Val Neil

Dark Fantasy Author

writing process

Forced Romantic Arcs

by

Mini rant!

One question I see repeatedly in writing groups is:

Why would the female protagonist not want to get together with the male love interest?

This question is always asked in the interest of generating ideas, but it bugs me on a fundamental level, as if opposite sex characters should automatically get together, regardless of whether they mesh well or not. People will suggest a ton of things, but rarely will it be that they’re just not into each other. There’s a million reasons people won’t get together. Out of all the people on earth, chances are, you’re not attracted to most of them for a variety of reasons.

Gay people exist. Asexuals exist. People can be friends but not want to bang.

Characters need a reason TO get together.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

Finding Your Flow State

by

Finding Your Flow State

What is a flow state?

Do you ever get into the groove when you’re writing? Your fingers fly, words pour out of you like magic, and before you know it, an hour has passed. That’s the flow state—a particular mindset when the words come without hesitation.

How do you get into the flow state?

Getting into the flow state can take some time, but a few tricks can help you get there quicker. Some professional writers do warm up techniques before they sit down to actually write—they meditate, read their notes from the previous scene, free write, or read aloud a test sample if they’re dictating. This can be intimidating if you only have twenty minutes to sit down and write and it takes you fifteen minutes just to get into a good flow.

Pay Attention to When you Write Best

One of the nice features about the new NaNoWriMo website is that it allows you to enter not just your word count, but where you wrote and for how long. This allows you to track where and when you are getting the most words down. It’s not always when you think.

A lot of people will say “I’m a night person” and assume they do their best writing in the evenings. Studies have shown that creativity is usually at its peak right after you get up in the morning (obviously, if you work the night shift, your “morning” will be different than for most people). The reason for this is that your brain has had a chance to rest and process things overnight. You may wake up with solutions to problems you had the day before. Your brain also hasn’t been taxed by a billion other things throughout the day. Even if you’re a night person, if your brain has been working all day and it probably won’t be in its best form when you sit down to write after the kids are in bed.

If you want to know for certain, write down your word count after various sessions for a week or two, then analyze your output. You may be surprised that your best writing times are not when you thought they’d be.

Train Your Brain

Have you ever gone to the restroom and as soon as you crossed the threshold, your body desperately tried to unleash itself before you reached the toilet? That’s the power of classical conditioning. Thankfully, you can use it to your advantage.

Create a consistent set of conditions under which you write. For instance, I decided last year that my home PC is a terrible place to work. It’s in a high-traffic area, and even with noise-cancelling headphones, I get interrupted a lot. The PC also has dual monitors, which makes it way too convenient to have Scrivener open on one and a browser on the other. I decided that since my laptop was already being used to write in cafés that I would use it as my writing machine. I made a desk upstairs out of a folding table and I write on my laptop.

If you don’t have multiple machines, that’s fine. You can still create consistent conditions. Maybe you always write in the same chair or listen to the same playlist. Maybe you always have a cup of coffee or burning candle. Whatever you do, try to be consistent to train your brain that those conditions mean you’re going to be writing. This should help reduce the amount of time it takes for you to achieve the flow state.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

My Drafting Process

by

There are a few different ways I write scenes. The method here is when inspiration strikes, not when I’m specifically sitting down to craft a scene.

Crafting

When I’m inspiration writing, I tend to start with straight dialogue. Some people struggle with dialogue, but for me, the character interactions are what make the scene. I have a movie playing in my head of the characters talking, so I just write that down.

If I’m super busy, sometimes I’ll dictate to my notepad on my phone and email it to myself. This means I’ll have snippets of dialogue, often with no quotation marks or indications of who is speaking (though from the voices, it’s usually very clear), let alone setting. The scene building is generally done later, unless I’m writing in order and starting a scene “from scratch.”

Below will be some excerpts from book 2 that I’m working on. Please be advised that they contain major spoilers from book 1, and minor spoilers for book 2.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

[Read more…] about My Drafting Process

Writing the Second Book

by

book2 frustrations

I created this blog post draft in October and made a graphic, but got over my hump and was able to continue, so it just sat in drafts with nary a word in the actual post.

