D. Hart St. Martin

I make female heroes badass AND believable

writing challenges

Confession

by

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

Since I was in my early 30s, I’ve known I had a story to tell, a memoir to write, but I’ve avoided it because fear and self-loathing have shackled me. This story I have to tell takes place in my ninth grade year in school. I was 14 going on 15. It was the year JFK was assassinated. It was the year of the Beatles. And it was the year all my ambitions dissolved into nothing, in part because of something an old man in my church—an old man with authority—said to me. This year was the effing end of my story!

But I needed to get this story out of my gut, spew it out, so to speak. Unfortunately, the process of memoir—writing a piece at a time and figuring out when you’ve got enough pieces what the theme actually is and then organizing those pieces based on that—runs counter to my very literal, very linear personal process. I fought the fight, but I lost. And continued to work on my Lisen of Solsta series, now done.

Then, about a year-and-a-half ago, I came up with a brilliant idea. What if I placed a character based entirely on me into a setting I know well—a YA fantasy? Was it possible? Could I do it? I began building my world and my protagonist—Mari, a 15-year-old fat girl with low self-esteem and a narcissistic mother, who finds an escape into an alternate reality of sorts and gains there what she lacks on earth. Where Lisen was the me I wished I’d been in my teens, Mari is me at 15.

Mari and I became friends. We talk nearly every night. We talk about the current movement of the story and where to take it next. When I’m stuck with a plot hole I can’t seem to climb out of, I turn to her. She is, essentially, my inner child, but in separating her from me ever so slightly, I have made it possible for me to talk to that child, respect that child, encourage that child. Now this is all psychological stuff which my therapist is applauding in me, but bit by bit a story has formed. And the one thing I have demanded of the story is to give Mari the redemption, the resolution, I never got. Because I’ve promised her this, and this is a promise I don’t want to break.

It hasn’t been the easiest of journeys. I’ve had to dig deep and give Mari all my flaws. But while doing so I’ve also discovered some wonderful things about her (me), and I like her. A lot. As I approached the end of the draft where I’d be sending it out to beta readers, my anxiety disorder ticked up to a constant attack. I’m dizzy and having palpitations with a queasy stomach. Now this anxiety disorder is the direct result of a life, especially as a very young child, spent with that narcissistic mother who knew how to care for me but had no interest in my personhood and was incapable of love. (It’s all in the book, or if not there, it will eventually show up in the series.)

The book is now out to my betas. This is always a difficult time for any writer. In this case for me, however, I have eviscerated myself on the page. It’s never been this personal before. And I held back telling my betas what this book was really about. Until now.

I lost it last night. I had to make the anxiety stop so I messaged each of them and told them to stop reading. They refused and asked to know why. I told them. Or am telling them now. It’s my story, all right. Mari Spencer is me. Chloe Spencer is my mother. All that stuff she does when Mari’s at home—that all happened to me.

So there you are, my confession. I have to do this, write my story down. I had to get all that vile, ugly stuff out of me before I die. And at my age, that ain’t so far away now. Blessed be, friends. It ain’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

Extending the Proper Invitation to the Story

by

Beginnings are delicate things. First line, first paragraph, first chapter all require meticulous attention on the writer’s part. They serve as layers of an invitation to the reader to join the writer on a journey, and if the invitation fails to ignite the reader’s passion, they will get up and walk away, leaving the writer behind. No matter how amazing that journey may be, if an author can’t draw a reader in, they’re gone. So where middles and even endings can survive the sin of losing their bearings now and then, beginnings must be perfect.

I am about to slash my first chapter to shreds. I generally don’t go back and read something from earlier in a book while I’m in the process of writing or editing—I am, by nature, a linear writer—but in this case I took a look at chapters 1 and 2 last night because I’ve sent those chapters to a friend. I finished up chapter 1 with “meh” and “it’s too long,” while chapter 2 garnered my thumbs up. Why? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

I didn’t want to dwell too heavily on it, not while I’m neck deep in a complicated rewrite of changing both the point of view (from limited 3rd to 1st) and the verb tense (from past to present). (I wrote about this a few weeks ago.) I am immersed in this and pushing to get it done, so I didn’t want to get myself hung up in perfecting chapter 1, not now, not while I’m making good progress.

But I couldn’t help it. I went to bed, sat on the mattress edge and thought about it. It was then it occurred to me. I may (or may not—the jury’s out) safely eliminate reference to a particular entity throughout that first chapter and give it its due in chapter 2. Will I be able to make it work? I don’t know. And I won’t know until I return to chapter 1 on my next rewrite. I’ve placed a large Post-it® on the cover page with some brief notes of what I want to do, and that’s going to have to be it before I get back to it.

