Category: Writing

The Kiss of Deception and Surprise

I spent a lot of time last year posting individual reviews of books. A little while after I started work at the FCC, I stopped doing full reviews of every book I read, because it just got to be too much. My plan was to write reviews of books that made me think about writing in some way. And then life got busy, and then Covid started, and I’m pretty sure the only one of these I actually wrote was about Midnight Sun, and that was only marginally about the writing topic. I actually wrote this post about a year ago, but never posted it.

So let’s try all this again. My goal is to keep doing these posts going forward. Think of them as a combination of book review and writing discussion. I will try to keep these posts spoiler-free, but depending on the writing topic I’m focusing on, that might not be possible. I will flag any spoilers before I say them, though, so if you think you might want to read this book and don’t want to be spoiled, you can skip over them. I did manage to stay spoiler-free on this post, so no worries here.

So without further ado, let’s talk about a runaway princess.

Last year, I read The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, and since I just reread it, I decided the time was ripe to talk about it. This is the first book in The Remnant Chronicles trilogy. I’m planning to discuss all three books over the next few weeks, because I have so much to say.

I talked about The Kiss of Deception a little bit in my October reading roundup last year, so apologies if this post is a little redundant with that, but I want to go into a lot more detail here.

Lia is the only princess of the kingdom of Morraghan. This means she’s the first daughter and should be blessed with the Gift, a supernatural awareness of events taking place in the present and near future. But Lia doesn’t have this magic, so she knows her parents are perpetrating a sham on another kingdom when they arrange her marriage to the prince based on the fact that she has the gift. Unwilling to be a pawn in the sham, and definitely unwilling to marry a stranger she is pretty sure is at least twice her age, Lia runs away. She and her attendant and friend, Pauline, settle in a distant village and get jobs at an inn. Then two strange young men come to stay at the inn, and Lia finds herself falling for both of them, unaware that one is the prince she left at the altar and the other is an assassin sent from the barbarian kingdom of Venda to kill her. And both the prince and the assassin are falling for her too.

Before you roll your eyes—and if I could have rolled my eyes I would have when I first started reading—this book is so much more than a runaway princess and a silly love triangle. I’m so glad I stuck with it, because by the end of the book I was hooked into this world and these characters. Yes, the first half of this book is a bit rough, mostly because Lia is pretty insufferable, and there’s not much plot beyond the kind of cringy love triangle, but face it, Lia is a runaway princess, and when everything goes sideways about halfway through the book, she gets so much better. I also really loved the world building in this book. The magic system feels fully fleshed out, even if we only see a little of it in this book. What we see of the political situation is also really well-done and intricate. Since I’ve now I read the book twice and finished the series once, I can say that it feels like Mary Pearson knew where she was going from the beginning.

Another thing that I really liked is that Mary Pearson pulled off multiple points of view—Lia’s, the prince’s, and the assassin’s—without frustrating me. So many times, when we have the villain’s point of view in a book, I get frustrated because knowing what the bad guy is up to takes out some of the tension. My prime example of this is Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, especially the second book (I love it but it bugs me). Especially in cases where the main character is trying to figure out what the bad guy is up to, if we have the bad guy’s point of view and know what they’re up to, it takes the urgency out of the protagonist’s journey, or worse, makes the protagonist look stupid.

But it actually works to have the assassin’s point of view in this book. Part of the reason it works is that poor naive Lia is in no way suspicious of these two guys, so there’s still a lot of tension because we the readers know that she’s walking straight into a lot of trouble. But Pearson also keeps the mystery going for the reader too. We know the two guys are named Kaden and Rafe. We get chapters that are from their points of view, with chapter headings that tell us their names. But we don’t really get much of their motivations in these chapters. And Pearson is careful to phrase their thoughts so that they’re specific enough to not be frustrating but vague enough still that they could apply to either the assassin, or the prince. We also get chapters from the point of view of The Prince and The Assassin, where we get their motivations but no indication of who is who. So for the first half of the book, we know that Lia is walking straight into trouble probably, but we honestly don’t know whether she prefers the prince or the assassin, and we don’t know who is the prince and who is the assassin.

It was a ton of fun trying to fit all the pieces together and figure out who was who. And then about halfway through the book, the assassin reveals himself and kidnaps Lia, and the prince goes after her, and everything turns upside down.

I don’t want to say more because I’m doing my best to keep this spoiler-free, but the description of this book as a runaway princess gets involved in a love triangle with the prince she was supposed to marry and the assassin who is sent to kill her just doesn’t do this book justice. That’s the first half of the book, yes, but the second half, when Lia is a prisoner trying to escape, discovering her own power and magic and learning more about her world and how she came to be in this situation, is just so great, and in my opinion what this book is really about.

But my favorite part of the book is that it took me by surprise. The first time I read this book, I was positive I knew who was the prince and who was the assassin. And I was wrong.

In case you haven’t noticed, I read a lot. This was my ninety-first book of 2020. I also read a lot of YA fantasy. I’m really familiar with the tropes, and lately I’ve found myself able to predict a lot of what’s going to happen in books. Maybe not specifically, but very few things actually surprise me in books these days. But Mary Pearson totally surprised me, and I love it.

I’m not saying that the reveal of who was the assassin and who was the prince was unfounded. It wasn’t. When I looked back the first time I read this book, and as I was reading it for the second time, it makes total sense. So I really admire Pearson’s ability to both set up the true reveal so that it feels consistent with what’s happened so far and to steer her readers so effectively in the wrong direction. She weaves the details into the story so well it’s really incredible.

