Of Blank Pages and Story Prompts by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

You can’t fix a blank page. But what do you do when you are faced with one? I don’t know about other authors; I just know me, and I hate facing the dreaded blank page when I have no idea swimming in my head.

The blank page isn’t a problem when the ideas are flowing, I fill that page and then some lickety-split. When the ideas are not flowing, well that blank page can be daunting.

And why am I stuck on this?

Because I am faced with the dreaded blank page and no ideas this morning, why else?

Of course, there are ways to combat this. The easiest of which is free writing. The exercise where you set a timer for five minutes and then write down everything that comes into your head during that time.

The first time I did this exercise, in a high school creative writing class, I wrote that I didn’t have anything to write for the first couple of minutes, and then the words started flowing.

Not the greatest stuff, but as you can’t fix a blank page, at least I had something to work with, which is way better than staring at a blank page!

Another way to combat this problem is using story prompts, which can easily be found online. I find them all the time on Pinterest. Some of these are lists of three things to include in your story while others are single ideas, phrases, and even sentences to start off your story.

This is actually how I started the sci-fi I’m working on. A writing group I was in at the time had a prompt challenge, where the leader put up a group of prompts and we had a week to start one or more stories from those prompts. We shared what we produced at the next meeting.

I can’t remember how many prompts I used, but I remember the most important one. It’s morphed since then, I added some detail, but it became the opening line of my sci-fi until I realized that the scene in my hero’s POV, which I wrote after that scene, actually happened before the first scene I wrote, so I switched them around.

That prompt was still the start of what is looking to be a nice sci-fi series. I am working on book two while still occasionally tweaking book one, and I do have ideas percolating for book three. At this point, I have title ideas for four books, but I have a feeling I might need five books to finish the story. Mostly because I have two male heroes, and both their stories need telling.

Admittedly they are twin brothers, and the first book opens with the younger twin searching for his missing twin, which is really becoming quite a good read, if I do say so myself. It is the third book where the older twin becomes the main hero. I’m obviously not there yet.

But as the fourth book is supposed to be about the downfall of the villain they are fighting in the first three books, I’m now thinking I might have to have a fifth book to show the happily ever after of the heroes. Might. As I haven’t written that part of the story yet, I really don’t know.

I do know I need at least four books.

I’m working on it.

With Nano coming up, I might just start the third book then.

Wish me luck!

Then again, I started book one from that prompt during Nano a few years ago. And I actually wrote enough then that I started book two! As in I wrote over 90,000 words in that one month that year!

That was the best year I had yet.

This brings to mind the year Konnie actually wrote just over 50,000 words one November. Inspiration hit her and her family was mighty peeved at how much time she spent on her computer writing that month.

Konnie has never officially participated in Nano, never registered and after that one time, she has a good excuse not to.

Oh, and that book she was inspired to write. It is now the first book of her five-book sci-fi series!

I should point out that Konnie started her sci-fi years before that prompt session which started my sci-fi. A fact that all the other participants pointed out. It was high time I wrote a sci-fi too.

So anyway, now both of us have an epic sci-fi we are working on, but we also both have other stories on which we are working. What we both have always written is sweet romances. In fact, Konnie started her book as a sweet romance, it just morphed into a sci-fi.

Anyway, happy writing everyone! 

Editing Woes by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

Sometimes I hate editing. I’ve been working on my epic sci-fi, which is nowhere near finished, trying to at least finish the first book. My problem is while adding more detail to the story, I keep thinking of things I should have shown earlier, or other things that really should be addressed at an earlier spot, and in one case, wasn’t addressed and should have been.

Yeah, I have been doing a lot of backtracking.

At one point, last week I told Konnie I had finished my edits up through chapter fifteen and had started on chapter sixteen, which was true, at the time. I honestly thought when I said it that I was finally making headway. Well, that was last week, for the last two days I’ve been realizing there is a major plot hole in the second scene (the unaddressed issue), and that I hadn’t dealt with a couple of other matters as entirely as I had originally planned.

This means I have to go back and start from the very beginning of chapter one to find all the possible places to fix these problems!

I guess I should count myself lucky that there are no errors with my prologue which is basically a fable or myth about the “creation” of their solar system. That is in fine shape.

The story itself is great, it's just getting all the details in, and correct.

