started planning, outlining. I think that’s been the biggest hindrance, obviously. I have all these ideas in my head for how things can go, when things should happen, when things should be revealed – there are five or six outlines in my head with varying plot points and act counts, and they just rotate, so I stay stuck in a cycle of following one outline and then taking a turn down another outline to go in a completely different direction. My goal tonight was to write out all the contrasting outlines, to look at them all laid out t get the big picture for each idea and see what I could do to make all of the outlines happy.

I started by briefly summarizing the seven chapters I’ve kept (I’ve gotten up to 40k and then to 60k only to decide I hate the direction and cut it back down. Currently at ~21k) and then started on outline 1, 4 act structure – my instinct has been 4 acts from the beginning and I keep talking myself out of it because the story isn’t 4 acts – it’s 3 or 5. But tonight, I didn’t listen to grumpy, dictator Hayley. I just outlined.

And when I was done with the rough outline, all the way out to a pretty little Epilogue.

I looked at it.

It looked back.

I grabbed another piece of paper and started drafting Chapter summaries J.K. Rowling style. (Reference here) It’s even on notebook paper with bright blue lines. I finished outlining through Act I. I went back and filled in some things on the Outline, then realized I hadn’t included a plot thread, so I made a column on my chapter chart.

It is important to note that for me, as a writer, a big part of the process is focusing on the story I want to tell; and usually I can get a good grasp of the characters, what’s happened to them before the story begins to cause their motivations for behaving how they do through the piece and then, ultimately, how things resolve – but, I don’t always find it easy to figure out how they get from the beginning to the end.

And so, I looked at my three pieces of paper: the existing chapter summaries, the rest of act I and the mountain outline, sectioning the last of Act I and complete II, III, and IV – and finally, finally…I see the journey.

 

the last I’ll talk about 2016

I’ve said it so many times that if you only read one blog post of mine from 2016, you’d know: I was in a bad headspace. (I instinctively said was, hopefully that’s a good omen – I could use one) I started the year in a fragile, sensitive state regarding my creative abilities and the things I’d always let bounce off of me sunk in. For the last year, I haven’t been listening to my voice – my own voice saying that I was strong, that I was talented, that I had the drive to do this crazy dream. We all know, at the end of the day, this is the voice that matters most.

Over the last five years, I have tried to immerse myself in as much of the local writing community as possible. You meet a lot of different people at critique groups, writing events: from barely starting out and trying to develop their voice to people who have been published in prestigious journals and won awards. But most of all, you meet a lot of people with varying opinions. It is only natural, given the nature of this journey, that I have heard a lot of really positive things and a lot of really negative things about my writing in the course of trying to network.

I’ll never forget one of the first writing events I ever attended in person. (I’d previously done online workshops, participated in online crit exchange groups) I took the first chapter of a favorite project – a YA Fantasy piece – and I’d white knuckle gripped the paper but still managed to read the four pages in a trembling voice. It’s the first time that I’d ever read anything I’d written in front of strangers that wasn’t for school, the first time I bared my writer soul – because that’s how close the writing is to us, it’s a part of us that no one else will ever quite understand the way we do – even the readers. Afterwards, when I was shuffling around with my stuff, awkwardly about to leave I caught wind of a conversation two men older than my father were having – “The new girl? Oh, I thought that was horrid? Young Adult? It’s a waste of a genre.” And I froze. I completely froze. My first thought was, “I can’t say I particularly found what they read enjoyable either.” And so, the fiesty spark that ignites the core of my being laughed, and I came back the next week to read again, if only for knowing that those two men didn’t want me to.

So, see? I am used to pushing these kinds of comments away. I laugh those people off.

What was so surprising about 2016 is that the people who started saying these things were people I had grown to know, people I respected, people I trusted, people who helped make me feel welcome and safe to create new words. I have been carrying their words around all year and I’ve realized the only way for me to get over things is to set those words free. So I’m giving you back your words, and a few of mine to go along with them.

To the ‘friend’ who told me I’m wasting my time and my skill on genres that will never matter: I heard you. But the spark happens when we write the stories we want to write – I’m sorry that those don’t interest you, but I’m not going to change my genres.

To the ‘friend’ who told me that nothing I have written has been edited to any level of literary merit and it’s laughable I think so: I heard you. I think it’s funny that you can say whether or not this is true considering you’ve never read anything I’ve sent you – edited or otherwise.