I want to note that I listened to the audiobook both times I read this, and it has different narrators for each of the point of view characters. The second time through this, I felt kind of stupid because the narrators for the prince and the assassin are the same for the corresponding named character, and that’s normally something I would pick up on. But I was so focused on picking apart the details that I got mixed up on the narrators and was actually convinced they swapped. I’m curious if there’s different fonts or something for each point of view in the print book, but I would also note that there are no different fonts in Braille, so if I had been reading in Braille I still would have been led down the wrong path.

When I was in college, I worked for the Kenyon Review as a first reader for submissions. One of the things the editors told us to look for when evaluating submissions was “surprise and delight.” I haven’t thought about that phrase in a long time, partly because I found that what surprised and delighted me typically wasn’t what surprised and delighted the KR editors—obviously surprise and delight is a pretty subjective metric. But as a reader, surprise and delight is still a really important factor in how I feel about books. If I find the book is predictable, then I just don’t like it as much. If I’m surprised by a book, and if that surprise is done well, that adds a lot to my enjoyment of the book. I was surprised and delighted by The Kiss of Deception, both because it managed to trick me and because it subverted a lot of typical tropes when it did so.

So while surprise and delight is definitely subjectile reader to reader, it also seems like something that us writers should shoot for. I’ve been thinking about ways to do this effectively since I first read The Kiss of Deception. It’s done so well in this book, and it’s also something that I was working on in my MG fantasy project around the same time I first read it.

So how can you surprise a reader?

This will depend on the kind of surprise you’re writing. If the surprise is crucial to the plot or part of the climax of the book, how you set that up will be more important than a surprise in a subplot, or even a surprise early on or midway through the book that changes the character’s direction. Obviously, when I say less important, that isn’t to say it isn’t important at all, and if you’re writing a surprise or a twist, you should definitely work to set it up well.

When it comes to a good surprise or twist, that the setup is key. You want to lay enough groundwork so that when the twist comes, the reader can feel like the twist makes sense and is earned in the story. At the same time, you want to slip those clues in among other details or events, because you want the reader to be, well, surprised. But the other things you use to distract from the important clues should also be important to the story, because red herrings that go nowhere feel like pointless distractors, and that’s no fun for anyone.

In the context of The Kiss of Deception, I think the way Mary Pearson set it up, with the chapters from Kaden and Rafe and The Prince and The Assassin, and separating the characters from their motivations the way she does, works really well for this book. We get the separate motivations of the prince and the assassin, but when we know we hearing from Kaden or Rafe, we are only given details of their motivations and opinions of Lia that could apply to both the assassin or the prince. At the same time, Kaden and Rafe are distinctive, well-fleshed out characters, so the intentional vagueness isn’t as frustrating as it might otherwise be.

Another point of interest in this setup is that it is very obvious it is a setup. By using chapter headings both with the characters’ names and with their titles, so to speak, Mary Pearson is all but inviting us to try to figure out who is who before it’s revealed. It would be a very different book if we had no idea that Kaden and Rafe were either prince or assassin. If we saw them from Lia’s point of view, as a trader and a farmhand come to stay at the inn where she’s working, the reveal that one is an assassin and one is a prince would come out of nowhere and feel unearned.

I would also like to point out that while this surprise is really important for this first book in the trilogy and is the surprise that got me thinking about surprises in the first place, it isn’t the only surprise in the book, and it isn’t actually that important to the series at large. Lia’s discoveries about her gift and what part she might have to play in the future of Venda are much more important to the series as a whole, yet the groundwork is laid just as thoroughly, from snippets of Lia’s facility with languages and the book she stole from the scholar, to the quotes at the end of some chapters, and so on. The clues are all there, but they are disguised as pieces of information to help build Lia’s character or to describe the world, and these little bits of information are overshadowed by the mystery of Rafe and Kaden for the reader, until hey, remember all this stuff we’ve been talking about all along, because it’s really important, have another twist. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t give more details than that.

There are a lot of ways you could pull off a compelling, convincing, and delightful surprise. The Kiss of Deception demonstrates at least two approaches. Like so many other things in writing, how you do it depends on the story you’re telling. The most concrete advice I can give here is to read a lot. Look at how authors you admire pull off twists. And just as important, look at books that don’t pull off twists effectively.

This probably should go without saying, but if you have a twist in your book, don’t just throw your story out into the world without getting some objective feedback from your trustee beta readers. Chances are, you’re way too close to your work to be able to tell if you’ve set up your twist effectively, and you have no way of knowing if it’s obvious to the readers or not. In my own work, I swung wildly back and forth between readers seeing the twist the first time certain character is introduced to readers not seeing it coming, not understanding it, and feeling it came out of nowhere before I found a balance that seems to work.

This is a topic I’m really interested in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve only scratched the surface here. If you have thoughts on how to successfully write twists and surprises into your work, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. I’d also love to know if you’ve read The Kiss of Deception and its sequels, because so far I haven’t found anyone else who’s read these books, and I am dying to talk to someone about them. Honestly, they may be the latest series that I go around yelling at people to read. I’ll be back soon with my whole reading roundup for October and then to talk about the next two books, along with talking about cliffhangers and strong female characters. But in the meantime, seriously, these books are great. You should read them. Go read them now!

How to Revise a Novel While Studying for the Bar

I’ve been planning to write this post since August, but I’ve been stalling. First, because I didn’t actually finish revising my novel while studying for the bar, and I wanted to focus on that. Second, I didn’t want to end up in a situation where I talked about how to successfully revise a novel while studying for the bar and then find out that I failed the bar and have to come back here and say, “Just kidding. This obviously didn’t work. Don’t do this.” That would have been awkward.

But yes, I did pass. I found out yesterday morning, and it is the best feeling. Also, a few weeks ago, I put the finishing touches on my revisions and sent them off.