But this is why I hate editing. I do this all the time, I think I’ve got a section done and move on, then, usually right when I’m writing some other detail, I end up going, “Wait a minute!”

I’ve mentioned before the one step forward, two steps back kind of event, but at this rate, I’ll never finish the series. I’m lucky if I’ll finish the first book!

And I have this major issue with writing things out of order, for the life of me, if I write a scene out of order, I’m pretty much done with the story, I can’t seem to go back and fill the missing sections. Ergo, I can’t move to another book until this book is finished, and I mean, done editing.

Not that I can move forward that much, because as of yet, the twin brother of the hero in book one isn’t talking to me, and I kind of need his POV for most of the rest of the series because he’s vital to the conclusion.

It’s not like he isn’t mentioned already, he just doesn’t make his appearance, yet, unless you count pictures and holographs of him, or the fact that they are identical twins, and the hero has gone searching for his missing twin.

Plus, that doesn’t even get into the fact that last week I was rereading it and realized that the second scene I had happened well before the first scene I had, so in essence, the second scene with the plot hole used to be the first scene.

Okay, yeah that’s something I wrote out of order, but I have to point out that this epic sci-fi started out as a writing prompt I did for a workshop some years ago. It was the beginning of the first paragraph that used to be the first scene. When I submitted that prompt, everyone in the group really liked it and wanted more.

This was right before Nano, so instead of expanding right away, I wrote down some plot points, made a list of characters (a semblance of an outline, if you will), and waited for November first. When Nano started, I fleshed out what had been the first scene, then wrote what had been the second scene to finally bring in the hero of this part of the story.

That has to be the first time ever I’ve written anything out of sequence and still managed to keep going. I promise it usually doesn’t work like that for me, I can show you tons of partial stories with one scene written out of sequence and, even after all this time, I have been unable to fill in the blank. I have tried a time or two, but no go. I do have one where I managed to fill in a little, but not all.

And this is why I hate editing. It’s so annoying to think I’ve finished something and then to have it dawn on me that I haven’t.

Konnie certainly knows how I feel, she’s been editing too. On her epic sci-fi even. But I got her back on that when I informed her, I couldn’t find the fourth book of that series among our shared files. What I did find was a repeat of book three under the file name of book four.

Isn’t editing fun?

Happy writing everyone!

Spring and Writing by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

I finally saw a robin this past week.

Though when I posted on Facebook that I’d seen a robin and about spring officially being here, a distant relative who lives just outside of town informed me she’d been seeing robins for several weeks.

Okay, first off, let’s note that she lives in a rural area, whereas I live in an urban area, and I would think more birds would be out in the country than in the city. My opinion only. Though the real issue is that I spent two whole weeks in March stuck at home on muscle relaxants because of a strained back, and I wasn’t even finished with that when I got tendonitis in my right foot.

Ergo I spent most of March and the first week and a half of April stuck in my apartment, and the only time I even went near a window during that time was to see what the neighbor kids were up to because I could hear them laughing.

Needless to say, with little kids running around making lots of noise, there were no birds within sight. I have been out and about since the eleventh, but I never saw a bird in my travels around town. I did hear some chirping outside my window a couple of times, but those were probably the starlings that are nesting in the eaves since I no longer have a row of trees shading my parking spot.

My landlord had all of them chopped down last month.

To be perfectly honest, I was surprised to see that robin outside my place at all. It just didn’t seem logical they’d stop here anymore.

However, on the bright side, I got a lot of editing done while I was laid up. I pulled out an older unfinished manuscript trying to fix the issue I have with it and realized what I needed most was a timeline of the backstory so I could keep it straight when each event that will eventually come into play in the story happened.

I already had a calendar of events in the story. At least the start of it. But I was getting confused about the backstory details, which turned out to include just how old two of the characters were. On re-reading what I have of my manuscript, I realized their ages were too vague and I wasn’t even sure how old they are.

Then, once I fixed that, I realized I might not have their reaction in a certain scene correct, because when I wrote it, I was thinking they were younger, and I honestly wasn’t sure.

So, there I was, staring at the screen trying to decide if I should change the scene, and not knowing if Konnie would know the answer when it dawned on me that my home health aid has younger siblings in the age range needed. And she was right there!

I asked her to read that portion of the scene, pointing out the ages of the three school-aged kids in the scene, and asked her if the two elder ones (8 & 10) would understand the full scope of the conversation going on around them.