To the ‘friend’ who told me that trying to grow as a writer was a bad thing and I should go back to what I was doing before: I heard you. I don’t know why you think growth is a bad thing, but I won’t let that hold me back anymore.

I could keep going, and I want to, because I won’t deny it: I am angry. But this isn’t about any of you and the things you kept repeating – this is about me. This is about me taking back my own words, taking back how I see myself and ultimately who I am. At first I wasn’t going to publish this, it would just become the thirty-eighth draft I saved to my blog covering these words. The words that I’ve been bottling up to the point I almost couldn’t hear myself anymore. But I don’t want your words anymore, don’t want to cling to them, hide behind them -it’s time I set them free. I have my own words, and in the breath of their syllables – my own power, strength.

It’s time I listen to them.

Virtual NaNo Plano: [1] A study in Plano

If you’re reading this and you don’t know me, you can call me Hayls, and I’ll be your virtual guide to the NaNoWriMo Plano Galaxy as long as you stay with me. This is the fifth year I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo – I like to use the month of November as a time to branch out in a non-stressful way and step outside of my comfort zone. Last year, I wrote Horror for the first time and this year I plan to borrow from the NaNo theme and write my first Space Opera. For this Virtual Plano, though, I will be using Star Wars: a New Hope for my personal examples as we walk through the Plano Galaxy together.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to it: What is NaNoWriMo? Hint: It’s not a disease. NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place the month of November. The goal is to write a 50,000 word length Novel within those thirty numbered days (To stay on goal, that means you have to write 1,667 words per day). You are totally allowed to write more than 50,000 words, and if you write less, well, you still have more words than you did at the beginning of November, right? (You can revisit my blogs from last year, too, here, here)

NaNoWriMo is an exciting time of year because it takes something that is a solitary craft – writing alone – and plugs it into a community. Join the NaNo site and find your local Region! You can go out in public and write with others, talk to other writers in the NaNo forums, find them on a Facebook page – NaNo uses community to bring WriMos together to create magic.

(So you sound hip with the lingo, ‘NaNo’ is slang for the event, ‘WriMo’ for the writers.)

For NaNoWriMo, there are two schools of thought: Pantsing and Plotting. If you’re going to Pants your novel, Thank you for reading this far and I promise what I am going to continue to share will be relevant to you pantsers, too.

The first thing you have to do to prepare for NaNo to set yourself up for success this November is something that manages to be quite difficult and quite simple at the exact same time: an idea. (Ideas are hard, I talked about it here)

If you already have an idea, great! Skip to the paragraph after this, or read the next paragraph, too, because I’m just that riveting in print. 😛

I find it the easiest to start by asking myself what kind of story I want to write. “A story about a woman who is willing to do whatever it takes to save her home,” became Gone with the Wind.”A story about the tough time my eleven year old daughter is going through,” became Inside Out. It starts out so simply, and we grow these truths into the story we want to tell. So what’s your story? Condense it down into a single sentence: I want to tell a story about a boy who grew up in a small town and unexpectedly got pulled to something better. (I talked about this before, here)

Our first exercise: Get a pen or a pencil, whatever makes your rocketship fly (be prepared for more Space puns) and a piece of paper or a notebook.

Start asking yourself questions-

Why should people care about this story? Why is it important? Why do you need to write this story?

What makes us curious about your story? What is the story’s conflict? What’s the mood of the story? What makes your narrator the best person to tell this story? What does your narrator want? What does your narrator need? What doesn’t your narrator know? What will your narrator learn over the course of the story? What changes will effect your narrator?

How can we relate to your character(s)? How will your conflict be resolved? How will your narrator(s) aid or hinder resolution? Are there any alternatives to your resolution? What makes the other options impossible?

Who supports your protagonist? Who is your antagonist? What makes your antagonist a threat/concern to your protagonist? (This doesn’t have to be a person, it can be an intangible as well) What makes your protagonist stronger than the antagonist at the resolution of your story? What changes will your protagonist have to undergo to be able to defeat the antagonist? What will help or hinder your protagonist along the way?

Where does the story take place? Where does the protagonist live? What is the importance of the setting? Do any settings influence parts of the story? Where does the beginning of your story start? Where does the story take your narrator? What settings are important to the story, to scenes? Where does your protagonist meet your antagonist? Where does your protagonist overcome the antagonist and conflict?

These are just some ideas to get your head going – keep asking yourself questions, keep fleshing out the details of; what, how, who, why, where? 