So since I can now say that I successfully revised a novel and studied for the bar this summer, let’s talk about how I did that.

To be clear, it was never my intention to be revising my book while studying for the bar. I got notes from my agent at the end of March—on the eve of a job interview, actually. I reviewed them, made decisions about revisions, and planned to complete those revisions before I graduated and had to start studying for the bar. I was moving right along through April, but two things happened. First, I underestimated the extent of the revisions in some places and did not account for the extra time I would need to work through some particularly snarly bits. Also finals. Finals happened. And despite professing all semester that I was done caring about law school, when finals hit it turned out I did care quite a lot. Then after finals I went apartment-hunting in D.C., and while I snuck in some revisions on the metro, it took me the whole week to do what I would have done in a couple uninterrupted hours at my desk. And before I knew it, graduation and bar prep was upon me, and I wasn’t done. Not even close.

Bar prep was incredibly intense and awful. I had to study eight subjects for the multiple choice section: civil procedure, constitutional law, contracts and sales, criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, real property, and torts. I also had to study these subjects for the essay portion of the exam, along with agency, conflict of laws, corporations, family law, secured transactions, trusts, and wills and estates. I’m not even going to talk about the multistate performance tests. Keep in mind that I’d barely taken a third of these courses in law school, and most of the courses I did take were in my first year. Plus, law on the bar is different from law in law school. In law school, you learn how to figure out what the law is.  When you’re studying for the bar, you actually learn the law. (If you’re wondering what I was doing for the last three years, join the club.) The point is, I was studying ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I was stressed beyond belief. I certainly didn’t think there was time to revise what still felt like a whole book.

But I also knew if I didn’t do some writing, I was going to crack up. I need writing the way most people need to breathe. (I feel like someone else said that better than me at some point.) Even if everything is going great, I need to write regularly or I get stressed and cranky. But I definitely need to write when things aren’t going great. Writing got me through losing my eye in 2013. Writing got me through my first year out of college, when I was living alone in Italy. Writing got me through 1L. Writing could get me through this.

I knew this about myself, but my bar prep course was also constantly reminding me to take time for myself. In particular, they said engaging in art helps you process the bar prep materials better because you’re switching the sides of your brain. Bar prep is a marathon, not a sprint.

So I decided to apply that to revising my book too. It was a marathon, not a sprint. It also had to be a secondary marathon to studying for the bar, too. I could take my time on these revisions, but if I failed the bar I would have to do all this studying all over again. (I don’t doubt I will have nightmares about having to retake the bar for years to come.)

The first thing I did was adjust my  expectations of myself. I was absolutely not going to revise a whole chapter every day. I wasn’t even going to try that.

So I took all the revisions I had to do, and I wrote them out in a step by step list. There were characters to cut, details and whole scenes to add, things to change and remember to adjust and keep straight later on in the book. Basically, I broke the book down by chapters, and then within each chapter, I had each task laid out in bite-sized pieces. Cutting a character from a chapter might be one bite, for example, maybe two (there was a reason we were cutting them). Changing a detail to keep things consistent with an earlier chapter would be one bite. Writing a new scene would probably be several bites, so on my list I wrote “add new scene in which X happens, then Y happens,  then Z happens.” X, Y, and Z would each be a bite. My goal would be to finish one bite every day. If I could manage more, that would be great, but it was neither necessary nor encouraged.

This process also really allowed me to free myself from doing my revisions in chronological order. I’m normally tied pretty closely to drafting in order, because I don’t really believe in skipping around to the parts you want to write and then filling in the gaps. What if I never filled in the gaps? I am a little more flexible when it comes to revisions, but this time, I was really flexible. Because I’d written out all my revisions in so much detail, I had a strong sense of the big picture of my book, so I was able to jump all over the place. What mattered to me right now was getting the revisions done and also maintaining my motivation to keep writing, because that was overall better for my mental health while I was studying for the bar. I also knew that once I was done all the revisions I had written down, I would read through it again from start to finish for a final polish before sending it off to my agent. So if one day I wanted to work on a specific scene in the climax instead of changing details to get rid of inconsistencies in my world’s climate, I did that. If the next day I wanted to go through the whole book and get rid of all references to mangoes—again the climate thing—I did that and knocked out a lot of bites while I was at it. If the next scene on my list wasn’t doing it for me that day, but I was really inspired by another scene later on, I skipped ahead. If I worked on what I was excited about working on that day, I ended up feeling more accomplished and less stressed, and I ultimately ended up doing more. This did leave me with one heck of a chapter to write after the bar, because I kept skipping it, but otherwise this system really worked for me, and after the bar I felt like I could conquer the world so this chapter didn’t take too long to finish up.

Generally, I wrote at the end of the day, after I’d completed all my bar prep tasks. Once, I tried to switch back and forth between studying and writing—complete one bar prep task, do one bite of revision, back to bar prep, back to revisions. It was great for the book, but I had a hard time focusing on the bar prep and fell behind, so I stopped that. Sometimes I would do a bite at lunchtime, when I was taking a study break anyway, and in the evening. But generally I did the bar prep stuff first, then wrote. I felt better about taking time to write if I’d finished studying for the day, and if I felt better about writing, I was more motivated, and I accomplished more. Are you noticing a pattern here?

I also wrote up my list of revision in hardcopy Braille with my Perkins Brailler. This allowed me to throw out whole pages of revision notes as soon as I finished with them, and this was so much more satisfying than deleting each bite from the list on my computer.

