Anna DeStefano's Blog

Yeah, I said it. Because part of what I teach is that at this point of the process–the rewriting of a full draft that rarely wants to be rewritten–your job isn’t easy. Either the overwhelming work to be done is going to win, or you’re going to win because you’re a professional writer. And the only way for you to win, is to take control and show the rewrites or the new draft or whatever stage you’re in, that you’re the boss.

The way to do that?

Simple.

No, the process isn’t simple. You have to keep it simple.

When you’re drafting with a plan (and you have a plan, right?) or rewriting with plan (because you revamp your plan for your story before you rewrite, right?), you stop the overwhelming, sinking feeling that you can’t succeed at something as complex as creating a novel–by focusing on one piece of the story at a time, until the whole manuscript finally begins to take shape.

I encourage students to do what I do…focus on the beginning, middle, and end of your characters’ journeys, as you plot or deconstruct or draft write a novel. I also teach students to pinpoint the emotional focus of a character at the inciting incident of a story, then at the black moment, and only then at the middle of the book. If you can define for yourself or me or a critique partner what your character’s internal journey will be at these three story points , you’ll never be writing or rewriting into a void.

An example?

My protagonist/heroine in my Mimosa Lane WIP (Book 3 of my Seasons of the Heart series) grew up in a dysfunctional family. That could have made her angry at the world and rebellious (as it does our hero, but that’s another blog post). Instead, while she’s wary of ever making family work for her, it’s made her a champion of other families and of the kids she teaches and cares for in her job (she’s an amazing assistant elementary school principal, whom you get to know in Seasons of the Heart Book 2, Three Days on Mimosa Lane). Sound interesting? I hope so.

But that’s only the beginning. It’s nowhere close to a full story arc. Not yet. And if I’m going to rewrite my muddled and wandering draft into the best story it can be, I need to understand my protagonist’s emotional/internal journey as I weave her in and out of the external story points I’ve already created–I need to motivate her carefully and throw the right conflict at her for the right reasons (using my hero and key secondary characters), so that she’ll change and grow and achieve a goal by the end of the book that she/we wouldn’t have thought possible at the beginning–claiming the happy family she’s always wanted, even if that family can never be the perfect thing she dreamed of as a little girl.

The simple part
(that’s taken me a long time to arrive at, longer than most other stories I’ve written, because of the complexity of the characters and community I’m writing about)

Heroine at the story Inciting Incident: She’s surround herself with love and family (other peoples’), focusing on her job and helping the ideal community she’s grateful to be a part of. Her success at her job helps other families and the children she’s responsible for thrive, and that makes her happy, or so she’s convinced herself.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the next 12 days, I’m writing ugly–revising ugly, mostly–and I’m blog posting every day about it. I taught a NC retreat weekend a few weeks ago and am teaching again this weekend coming up on what it means to draft and revise as a professional fiction writer. Students tend not to believe that it’s as hard for the pros as it is for them. I tend to believe and teach that it’s harder.

I say I work 15-20 hr days at this point in the process.

Because of personal issues, I’m so far behind with this deadline (and am working on an extension my publisher graciously gave me) that it’s going to be more like 20 hrs a day. No. Really. I have close to 100k words of meandering draft, with no end in sight, even though I know what I want the ending to be. Only the beginning and middle of this thing won’t take form enough for me to be able to finish it. So it’s back to the drawing/design board. I’m deconstructing again and revamping character/plot/story AGAIN, the way I teach other writers to.

And I’ll be recording daily here, for  anyone who’s in the same place or is interested in following a long for the hell of it. In the end, this is a job, as much as I love to create and spend time with my characters. I have a series and a book to do my very best to bring to life and finish. I have a publisher, editor and agent counting on me to fulfill my obligation, no matter the chaos going on in my personal life. I have a plan for my career that I don’t intend to let fizzle away because of some bumps in the road.

There will always be bumps in the road. I have the great pleasure and luck of doing what I love for a living–most of the time I love it, anyway. Sometimes this is simply my job–and my kid needs to go to college, so I do my job.

So for 12 days I’m working my ass off to turn this thing over to my editor on June 15th. You can do anything for 12 days, right?

Join me, won’t you?

For those who follow my process as I teach it, here’s the new plan (character-driven, of course), from the analysis I spent most of yesterday pulling together. Today, I’m ripping at the old draft, cutting and tuning things up and moving scenes/plot points as needed. Likely, that’ll be all I do this week–ALL on hard copy, because that’s how I see story best at this stage. It’s most of us see it best, not that I’m insisting you try it this way, unless you’re one of my students, and then, yeah, I’ll insist!

Story Themes (weave in from beginning, through the middle, to the end): Read the rest of this entry »