And meet me back here next week, if you want to, where we’re going to start talking about outlining.

How To Come Up With An Idea

It’s really, really simple so I thought that I would outline it for all of you in some easy steps. Just follow my methods and you’ll have ideas in no time at all!

Step One: Think about it.

Scratch your head if it makes it easier, tap your chin. Just think about thinking about an idea.

Step Two: Take a break.

You’ll never be able to think of an idea for you next creative endeavor if you’re stressed. Relax a little bit.

Step Three: Think about it again

You’ve had a break, now make yourself really think about things – should it be pirates who are really business men but aren’t really men but women, like in Mulan, who are taking on an alien race that comes out of the sky like in Avengers but without Loki, not a nordic influence of mythology, maybe a celtic, but probably not because that’s too close so maybe egyptian – and no, they aren’t pirates, they’re really members of the maji, like in the Mummy movies but wait, do they really exist or is that just in the Mummy movies, and maybe there should be like an Indiana Jones element, with some lost treasure and that’s where the pirates come in but wait, I’m scrapping the pirates so maybe they’re like evil maji or maybe it’s still like a treasure hunt of some sort and the artifact is hidden in a giant skyscraper and that’s why they have to be business men but women and I don’t even know what this story is anymore.

Step Four: Drink some coffee, engage in a vice

Realize, over your espresso, that your idea was actually quite stupid and that all of your ideas are stupid and fall onto the ground, crying in a ball because you have no original thoughts and you will have to sell out because you’re a fraud, a fraudulent shadow of the glory you thought you’d be and you have no ideas and the whole world is against you and you should just give up.

Step Five: Try to think again

Think so much that you give yourself a headache from thinking, if that’s even a thing. Think so hard that there’s nothing left in your head at all, let alone a brain, it’s just emptiness and you’re eye starts to twitch and–you’re overthinking it. You can’t force an idea anymore than you can force your pen to write words on the page if you aren’t holding it.

Step Six: Wait

Here’s the thing: You can pretty much disregard steps 1-5 and just focus on this one, in waiting. Ideas aren’t something you can force, no matter how hard we wish sometimes. Ideas have to be born. They have to be tended and watered to grow into the shiny, wonderful things that you will create from them. And maybe you’re reading this and thinking ‘this girl is hokey and corny and I’m going to give myself a brain ulcer thinking about my next idea.’

But here’s the thing: You can’t force a story you don’t know how to tell. You can’t force a story you don’t know the questions to. You can’t force a story you haven’t thought of yet.

So be patient, and keep your mind open and listen to the dreams and the whispers of the world around you…there, you’ll find your idea.

 

On Why Your Character Needs a Motto

According to Google:

Mot-to: (noun) ;

a short sentence or phrase chosen as encapsulating the beliefs or ideals guiding an individual, family, or institution.

I, personally, have a motto. It is actually a motto that I share with a Disney Princess – that kindness is the strongest power to have. I never had an eloquent way of putting it until 2015’s live action Cinderella –

Have courage and be kind.

and, I have to share this one, too –

Where there is kindness, there is goodness. Where there is goodness, there is magic.

For the example of this post, lets talk a little about Cinderella for a minute, okay? Yes, I am actually an adult.  For this post, I am going to be referencing the 2015 adaptation, which focuses on some details and development that the mainstreamed animated version does not. I will try to make it understandable for those of you who haven’t seen it, though.

Okay, it starts by establishing Ella’s character from a very young age as a sweet girl who is kind – she is kind to the field mice, she is kind to her parents, she is kind to the large house’s servants. We are shown, in the opening fifteen minutes or so, that Ella is a very kind person.

And…at about the twenty minute mark, when her mother is ill and we realize that the story is about to turn into the Cinderella we all know – orphaned, abused, but still optimistic her life will be better one day – her mother says, “Have courage and be kind.” They literally hit it on our heads – strength and kindness.

From here, we see Ella become ‘Cinderella,’ we know from all the other iterations of the original story, and the original story itself. Abused by her step-sisters and step-mother, we watch her be called names and laughed at by them, we see her ostracized from the family and pushed away like she’s nothing. And we see her be courageous and face the obstacles she’s thrown with kindness because her motto serves as her motivation for how she behaves and reacts in circumstances out of her control.