No, I didn’t finish all the revisions while I was studying for the bar. I think that would have been impossible. But I accomplished a ton. In between everything I had to do to move, set up my new apartment, and start my new job, I made sure to set aside large chunks of time—such a blessing—to writing. I finished up all the revisions that I’d planned by the end of August, then took my time going through and really cleaning it up and polishing everything that I could. While my bite-sized and all-over-the-place revision strategy kept me working through the bar, I won’t deny that my book had some sloppy edges. I somehow managed to write at least one scene more than once. I also overwrite, and so the new stuff I added had to be pared down significantly. A few weeks ago, I sat my butt in my chair when I got home from work, revised all weekend in a mad dash, and finished everything. it was great!

I’m not saying this is the best way to revise a novel while studying for the bar exam. I’m not even saying you need to or should revise a novel while studying for the bar exam. But if you find yourself in that position, whether because you have revisions to complete or because you have a project that could use some revising and you could use a break from studying, this is what worked for me: organize the revisions into manageable pieces, take them at your own speed and in your own order, and do whatever you need to do to keep yourself feeling both motivated and accomplished. And the whole way through, stay in touch with yourself and what you need as a writer, as a student and as a human.

I’m sure that working like this would also be helpful in other high-stress situations or at times when you have a lot going on but also want to get writing done. Next time I’m working on revisions, I’m definitely going to break everything down into individual bite-sized tasks again, though I might stick closer to the start to finish order of the book, because that pre-polish draft was a bit much.

Revising my novel obviously didn’t hurt my performance on the bar exam. It might have even helped, if that brain side switching thing applies to writing as well as visual art. I’m really happy with my revisions too, and I’m looking forward to whatever comes next in this exciting new book journey. It’s probably more revisions, but this time, there will be no bar.

If Only a Word for All Things is Published

I’m a tad late on this, because I didn’t know this was happening until it happened, but I am so excited to announce that my short story “If Only A Word for All Things” has been published by Cast of Wonders. It’s been a long time coming (I got the acceptance more than a year ago), but now it’s here! You can go listen to or read the story here.

Cast of Wonders is a young adult speculative fiction podcast. You may recall they published my story “The Collector” back in 2014. I was so excited when I got the acceptance letter a year ago, because I love what they did with “The Collector” and I knew they would do a great job with this story.

“If Only a Word for All Things” is the only story I’ve written (so far) that was directly inspired by my year in Italy. It means a lot to me, and I’m so glad you can all read it now. It is a fantasy story, but the fantasy element is very subtle. It’s much more of a literary or magical realism type story. I really hope you enjoy it.

And once you’ve read the story, you can check out what went on behind the scenes and find out the story behind “If Only a Word for All Things.”

Happy reading!

If Only a Word for All Things to Be Published in Cast of Wonders

Hello friends. Today I write with some good news I’ve been looking forward to sharing for quite a while. The contract is signed, sealed, and delivered, so I can finally tell you that my short story “If Only a Word for All Things” is going to be published by the YA podcast Cast of Wonders. “If Only a Word For All Things” is magical realism, and it’s the only story I’ve written so far that was directly inspired by my year living in Italy. You may remember that Cast of Wonders published my story “The Collector” back in 2014, and I am so excited to hear how they perform this story and for you all to get to experience Annachiara’s journey across Europe to find her runaway mother. I’ll let you know when it’s published, and as always I’ll have more information about the story for you then, too.

 

Back to the studying!

2019 Check In the First

We’re just about a quarter of the way through 2019. Feel free to stop reading at this point for some existential screaming if you need to. I’m right there with you. How is it almost April? I’m still accidentally writing 2018!

However it happened, it is in fact almost April. I set some pretty ambitious goals for myself for 2019, so I thought now might be a good time to check in on my progress and course correct if I need to. So let’s go.

  1. Don’t freak out:

I have a lot of things going on this year. Last semester of law school, graduation, studying for the bar, taking the bar, moving somewhere, starting a new job, actually becoming an adult. My goal is to not panic as all this happens. I’m doing okay with that, all things considered. I’m not 100% calm by any means. Lately I’ve been having some days where I am very much a ball of stress, but I’m getting everything done that I need to get done, and I’m moving forward.

1a. Get a job:

This still hasn’t happened yet, but I have some good leads I’m working on. So here, too, continuing to move forward is good progress.

  1. Get in shape:

This has not happened. A wonky schedule during J-term, then a variety of illnesses in February meant I’ve just this month started going to the gym, and that’s been interrupted by spring break and traveling for job interviews. But I am going to the gym as often as I can. As long as I keep doing that, I’m making progress.

  1. Read 100 books:

I’ve read 25 books so far this year. If I read 8 books a month, I’ll hit 100 for the year easily, so even though I haven’t read as many books in March as I did in January and February, I’m right on target for this goal.

  1. Finish the next draft for three projects: the middle grade sci fi novel, the memory-wiping academy novel, and the WWII Italy novel.

I am nearly done with a first draft of the middle grade sci fi novel. I will almost certainly have finished a draft before I graduate. The rest of this goal is going to have to change slightly, because guys I got an agent! And we’re going to be working on revisions to my middle grade fantasy project. I don’t know how long that will take and how many drafts that will require, so I want to allow myself some leeway here. I still want to finish three drafts this year, but what they are can be flexible. And with that flexibility, I’m well on my way to meeting that goal.

4a. Get an agent:

Yes! I did this! And I am still screaming about it!

4B. Set achievable weekly writing goals:

In January, some friends and I did a mini NaNoWriMo, because November is the worst month for writing a lot if you’re a student. I set a goal of writing one chapter a week. If I finished the chapter early in the week, I had a stretch goal of writing an additional chapter, and if I did that, I got to reward myself in some way. I only ended up meeting the stretch goal once. My reward was renting The Hate U Give movie when it came out, and wow! While I only made the stretch goal once, I did write almost five chapters that month (the flu stopped me from finishing the bifth chapter), and this is a big reason I’m so close to finishing the middle grade sci fi project.

