Welcome Bonnie Dodge, whom I’ve just met! ~DD

When I worked for a commercial bank, I thought writing would be the perfect job for me. I loved words. I loved to write. Doing something I loved to do had to be easier than driving to a job I dreaded every day, right? Then I left my (paying) job to write full time and discovered that I had a lot to learn about writing. I have been writing professionally for several years now and here are a few of the things I have learned.

1) Like all jobs, there is a learning curve. Just because my English teacher gave me A’s and said I showed promise doesn’t mean I am the next Ernest Hemingway. In order to become a successful writer, I still have to do the time. I have to read voraciously. I have to attend seminars, workshops, and conferences and hone my craft. I have to network. I have to study people and be alert. I have to write, write, write until my fingers ache. I have to read, read, read until the words on the pages blur. Then I have to work and work and work until my story starts to resemble something someone besides my grandmother is willing to read.

2) Even when I have been over a draft a zillion times, I will still miss an error. It doesn’t matter how many times I or my critique partners have read my manuscript, the minute I submit it the errors will pop out like zits.

3) Perfection belongs in the dictionary, not in my office. Yes, I would like my copy to be perfect. Yes, I want every query letter and synopsis to shine. But striving for the perfect query letter or the perfect story blocks my progress. It’s admirable to strive for perfection, but it isn’t realistic. On good days my words sing. On bad days my work sucks. In the name of progress, it is better that I have an attainable goal—I will write 300 words today. Tomorrow I can worry about making them perfect.

4) I’d better love the story I’m telling because it creeps into my bedroom and becomes more intimate than my lover. It follows me to the grocery store and into the bathroom. It talks back to me while I’m waiting in line at the Post Office, and in some very real ways drives me crazy. So the time I spend with it better be worth it.

5) It never gets any easier. No matter how many stories I have finished, won contests with or had published, the process is still the same. When it comes time to create something new, all the same doubts are there to great me—this idea sucks, there isn’t enough conflict. My characters won’t do what I tell them to do. My hero is wimpy. The only way to climb the hill is to just start writing the story. I can always revise tomorrow.

6) The pay sucks, but there is joy in the journey.

Submitted by Bonnie Dodge, author of Miracles in the Desert: Essays celebrating Twin Falls, Idaho, and 100 years on a high desert plain, and co-author of Voices from the Snake River Plain

While The Cat’s Away Countdown – Day 5…

I’m taking a break away from my personal blog to let any writers among you know about the Plotting Bootcamp that starts up next Monday. It’s something my sister and I have run very successfully for years.

What makes our class different from all the other plotting classes out there? We give you feedback every step of the way. You build your story from the ground up, and we help you through feedback on the exercises and through frequent live chats. We do this so well that we have many writers coming back again and again for help refining their latest work-in-progress.

Here’s the information about the class. I hope you’ll join us!

What you can look forward to during Plotting Bootcamp:

Learn a methodical approach to harness your creativity in order to produce an in-depth plot for your next novel! Sound scary? It is-when you’re staring at an empty page without a compass and a map to guide you through the novelistic jungle. Your DIs will lead you through four weeks of activities that will help strengthen your abilities to: capture the conflicts, the major plot line and subplots; deepen your knowledge of your characters; and conceive of and develop an in-depth, by-chapter description of your book. Elle and Delilah will accomplish this with weekly lessons, bi-weekly chats and daily online communication. Be ready for bivouac!

Interested? Click on this link to enroll!

Testimonials:

I would highly recommend this course to everyone who is even thinking about writing a book.
~Laurean

Thanks for all the insight. You taught me how to think as a novel writer after many years of banging out ad copy.
~Tim
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My untitled menage has earned a nickname—The Neverending Ménage.

I rarely write long, meaning if a book should come in at a certain word count, I’ll hit that number, come rain or shine. My latest Work-In-Progress was supposed to be around 20,000 words. If you look at the progress meter to the right, you’ll see I adjusted the planned count upward to 25,000 when I realized the story wasn’t finished. Now, I’m closing in on 28,000 words and I still don’t see the end. Sheesh!

At this point, I just want it to be over. Wish me luck with that today!

I’m running a critique weekend for Rose’s Colored Glasses Critique Group. The hard work was done yesterday, organizing the submisisons and getting them ready to go. We have 70 people on that loop now. On any given weekend we have 12-25 people participate. Critique groups aren’t for everyone. But I do think all writers benefit from criticism. I hope the participants see it as a good thing.

Today, my goal is to finish that stubborn story, get a nice long swim in, and then settle down to read a book. I’m on a Blaze binge at the moment. They’re short, fun—some better written than others— but I’m finding it really depends on the author. And I do know I’m hard to please.