There are cracks in her courageous kindness, and one of them is when she acts out of character, storming away from the house on a horse. It is this moment where she meets the “lowly” apprentice, actually the Prince. She asks him if the people in the castle treat him well, he replies that they do, and in turn asks her the same question. She says, “they treat me as well as they are able,” (maybe not verbatim, but it’s something like this) and we see, yet again, that this girl is kindness in a tiny, blonde haired body. Before they part, she says to him, “have courage and be kind.”

And so we are reminded, again, if we’re too thick to understand for ourselves, that Cinderella believes in being courageous and being kind.

This is where things just keep getting rockier and rockier – the little things her step-mother did towards the beginning of the movie see tame to what is thrown our way. When Cinderella is told she “can’t eat breakfast,” because she needs to attend to her family while they’re eating their breakfast, she just smiles and does it. When she finally does get to eat, she splits the measly leftovers she has with her mice friends because she is so unbelievably kind and it hurts your heart, you feel for this girl and believe her character and motivations in these moments because we know that she is courageous and kind.

She decides to go to the ball because she is courageous, she gets the help of her Fairy Godmother because she is kind.

When she finally stands up to her step-mother, stands up for herself, you know why?

Because she has courage and she is kind – this time, the kindness is to herself. Because she never forgets what her mother tells her, “have courage and be kind,” and lives her life by that motto.

You see – this one sentence motto?  It is the foundation that we come back to again and again through the narrative to establish her as a fleshed out character.

From the writer perspective, establishing a motto aids the writing process. Creating a one sentence motto for your characters should be the first thing you do in the nature of characterization because it gives you a foundation to return to as you’re putting them trials and tribulations, whether you’re writing fiction or horror or romance or science fiction or some combination of the above.

Stuck on how a character should treat another character? See the motto.

Stuck on how a character should face a confrontation? See the motto.

Stuck on how a character should react to a situation? See the motto.

Stuck on a character?

Give them a motto.

On Characters and the side affect of forgetting who you are

Have you ever gotten too deep in a Character Funk? I don’t mean the type of writer’s-block-can’t-write-don’t-know-how-to-words type of funk we usually talk about as creators – I mean actually, submerge yourself into a character so completely you become them?

It starts out simply enough – you start listening to a type of music you wouldn’t ordinarily. It’s all in the name of Character Research, of course. You find something that’s a perfect match for the character in question, and so you queue it up in your planning and your drafting.

And then you get further into the process, you write a few scenes. Your characters are all drinking Hot Chocolate to soothe the cold from the chilly autumnal air within the world you’re currently creating. It’s the middle of summer, it’s ninety degrees outside. You drink Hot Chocolate and wear a long sleeved t-shirt to bed.

You go about your life, working away on the manuscript and honing the characters reactions and thoughts and motivations.

The motivations, that’s the part that ends you.

Finally you find yourself doing all sorts of things you never would have done.

But nothing seems out of the ordinary.

You go about your days, your life, doing the same things you were doing before – existing.

Day in, day out. You’re parting your hair on a different side and taking your coffee with only cream because that’s how your character does it but you don’t think about that, just think about that’s how you do it.

 

After a few days, you feel a little grumpy.

After a few days, you feel like something is off.

And then, you catch yourself going to the grocery store, finding that musical artist you were using for “research,” and listening to it on repeat.

And you have a breakthrough in the yogurt aisle – you’ve felt out of sorts because you have been. You’ve been acting unlike yourself because you forgot that you are who you are and not the character you created.

 

 

On Too Many Words and Tragedy

People always talk about how much a creative hobby helps them through bad times. They’ll lament with flowery adjectives that painting saved their life or that learning to play the violin forever changed who they would become. I am not trying to knock this process, so I sincerely hope it’s not reading that way. I support the arts and do think there are a lot of benefits.

But…

You knew there’d be a “but,” didn’t you? 

Whenever I need a creative hobby to take me and shape me into the better person tragedy will inevitably create…it’s not there. It feels like I’m standing in the middle of a football field at night. The lights are so bright, so encompassing so that everything within their poles is bathed in artificial luminescence and yet, when the sun has slipped beneath the horizon they all short out. No flicker, no dim—just psssszzzt. Gone. 

For those of you who know me, you know that my mother passed away last Sunday. For those of you who don’t, well, you do now. 

After I got the news I just kept thinking, “this will be so good for my writing.” I kept thinking about new pens (a guilty pleasure/retail therapy go-to) filling up notebooks, about running my laptops battery to the deathly 11% again and again and again. 

But I go to write and it doesn’t matter how long I stare or think, but the paper stays white and clean and untouched. 