My various sicknesses in February, as well as the start of the semester and my renewed job hunting efforts, meant I didn’t get as much done in February. I had a hard time maintaining the weekly goal system without the structure of the group. But I have been moving forward. I liked the weekly goal strategy, but I also think that I have so much going on right now—finishing the semester, applying for jobs, applying for the bar, studying for the bar, revising my book with my agent—that if I try to add specific weekly writing goals on top of all that the sheer amount of things might paralyze me into not writing again. So my goal right now is to write as much as I can. When things settle down, I can be more ambitious on a weekly basis. See? Achievable writing goals.

  1. Blog more:

Okay, so, so far this hasn’t happened. We can all agree on that. But as you’ve probably noticed, I’m working on redesigning my website, and I have plans to most more regularly. I’ve already finished and scheduled a number of posts for April. So while I haven’t made much progress on this front so far, I’m turning that around now.

So that’s where I’m at. It’s a quarter of the way through 2019, and I’m making good progress. Better progress than I expected in some areas, actually. I’d like to focus on getting in shape, doing more with this blog, and of course continuing with the not panicking, the reading, and the writing in the same way I have been. And I’ll check in on these goals again in three months.

In the meantime, happy April!

Exciting News!

Friends, it has finally happened.

After years of writing, rewriting, revising, rewriting, revising again, and finally querying my middle grade fantasy adventure book, yesterday I signed with a literary agent, Laurel Symonds of The Bent Agency.

Yay!!!

I’ve known this was happening for the past couple weeks, and I still can’t believe it’s real, and I am still ridiculously excited! We’re going to revise my book and then start submitting it to publishers.

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks from when I received the call to now, and I’m looking forward to telling you about the process up to this point and what happens next. But first I have to unstick myself from the ceiling and finish my homework for Monday, because law school doesn’t stop.

Summer 2018 Part Three and Beyond: Overcoming Writer’s Block

Hey everybody. Welcome to October. We’re back to the time when it takes me a whole month to write a blog post. Sorry.

The first month of the semester has been a bit of a mixed bag. I’m enjoying some of my classes. Some classes less so. There’s so much reading, and I also got pretty sick the first week of school, which threw everything out of whack for a while. I’m having a hard time juggling all my reading, my now part-time internship at Analytical Space, my post-graduate job search, and all the things I want to do for fun. I’m definitely missing the summer, when I went to work full time, came home, and didn’t have homework. And I’m not going to lie, a huge part of my motivation right now is that by this time next year, I won’t have four hundred pages of legal reading a week to do at home. It’s such a glorious prospect.

In the last couple of weeks of the summer, I posted about the two halves of my summer and the two different internships I had. Now, I’m going to talk about a third half of my summer, which is how I finally kicked my writer’s block out the door. This is still an ongoing struggle for me, what with trying to balance writing with everything else I’m doing, but it mostly happened over the summer.

Last spring, I wrote about how I was struggling with writer’s block and balancing law school and writing. I’d never experienced writer’s block like this before, and I was pretty miserable about it. I tried all the standard advice for handling writer’s block—changing things up with the project you’re working on, starting a new project, taking walks to think about where I might be stuck, just sitting my butt in the chair and forcing myself to write one. word. at. a. time. None of it worked. A lot of it actually made me more miserable. All I could think of was that person who said writer’s block isn’t a real thing, just an excuse for being lazy. A plumber can’t say they have plumber’s block, or whatever, so the fact that I really did feel blocked made me feel like I was some kind of failure and would never have any kind of writing career. Which of course made everything worse. And round and round the drain I circled, rapidly on my way to becoming plumber’s block myself.

At the time, I was worried that it wouldn’t get better. I wrote my post from the middle of all these miserable feelings, and while I didn’t see how it could possibly get better, it did. I got through it. And I want to tell you how. If you’re struggling with something like this, know that this might not help you, because everybody’s struggle and process is different. There is no one magical solution, unfortunately. But it might help you, and if this process will help even one person, it’s worth sharing to me. So here’s what I did to overcome my writer’s block, broken down into eight steps that makes me look a lot more put together than I really am.

  1. Figure out why you’re blocked.

There are a few reasons why you might be blocked. You might be stuck on how a particular scene works, or how a character should function in a story. There might be something deep down in the project that isn’t working and your subconscious is screaming at you, but it’s your subconscious so you don’t realize it for a while. You could have just lost interest in the project. These are the sorts of blocks that changing things up, taking long walks or hot showers or whatever, or trying something new will solve.

Then there’s the kind of writer’s block you get when you’re just creatively drained, exhausted, stressed, and generally burnt-out. This is what I think was going on with me.

Figuring out why you’re blocked is key to solving the problem. As I discovered, starting new projects, changing points of view, working through snarly plot points, none of that will help if you’re drained. In fact, they’ll just make you more frustrated.

So do some self-exploration and figure out why you’re blocked. Then set out to solve it.

  1. Talk about being blocked.

I addressed this in my original post on writer’s block, but there’s this feeling in the writing community that everything has to be sunshine and rainbows. Writing is what we were built to do, and simply by writing, we’re living the dream, right? But there are struggles in the writing life, and it’s unhealthy to ignore them. More and more, I’m seeing writers and professionals in the writing industry speaking up on Twitter about what they are struggling with and what is challenging about the industry, and the support that comes out of the woodwork for them is incredible.

I’d say one of the single most helpful things I did to unblock myself was to start talking about it. I’m not saying complain about it publicly. Don’t become a whiny, miserable, bitter person. There is still something to be said about acting professionally and positively on public social media. But it’s okay to admit that you’re having trouble.