I need to figure out something fun to do for my Friday blogs. I know some writers have “Flasher Fridays” where they write a very short piece, up to 1000 words, and post it on their blogs. I like that idea a lot. That’s not a huge commitment of time. It would provide me a chance to step away from my main project and “cleanse my palate”. Now I just need topics for really short pieces. Any suggestions?

Yesterday, I spent two hours in the pool playing pearl diver. The wind whipped up and the walnut tree twenty feet away dumped half its leaves onto the pool. Before I could turn on the pump, I had to scoop a thick layer of leaves from the steps. When there’s that much debris, it tends to move. I found a live salamander, a live frog and tons of crickets.

The pearl diving came in when I got the surface clean then had to take a small hand-held net and dive to the bottom because there were too many leaves for the robot to handle. I like to pretend I live on some South Sea island and have to dive for pearls at the bottom of the ocean. I’d suck at it in real life. I can’t hold my breath longer than 15 seconds when I’m exerting myself, and I’d have to tie huge boulders to my waist to get my fat ass down 50 feet—fat floats quite well, ya know.

I didn’t mind the time away from my desk. I received a “this isn’t quite right, but I’d be willing to look at revisions” answer on one of my proposals. First reaction was extreme disappointment. Naturally. Second was anger. Third was call a friend to see if she had time to look at the notes and the work and see if there’s hope. Since the friend writes for that publisher, her opinion was very helpful. Plus she reminded me that this particular line tends to put authors through a bit of hazing before acceptance.

So now I have my head in a more positive place. I didn’t get a flat no. I have the invitation to resubmit the same work or something else. I’ll work on revising and ship it back out—just not today. I need to work on something that will be more immediately successful. Egos are fragile things. And while I tend to think I’m tougher than the average person, I can still get huge dents in my armor.

Some places are just meant to be portrayed in fiction. Last year, I sped to Memphis for some location research with Shayla Kersten. I blogged about my adventures there—the long conversation with the police officer investigating a robbery, my travels with John the trolleyman and the church he suggested I could desecrate (for my story, of course).

One place in particular that caught my eye was this “castle” in a seedy area of the city.

I made Shayla pull over so we could take pictures. Ashlar Hall is creepy and used to be owned by a local personality who goes by the name of “Prince Mongo” from the planet Zambodia. I’m not kidding, I swear. He exists and this is his picture.

Gotta love a man who’s not ashamed to wear a rubber chicken.

Anyway, the property was surrounded by wrought iron fencing which was padlocked, and since I’m not much into climbing these days or being arrested, I didn’t get any closer than this to take pictures.

Love the car parked outside. It totally adds to the decrepit air of the place. I’ve tried and tried to come up with a nice creepy story set inside this house but haven’t hit upon the right idea. Most of my ideas are more suited to comedy. It seems like the kind of place that would appeal to Emmy O’Hara from the MIK stories.

When you look at the pictures of the house (try to blot out of your mind Prince Mongo’s pic!), what sort of story comes to mind?

This is one of the most sigh-worthy photos I’ve found. I plucked it from Gerard Butler’s website a long time ago. It comes from a scene in the movie Timeline. I printed it out and tacked it to my cork board. Whenever I need to remind myself what romance is about, I just look up.

Sometimes writers like to use photos as prompts to get our imagination spinning out new ideas. I haven’t written a story inspired by this photo yet, but I’d love to give it a try.

If you were the writer, staring at this picture,
what sort of story would you conceive?

For those of you who don’t know, I have interests other than writing my own stories. Years ago, my sister and I decided we wanted to do something to share what we’d learned about the writing biz because we’d bumped along the hard way without much support. The publishing industry is cruel enough. Why not offer writers a place where they can hone their skills before they enter the fray.

I came up with the name, Rose’s Colored Glasses. Rose was a morphing of my sister and I. She wore large rose-colored glasses, through which she saw the stories living inside her mind come to life. Our mother drew the cartoon character of Rose, we developed a website and invited some of our closest friends to join us.

We offer online courses, some of them for free, but all at very reasonable prices. We travel to writing groups and provide in-person plotting bootcamps.

Last month, I organized a critique group and a workgroup to plow through Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel—both are still open to join.

In August, we will lead our annual “Write 50 Books a Year” workshop. It’s free, it’s fun, and you will take away tools to improve your planning and productivity.

In September, we will start our next interactive Plotting Bootcamp—a month-long endeavor that is so popular, we have many writers return again and again.

So, if you haven’t checked us out, we have a brand new edition of our newsletter for to read, chock full of lessons learned by “The Roses”.