The answer was, yes, they would. The five-year-old wouldn’t, but the other two would.

Long story short, I did have the reaction of the five-year-old down pat, but the reaction of her big sisters needed to be changed.

That scene is now fixed.

Now to move on. I need to make other changes because what I did have wasn’t working the backstory in well enough, and some of it was being ignored.

And I have a feeling this isn’t going to be any regular-length novel.

In fact, it may end up as another series.

It seems when I start writing, I tend to include the whole family. And to get the whole backstory in this time, I may have to write several novels. Though I think this time I’ll do what Konnie did to her epic sci-fi and write the whole story from beginning to end, then divide it into books.

And that doesn’t include my epic sci-fi, which needs work, and I have another group of stories, of which only two are completed, but I have several others either started or in outlines.

Yeah, I really need to buckle down and finish more of these stories.

Not sure I will though, especially for the group with two completed stories, because I’m not sure I’m up to the research it would take to write her ancestors’ stories. But I really should finish my sci-fi and the one I’ve been working on.

Do any of you have a series you’re working on?

Anyway, happy writing everyone.

My Rant by Konnie Enos

As a writer, I hear a lot about self-publishing. Going this way used to mean you weren’t a good enough writer to make it in the big leagues. I’ve heard this isn’t the case anymore but I’m beginning to wonder if the vast availability of new books/authors is making our reading choices less.

It’s not that there aren’t more books out there; it’s that there are fewer and fewer well written and edited books offered. I’m also starting to discover how well written a book has little to do with the author's experience or whether or not it’s self-published.

Recently I read some books that weren’t self-published and weren’t the author's first books.

One of the stories I found compelling and it kept me reading but in the end, I felt cheated. She carefully crafted the story where one young woman was in a new relationship with ALL the red flags and her four friends were worried about her but would not listen to them when they tried to voice their concerns. She ended up running off and eloping with this man and then moving to another country in Europe. Through all of this, her friends are worried about her and trying to find ways to make sure she is okay or rescue her if needed.

My problem is, in the end, the author just drops it. Leaving this woman as happily married without ever giving the reader any reasons why the marriage isn’t abusive. If you’re going to put in all those red flags then you had better tell the reader why they were false indicators or they are going to assume the young woman is still in an abusive relationship and you didn’t finish the story.

Another story I read was about a young man who experienced both abuse and bullying growing up. The abuse was bad enough the local cops were quite familiar with his family. Eventually, during one of his father’s drunken rampages, the young man managed to hit his father just hard enough to unbalance him, causing him to crash down the stairs and through a banister to his death.

The problem is the whole premise of the story is the young man thought he’d gotten away with murder so know he’s going to kill his bullies too.

One, I can’t think of a soul who wouldn’t have seen his father’s death for what it was. Self-defense. Two, in fourteen years he killed only two of his bullies and in the same way. Then he killed one lady and attempted on another (again the same way) before making three very different attempts on one lady and another attempt on a different lady all in a matter of months. Yes, killers escalate, but drastically changing his timeline and M.O.?

I also had problems with the cops taking over a decade to figure out the first attempt was murder and another couple of years to decide who his targets were while they never realized the second and third murder had anything to do with the case and never, in fourteen years, figured out who was doing it. The clues were in the story. The entire world is not so dense they can’t figure it out.

I’m just tired of reading published stories with clear flaws in their storyline or huge plot holes, clear telling, redundancies, echo, and grammatical errors. However, what really irritates me is published books with extra or missing words. Well, that irritates me in drafts too but authors should edit well enough to eliminate this issue. They should also know their craft well enough to not have plot holes, telling, redundancies, echo, and grammatical errors in their finished product.

So I’m wondering how writers go about editing their books that they are missing these issues. Do they rely on the same handful of people who can’t get these problems fixed in their work? Do they not hire a professional editor?

I’m still unpublished, but I know I need to correct any and all of the errors mentioned above so I don’t know how or why published authors aren’t making the same effort. Yes, I’ve read books by well-known authors with an error or two, which I forgive. Somehow, they missed it in the editing. But those are small, a missed or extra word here or there. One story has a wrong name in one place (confusing but oh well, it’s just one error).

I find the ones with large, glaring errors annoying.

Since I’m still unpublished, what tips do you have, for other writers, to find and eliminate these issues in their works in progress?

Let’s work together to make our writing better.