When I started talking about struggling with writer’s block, I realized that I was not the only one. That really helped me realize that I was not a failure. Friends and writers  I admire have struggled with this too. Also, it was kind of freeing to talk about it. I was no longer holding how miserable I felt inside myself. And talking about it helped me move from wallowing in my misery to accepting that I was struggling and trying to figure out how to fix it.

  1. Allow yourself to take a break.

Self care is really important, guys. If you’re struggling with writer’s block because you’re exhausted and stressed, it’s okay to take a break. Writing every day won’t get you anywhere if it’s just making you unhappy.

Once I figured out I was struggling to write because I was creatively drained and stressed out, I also realized that forcing myself to write was adding to my stress. At the time, I had a full course load. I was trying to get a second internship for the summer, and I couldn’t find housing for my first internship, and a bunch of other little things. Trying to force myself was just not helping with any of that. So I said to myself, “Self, it’s okay to not write for a while. If the problem is that I’m burnt-out, then the solution is to recharge. And right now this is the only thing I can take off my plate.”

  1. Find what has inspired you in the past and immerse yourself in that.

So I took a break. But that isn’t to say that I just stopped trying to solve the problem. While I wasn’t writing, I was still participating in my biweekly writing skype calls with my friends from Kenyon. I was thinking about my stories and where I wanted to go with them. And I delved back into some books and TV shows that have inspired me to write in the past. For me, that meant rereading The Hunger Games and the Giver series and rewatching Anne with an E on Netflix (sidenote, if you haven’t watched that yet you need to).

We all have those books and movies that have inspired us to write. They might inspire us to work on specific projects or just in general inspire us to write something. So while I wasn’t actively writing, I was immersing myself in what, in the past, had driven me to write. And little by little, I started wanting to write again.

  1. Get rid of any stressors you can.

I sort of talked about this a bit in step 3. At the time when I was most seriously blocked, I had a full course load and all the work that entailed, trying to find a second summer internship, trying to find housing  for my first summer internship in Maryland (no one wanted to rent to me for only two months with a dog). There were other things too, plus the writer’s block. I thought that part of my problem with the writing was that I was so stressed about everything else.  So I set out to get as much off my plate as I could. This is why I took a deliberate break from writing. It was something I could control. I couldn’t just stop doing the other things. Depending on your situation, you may or may not be able to get rid of your stressors. I recommend getting rid of as many as you can. Because when I got my second internship at Analytical Space, when I figured out housing for my internship at NIST, and then when my classes started finally winding down, there was room on my plate for me to act on that growing drive to write that was creeping up on me because of step 4.

  1. Accomplish one thing. I don’t care how small.

So I’d been thinking about writing and reading and watching things that were inspiring me to write. I’d gotten my Analytical Space internship, and I’d found housing for my internship at NIST. And one evening, I set our roomba to vacuum the living room. And eventually I had to study, didn’t want to study in my room and wanted to study downstairs, and the roomba was making a lot of noise. So I told the roomba to stop vacuuming and go back to its home base, and the roomba went off in the wrong direction. I was working on my final paper for my Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence course, and I jokingly said to my roommate, “Oh no! The AI apocalypse is upon us!”

And that night, I sat down and wrote a flash fiction piece about the AI apocalypse starting with a roomba insisting that it hadn’t finished cleaning. It’s short, only a thousand words (about four pages), and it’s meant to be kind of funny but also disturbing. But most importantly, it was something that I had finished. Up to this point, I’d been accumulating a vast pile of unfinished projects, so finishing something, even if it was a small, funny something, was a really big deal.

It was actually the last piece in the puzzle I’d been needing. Take a break, immerse yourself in what inspires you, reduce your stressors, and then, when you’re ready, write. And finish something. Show yourself that it’s possible. Because even if it doesn’t feel like it when you’re spiraling your way to becoming plumber’s block, it is possible.

  1. Get a few more wins under your belt.

At this point, I knew it was important to keep writing. Not a lot. Not enough to burn myself out again, because I was still in the middle of finals. But when I wanted to write, and I did want to write now, I did. And at this point, this was what I needed to do to keep myself writing. It also helped that right around this time, I got the acceptance letter from Andromeda Spaceways for my story “The Year of Salted Skies.” It was really lucky timing here, because it was just one more added confidence boost. And to some extent, because editors’ taste are so subjective, it’s kind of out of your control. But while I stopped writing, I didn’t stop submitting my stuff that was ready to be submitted. And getting “Salted Skies” published, and some other good news I got in June that I can’t tell you yet, really helped motivate me to keep writing.

  1. Look back at what happened and make a plan to do better next time.

By the time June came around, I was using all my free time to write. I finally finished revisions on my middle grade fantasy novel that I’ve been planning for a while. And I’m querying that again now. Over the rest of the summer, I started on the long path of finishing all the projects that I started and then abandoned during my months of writing block. Because I still love a lot of those ideas. I’m not writing all that fast, but I’m still writing.

Once I felt confident in my writing again, I took some time to look back at last school year to figure out what happened. I was really busy last fall because of the clinic I was in. I thought I could still do National Novel Writing Month. But the clinic project was bigger than anyone thought and quickly overwhelmed everything else. I wrote about thirty thousand words on my novel in November, and all things considered that was pretty good. But I’d pinned a lot on writing the whole novel in November, and also I’d never failed to write the full fifty thousand words in November. So here I was, totally swamped by school and work and unable to do what I wanted to do most. That, I think, was how it all started. It just got worse from there. But once I went through the steps I described here, once I figured out what the problem was, took a break and worked to inspire myself, and took baby steps back into writing, I was okay. But I don’t want this to happen again.