Sometimes we have to kill our children. It’s a writer’s adage. Editing sucks, and what sucks more than anything is when amazing phrases or metaphors must be sacrificed for the sake of better storytelling and better prose. But we do it. And I’ll do it when the time comes to rip that chapter apart, throw away chunks, saving them for use in chapter 2 but knowing I’ll likely use very few of them, if any at all.

Why do we put ourselves through this torture? It ain’t the money, that’s for sure.

Point of View

by

Old drafts die hard

Let me begin by saying this is not a lecture on the variations of POV or how to maintain a consistent POV or anything like that. This is, instead, the story of a decision I made a week ago to change the POV in my current work in progress from limited third to limited first and in essence junking previous drafts. I am, not coincidentally, also shifting the tense of my novel from past to present.

I jumped into this decision (well, not jumped exactly—I did consider it carefully first) knowing it would require some work. I did not, however, believe it could be all that difficult. In the past, I’d moved characters from one geographic location to another, deleting them from scenes in the initial setting and inserting them into scenes in the new location. It’s work because the information each scene provides must be preserved, and the character can’t look like they’ve been dumped into a scene (or scenes) they hadn’t occupied in the initial draft(s). Now, that’s complicated. But that change in pronouns and tense? Easy.

Not so fast. What I’ve come up against is the reality that my POV character (both in third and first person) has a distinctive voice and tone, both of which are dominating a myriad of little changes in the text now that she is the official narrator. Mari, my hero and now narrator, is fifteen years old and a contradiction in every way. She is bright, witty, snarky and insecure to the max. She suffers from more low self-esteem than your average teen, and she’s subject to occasional painful rages. All of this has risen up in the text now that she’s doing the talking.

I love how it’s turning out. I’ve just completed reading the first chapter aloud, and it’s working. I think. We authors are an insecure lot, aren’t we?

It’s the Process

by 2 Comments

TRUST IT NO MATTER HOW &#*%ING HARD IT GETS

Chapter 7. Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? Chapter 7. Somewhere close to midway or so, perhaps? It’s a chapter, simple. Nope. Chapter 7 of my current work in progress is where everything fell into a dark hole.

Into the Forsaken Forest is the first in a series of four or five books (depending on how things work out). The series will detail the adventures of a teenage girl, Mari, who is magically transported from earth to a place called Azzur on multiple occasions. I’ve been pantsing it with notes but no outline. I did, however, have a plan of sorts—thirty chapters, 60+K words.

I reached the first draft of chapter 20 near the end of July 2018 and hit a wall. I’d just brought Mari back to Azzur on her third trip and realized there was simply too much jumping back and forth for a mere 60+K words. Too much traffic between here and there. Here’s what I wrote at the top of my notes that day. → → → →

I backed up, all the way to chapter 3, and canceled Mari’s initial leave-taking from Azzur. I made her stay. This required mooshing things together. I took chapters apart and put them back together again, using the useful and discarding the rest. And when I arrived at the original chapter 12, which had been reduced to chapter 7, I decided to get the chapter breaks back in line to the original draft so I wouldn’t have to do quite so much work on transitions from that point on. But chapter 7 ended up being way too long. (Not unlike this paragraph. Sorry.)

This week, the official rewrite of the first draft with the above changes brought me back to chapter 7 (née 12). As I worked on it, I felt like I was riding a bicycle on a cobblestone road. The damn thing was bumpy, no flow at all. There’s a significant conversation in this chapter, and it had to roll, not jostle.

I’d also pulled the last 300 or so words from the chapter and repositioned them at the top of chapter 8 in order to shorten 7. But on reading the chapter aloud, I realized it simply wasn’t working without the original neat cut-off. So I edited some words out and returned the original ending to where it had begun.

If you’re still following me here, thank you. I will continue.

I took chapter 7 into my writing workshop this week, thinking they’d rip it apart and give me guidance on how to turn this bumpy thoroughfare into something workable. They didn’t. They praised it, said the conversation was great, that it gave the reader a break from the previous action while not feeling like an info dump. The chapter read smooth and worked for them. (And trust me, they would have told me if it hadn’t.)

So next week I take in chapter 8. Let’s see what they think of that one.

Why it Takes so Damn Long

by 3 Comments

Inspired by a year’s end blog post from author E.J. Dawson, I found myself pondering the relative slowness with which I produce scenes, chapters, books. I am forever berating myself for my laziness, the fact that I sit around a good portion of my day staring at the television and not writing. Hart, I say to myself, look at how much everyone else is able to write in a day, a week, a year. Why are you so slow?