It’s not as though I’ve lost the will, that’s not true at all. I want to be writing. I feel like I should be writing…but I can’t hear the muses over how loud my thoughts are. 

I never have a hard time finding words. I usually have too many. Reading my previously posted blogs should at least be a testament to that. For a while, I’ve thought I didn’t have any words, but that’s not quite right. I’m drowning in words—for every sentence I say or write, there are paragraphs floating through my mindspace. And they all just don’t feel right somehow. 

On Rediscovery

I’ve been in a slow production funk lately. I haven’t wanted to write, haven’t felt like writing, haven’t been able to remember the dream. None of my go-to fixes have been working. All in all, it just made me more depressed.

I have more excuses than stories – Leia and her raging Parvovirus, the first big rejection, the quarter-life crisis “what if?” of it all.

One of my favorite songs of all time is “Landslide.” I don’t mean the Dixie Chicks version you thought was cool in the nineties (I’m looking at you, Whitley). I mean the real version, written and recorded by one of my most favorite women, Stevie Nicks. I’ve always loved her for her fiesty attitude, for how she rocked frizzy hair (curly haired preteens need more role models) and for the fact she was unashamed she was an alto (in the musical theatre world, this is undesirable). My love for her was fueled by my Dad’s extensive vinyl collection, and later, CDs, and then of course – YouTube.

I was twelve or thirteen when I first came across the interview. I don’t remember where I saw it – on PBS? On YouTube? Was YouTube even as big of a thing then, with buffering and what not? (I remember at least how terrible watching videos on YouTube used to be – twenty minutes to load two minutes of Harry Potter trailer) I don’t even remember, but what I do remember is hearing her talk about writing “Landslide.”

Popular theory is that she wrote it to remember John Lennon. Some people say she wrote it for her Dad. Neither of them are true. She wrote it for herself, and Lindsey Buckingham. She wrote it when she got to a point of unhappiness and she didn’t know if she wanted to keep going after the music thing anymore. She wrote it as the decision to herself that she’d keep going, that she’d do what it’d take to get where she wanted to be.

And it became my song.

There have been so many moments in my life where I’ve felt like the dream was too big, bigger than any shoes I would ever be even remotely capable of growing into. And the song would come on – on the radio, in a store, at the coffee shop – all these weird coincidences of me saying, “this is it,” to turn the corner to, “’cause I’ve built my life around you.”

I’ve been skipping the track when I listen to Stevie, been turning off the radio when I hear it – I’ve been avoiding Stevie’s voice, “I took my love and I took it down.”

I listened to it for the first time this year today. And then I listened to it again and again and again.

I am sitting here, writing this, with the song on a loop – “but time makes you bolder.”

Finally, with clarity and a little help from Stevie, I get it. Suddenly, the words have taken on a whole new meaning to me, a whole new set of circumstances.

I’ve been sitting on several manuscripts for a few years – and none of it was seeming to do much of anything for me on a personal level. (I’m looking at you, Greek-Mythology-Let-Down) So I changed what I knew – I started writing with a different voice, I started writing in a different genre. I started writing different kinds of stories with different kinds of people. Characters I liked and characters I didn’t. Characters that are good and bad and all kinds of shades of gray.

This project has been the hardest manuscript to write in the history of Hayley writing manuscripts. (a short fourteen years, but who is counting?)  The story is emotionally draining, the characters are mentally exhausting and the words are coming slow, slow, slow. I have sections of the manuscript that are exactly right and sections I’ve written handfuls of times with still no idea how to proceed.

And for a very long time, I’ve thought all that was a bad thing. That it meant I wasn’t good at writing anymore. That it meant that maybe I shouldn’t write anymore.

My last few manuscripts (last being Gothic Horror) have been easy to write. It’s always easy when you’re writing during NaNoWriMo and you must get all the words to get bragging rights. (I owned 2015 in case you forgot – 132,623) One easily forgets that not all stories write themselves within thirty marked days.

This is a rediscovery of sorts for me – a new genre, a new kind of story – a reawakening of my writing prowess. I used to think I knew everything about writing, and now I’m sure I know barely anything about writing at all – but I am certain about this: not all projects are created equal, not all manuscripts are the same. So I’m going to stop comparing this one to the others and just keep focusing on my (meager) 500 words a day.

Maybe I’ll finish it before I turn around and see snow covered hills. (Do you see what I did there? Yeah? Okay, it’s not funny.)