Ultimately, this happened because I failed to meet a goal. A crazy, unreasonable goal, but still. So what I’ve decided I need to do is to try to set more reasonable goals for myself. I’m a goal oriented person, so I’m not just going to abandon setting goals for myself altogether. But I’m not going to push myself to write a whole novel in a month while I also have a full course load and a part-time internship. Sometimes, this means I can’t do things I really want to do. For example, I really wanted to submit to PitchWars, which is a competition to get your novel mentored and then to get agents. But I accepted the fact that my third year of law school was going to be crazy, and I’d be better off waiting to submit until next year, after the bar and everything. And there’s nothing to stop me from querying agents the normal way throughout the year. I’m also not sure if I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year. This seems, even to me, like I’m not doing that much writing, but this is actually freeing me up to write, and I’m writing more because of it.

So there you have it. How I overcame writer’s block and what I’m planning to do next. I hope what helped me helps some of you. And if you’ve struggled with writer’s block for whatever reason, please share what worked for you in the comments.

The Year of Salted Skies is Out!

Hey all! Issue #71 of Andromeda Spaceways is out, and with it, my story “The Year of Salted Skies.” It’s all about droughts, magic, and sisters. You can pick up your copy of the issue here. You get the whole issue with a whole bunch of stories for less than $5, which as I said last September is as much as I spend on ice cream on a daily basis. And after you’ve read the story, don’t forget to check out the story behind “The Year of Salted Skies,” to find out where the idea for the story came from and to read about  the roller coaster that was revising it. It took seven years from idea to publication with this story. It started out a complete mess, and then it was the third runner-up for the Dell Award, and now I’m so happy that it’s out in the world for you all to read. I hope you enjoy it!

“The Year of Salted Skies” to be published in Andromeda Spaceways Issue 71

Hello friends. As it says in the title, my short story “The Year of Salted Skies” is going to be published in Andromeda Spaceways Issue #71. This story was the third runner-up in the 2014 Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, and I’m so excited it’s finally going to be published. Huge thanks to everyone who helped me edit this over the years, and stay tuned for a link when it comes out in early June.

This Too Shall Pass… I hope

Last week, I got involved in a conversation on Twitter about the challenges of writing while attending school. It was past midnight, so I let out a lot of feelings I normally try to keep tucked away. Now, in the light of day, I’m trying to crystalize what we were talking about into something coherent and at least a little bit constructive on the challenges of writing while you’re a student and, because this is how those challenges have manifested for me, overcoming cosmic writer’s block.

 

To be completely honest, all through college and the few years after college before I started law school, my friends considered me something of a writing wonder. I write a lot, and I write fast. And in college, I always found time to write. But at the same time, I was steeped in creativity. My friends were the same people in my writing group. We would set aside hours for quiet writing time. We were so involved with each other’s stories that we talked about them all the time, formulating theories, helping each other work out plot holes, and so on. And when we weren’t writing or talking about our projects, we were disecting books we were reading and shows and movies we were watching. It was a really great experience, and if you have a group like that in college, then I totally agree with anyone who says that college is the best time to get writing done. But I’ve also heard a lot of college students say that it’s hard to get writing done in college because of all the other things you have to balance, and while I didn’t really get it as an undergraduate, I’m definitely getting it now.

 

Since I left college and I’ve lost that constant, in-person writing support group, writing has become a struggle for me. I kept going through my first year of law school, partly because it was the only thing that was keeping me sane. But it wasn’t easy the way writing used to be easy. Just the other day, I saw a Facebook post from last year where I was saying that I was going to do Camp NaNoWriMo in April because I was tired of a paragraph feeling like a victory. And in my second year of law school, it’s only gotten worse. I was told my second year of law school would be easier than the first, but this has turned out to be a big fat lie, at least for me. The only real difference is that I chose all the things that are making me busy. Still, I managed to get some short stories written in the fall, and even about a third of a new novel during NaNoWriMo in November, at least before the work really hit, and I had to write a two hundred page paper and edit it four times with a partner in a month, and I stopped writing. And anything I’ve written since has been like pulling teeth and doesn’t even feel like a victory when it’s on the page.

 

I’m calling this cosmic writer’s block. It’s not like writer’s block as you would traditionally think of it. I’m not stuck on a specific story or a specific scene. I’ve tried switching projects, and now I just have about fifteen unfinished projects floating around, which of course just makes me feel worse about the whole thing. I’ve tried all the things the internet recommends for combatting writer’s block—taking walks, taking showers, just powering through because writer’s block isn’t real, and—but nothing helped. I remembered the distinction Anne Lamott drew in her book Bird by Bird, the distinction between blocked and empty. But even her suggestion to do things that normally inspire you, like reading books or watching movies or TV shows that inspire you to write really hasn’t made  much of a dent. I’m just exhausted, and the idea of writing right now feels more exhausting, and when I can’t write, I’m even more discouraged and exhausted. So even though I’m fully aware that I’m spiraling, I can’t stop it. I just have no desire to write, and since for so long writing has been the only thing I really want to do, this is really scary to me.

 

I don’t have any answers to this, except that maybe I just need a week-long nap. But that’s part of the point of this post. I’m not here to tell some story about how perseverance makes everything okay, because I can’t say that right now, and if you’re feeling anything like me, you don’t want to hear that. I’m talking about writing, but I could be talking about any number of things in my life in the past few months, and any time I try to talk to someone about how I’m feeling, they come up with some baloney about how your twenties suck and “this too shall pass.” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard those words in the past few months, I could probably pay back a big chunk of my student loans, which would be a lot more useful than that advice. Maybe it will pass. I really hope it does pass. But right now I’m in the middle of it, and it feels like it won’t ever get better, and just saying “this too shall pass” is the least helpful thing anyone can say.