As I read E.J.’s post, “Write the Darkness Within,” I felt envy for her prolific pen—6 books in a year!—and recognized in her struggles with her demons something similar to my situation. I write to ease anxiety. I write to save my soul. I’ve known this for years. I know I feel better on the days I’ve sat down and punched out a page or two. What I did not recognize until now, however, was how very hard each of those pages was to produce.

My mother didn’t love me. Oh, I know, you’ve heard that sad cliché far more times than you can count. But it was more than that. By taking away anything I started before I could finish it—all in the name of protecting me from disappointment—she taught me that I couldn’t finish anything.

And to this day I can’t. I set out to clean the house. I do the floors and vacuum half the carpeting, promising myself I’ll finish up tomorrow or the next day; I don’t. I begin neatening up my patio, and I stop with leaves remaining to be raked and only the open areas swept. I’m even having trouble finishing writing this.

But here’s one thing I can do. I can write a book. I have, in fact, published 7 of them over the last 6 years, with an 8th written and traversing the dangerous territory of rewrite at the moment. The one and only thing I consistently finish is the creation of a story and the fulfillment of the fullness of its truth in tens of thousands of words—sometimes even over 100,000 of them.

How is that? I don’t know. Save for that save-my-soul thing which I’ve always discounted. Until today when I read the aforementioned post.

Most writers must practice the most meticulous discipline, often to the point of ritual, in keeping to their goals. It’s hard to sit down in that chair and open up to the muse day after day. Much like the mind in meditation, we writers are constantly bombarded by thoughts and distractions that would steal us from our work. I’m not alone in that.

But here’s the thing. It turns out, because of my mother’s intrusions in any process I began and my lack of trust in my abilities to finish anything, writing slow is the only way I can write at all. I plod along, and that plodding gets it done. Eventually. And the fact that I’ve finished 8 books serves as testimony to my perseverance. The one thing I can do, the one thing I can finish to its end, is the creation of a story.

I am prolific. I’m just prolific at a slower pace.

That Timey-Wimey Thing

by Leave a Comment

That’s my mess

With first draft done on my WIP, I have begun rewrite. I totally pantsed this one. Lots of notes in a notebook with a ton of Post-Its used to tag the stuff I’ll need eventually, but no outline, no 4 x 6 cards. I love that notebook, messy as it is. It’s a window into the process and a reminder of how far I have yet to go. (And yes, that’s a Wikipedia article on Komodo dragons slipped between the pages. Let that whet your appetite.)

But pantsing presents its own perils, one of which is the fact that one often can’t paint oneself out of a corner until she’s actually painted herself into it first. Well into it. Into it to the point where there are three coats of paint waiting to dry and there’s no getting out until the true color of the paint reveals itself and allows the painter to walk out without marring the finish.

In my case, the corner was a time thing. Or, rather, two time things.

Let me state right off that my current WIP is not a time-travel story. It is a story of a young woman who travels back and forth between earth and another world via a magic gateway (of sorts). But as I wrote, time became an issue. Or issues.

First, I needed time to pass normally wherever my hero (and sole POV character) happened to be at the moment, but no time could pass where she wasn’t until she was there again. This was easy. I gave her companion—a woman who appears to have traveled through the gateway many times before the story begins—a single line which will likely show up at the beginning of the second book. “It’s as though time holds our place and brings us back to precisely when we were last.” One problem solved.

Then there was the other thing. My hero must age from fifteen to eighteen from the beginning of the series to the end, but I don’t want to write a dozen books to get there. I’ve had certain “adventures” set out for her for a while now, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to expand on them. And yet, how do I get her from fifteen to eighteen without filling her days both on earth and in the alternate world with adventure?

I was stuck. I had story enough for four books, maybe five, but needed more to fill the holes created by the extended time required to let her mature. I knew how to get her from book 1 to book 2 with a five-month gap between stories, but I couldn’t use an angry separation between my hero and another main character every time. I’m a writer. I tell stories. I have to be original.

I looked to C.S. Lewis and his Chronicles of Narnia. He succeeded in bridging time by aging the children out and using a different method of accessing Narnia in each book. I had one hero whom I planned on aging out but not until I resolved her story and could end the series. I also had one means of transporting her back and forth which I rather liked and didn’t want to change. Especially since it includes another character I want to keep.

The “gateway” perhaps?

Turning to Lewis did prove helpful, however. I allowed the gateway to become an impulsive entity, sometimes receptive, sometimes not—and, hence, unavailable until it was ready—forcing my hero to repeatedly request access over time unsuccessfully until the gateway relented. And that eliminated the second problem.

I love the muse, don’t you?