It’s now November, National Novel Writing Month, and I’m stuck on chapter 15 of book 2, so I figured it was time to bring this shit back. No real context needed here. The pic kinda speaks for itself.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

The End

by

I finally finished the latest draft. I’m a pantser and a newbie, so when I sat down to do a developmental edit on manuscript it need a LOT of work. This last draft has taken forever. I waffled endlessly on adding Medea’s POV and when I did, it made some significant changes to the storyline.

file names

New advice for writer’s block: If you get stuck, write the same scene from another characters POV. You may think you had them down, but their insight will drastically change the tone, possibly even the dialogue.

With the addition of Medea, I’d added a new character loop and made her rules a lot more clear…which was messing up my original ending. I tried to pick up where I left off and it wasn’t working. So I followed my own rule (back up and try something else). I started writing a whole new ending.

It was epic and fun and very Hollywood with a Home Alone vibe. And while the scene was fun, it absolutely did not complete my main character’s arc (cue Sacha Black‘s voice telling me to close those loops), which made it hollow. It worked for Medea, but not for Nikolai. To learn his lesson (finally), he needed the original ending. I found a way to sidestep Medea’s rules and make the original ending work. I will probably save the alternate ending and use it as a reader magnet for my mailing list (it IS a fun scene).

So what now? Well I still have micro editing to do. I kept changing the year, from 1956 to 1953 to 1955 so I have to check the timeline continuity. Gotta check my crutch words (if you’re an author and don’t have a crutch word list, make one!). Gotta find a new round of beta readers wiling to read 128k.

My brain is already springing forward to NaNo. I need to prep for book 2 so I can get it written, hopefully by the end of the year. I’m taking a week vacation in October just so I can write. Not sure how much I can get done in November this year, but I’m going to try.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

 

Muddle in the Middle

by

Oh boy. It’s been a hellava month. As you can see here and here, I’ve been struggling to get through chapter 21. I finally did it, but then chapter 22 didn’t flow and I was right back where I started.

One of my struggles has been whether or not to include Medea’s POV. When I wrote the story, it was incredibly entertaining watching two very different personalities clash on the page. The problem was that I needed to make a plot out of what was essentially banter and training montage.

I succeeded, taking Nikolai’s little problem, which was originally solved immediately, and stretching it out over the course of the novel. What’s happening to him and why? Is it Medea? If not her, then who? It’s a mystery he has to solve.

Yay! I had a plot! Problem solved, right? Not exactly. This particular plot meant the reader couldn’t know Medea’s intentions. At all. It turned a character driven story into a plot driven one, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, this story works better when you can see both sides.

Still, I didn’t see how I could add Medea and have it work. In the original drafts, she’s a static character. There’s nothing for her to do. She’s just trying to train Nikolai the same way she’s trained a bunch of other wannabe dark wizards. Later in the series she has more to do, but she didn’t here. Also, it would kill a big reveal of her motivations at the end.

I toyed with adding her. I even wrote inserts for her, and rewrote a few scenes from her perspective. All of it sat in my Scrivener notes. I kept agonizing over it but didn’t want to mess with my main draft.

Then two things happened.

1. I got stuck in the middle. Part of the issue was that some chapters were falling flat. They felt boring. They were boring, because even though I knew everything going on behind the scenes, Nikolai and the reader didn’t. So it felt like “why is this scene even here?” Knowing Medea’s motivations make them work because the reader gets dramatic irony.

2. A friend of mine beta read the first few chapters and said with absolute conviction, “put her in.” This particular friend writes romance, a genre that is all about character-driven plots.

So I put her in, and suddenly my mess of “Where do I put this scene? Argh I can’t get this cause-effect chain to work!” was gone. I went from this to this:

[First image of multiple chapters with duplicate numbers, all out of order. Second image is clean chapters 20 through 26.]

Not only that, I’ve been able to dramatically up the tension in the middle of my book. I got to let Nikolai do something incredibly stupid that I’ve been dying for him to do, but couldn’t because it didn’t work in the old draft without him going off on a tangent. The way it’s written now, his behavior makes absolute sense within the context of the scene.

Hopefully it keeps flowing. I have about seven chapters left in my developmental edit.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.