 

So I don’t want to hear that this will get better. I don’t want you to present me with all the examples of other writers who have overcome this kind of block or received hundreds of rejections or who have struggled with writing as a student. What I want is to know that I’m not the only one struggling with these feelings. What I want is to have a productive conversation about these feelings and how we, the young writers and students, can deal with them. Because as far as I can tell, these conversations aren’t happening. To write about rejection and confidence issues and writer’s block and the unique challenges faced by writers who are also students, to some extent we need to talk about failure. Nobody wants to talk about their own failures. And nobody wants to come across as whiny or bitter or incapable. If you’re trying to be a professional writer, it’s not the image you want to present to the interwebs. Even I struggled with whether I wanted to write this post, but I can’t be the only one struggling with this. And if I’m not alone, then maybe writing a post about these challenges will help someone else, even if it just lets them know that others are out there dealing with the same things.

 

So here I am. I am trying to write while attending law school. At this moment, I am struggling with writer’s block on a level i have never experienced before. I’ve published a few short stories, yes, but I’ve received way more rejections, and right now my predominant feeling is that I am somehow a failure and I will never be a successful writer.

 

I hope that someday soon I will be able to write a blog post about how I’ve gotten past all this. But right now, I’m in the middle of it, and sometimes I feel like I’m not going to get past it. If there’s a magic bullet to kickstart my creative brain, I’d love to hear about it. But while I don’t have a magic bullet of my own, I do have some inkling of the roots of the problem.

 

First, I need to work on setting reasonable goals for myself. I had this crazy idea that I would write an entire novel during NaNoWriMo last November and then spend the rest of the school year editing it to perfection, all while keeping up with all my classes and clinics. This was a ridiculous goal, but it was still what I wanted to accomplish this year. And when I failed, I couldn’t pick myself up and press on.

 

As a student, you’re juggling a lot of things: classes, including homework, projects, and exams; extracurricular activities; summer internship and post-graduation job searches; having a social life; and any hobbies you want to keep up. You also have to eat and sleep. Throw consistently writing into that mix, and it’s a little mind-boggling that one person can handle so much. If goals and deadlines motivate you to accomplish things, that’s great. Set goals. But don’t set crazy goals. And when things get out of hand and you don’t accomplish your goals, you can’t beat yourself up over it.

 

Obviously, I really need to work on this. It usually works for me to set goals for myself, but when I fail to accomplish them, I beat myself up and just make the situation worse. I have realized this is a problem, and I’m working on solving it. I considered doing Camp NaNoWriMo again this month and setting a small goal for myself that I felt would be a challenge but would still be something I could accomplish. But I also recognized that I have two fifteen-page papers due this month, as well as a final play to write and perform for my french class and a final exam. I also need to get everything in order for my summer internships. And in the place where I am now, even setting myself a small writing goal would be setting myself up for failure, which wouldn’t help the situation at all.

 

This goes for goals for publication too. The publication market is so subjective, and so much of it is outside your control, that beating yourself up over success or lack-there-of is just counterproductive. The most you can do to pursue a goal of getting published is to keep writing and keep submitting. Yes, rejections suck, but remember why you are writing. For me, I’m writing for myself, because I have a story inside me that needs to be told. Beyond that, I have a close group of friends who want to know what happens next. I hope  that someone, at some time, thinks that others need to read my stories too, but if an editor thinks that’s not the case, I’m not going to let that stop me from writing, because first and foremost I’m writing for me. I’m writing because it makes me happy.

 

Finding what inspires you also helps. Generally reading inspires me to write, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been reading a lot in the past few months. But this year I’ve been reading books that I haven’t read before. A couple weeks ago, I picked up The Hunger Games books and started rereading them. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I might want to sit down and write. I first read The Hunger Games back in college, and it was a big inspiration for my memory-wiping academy novel, which I’m now editing and expanding into a series. So maybe, if you’re stuck, don’t just do things that typically inspire you. If you can pinpoint it, specifically target what drove you to write this story in the first place and revisit it. It might also help to reread what you’ve written so far and remind yourself that it isn’t complete garbage and there’s a reason you’re writing this story in the first place. Basically, find what will inspire you now, which may  not be what usually inspires you, and tap into it.

 

Remember that there’s time. Along with setting reasonable goals for yourself and not beating yourself up if you have to change those goals, remember that there’s time. Yes, it would be fantastic to write, edit, and publish a novel before you’re twenty, or twenty-five, or whatever age you pick. But you’re in school for a reason, and even if you’re studying creative writing, that reason is to learn, not to write the next Harry Potter. Also, all your experiences in school and beyond school will inspire your writing and contribute to the stories you tell. I really, really wanted to get my novel published before I graduated college, but now I’m glad I didn’t, because my experiences being on my own, separated from my family and friends, and adulting for the first time in Italy right after college really informed my characters’ struggles and decisions, and ultimately made that story stronger. So don’t freak out. There’s time.

 

And because there’s time, it’s okay to take a break to recharge. School is exhausting, and it is also constant. You are surrounded twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with school. In a lot of ways, I feel like law school has taken away everything I love to do, one by one: reading books in Braille, playing the clarinet, drawing, and now writing, mostly because I’m just too busy and too exhausted to keep it up. I’ve clung to writing, saying oan more than one occasion that it’s the only thing keeping me sane. But now I can’t even muster that up. So if you’re just burnt out, which I’m feeling like is a large part of my writer’s block right now, it’s okay to take a break, let the creative part of your brain reboot, and get back to it when you feel ready.

 

I’m only just starting to feel the itch in my subconscious calling me back to my writing projects. Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about my stories more than I have in a while. I haven’t really gotten to the actual writing part. So I could be completely wrong about these strategies for how to write while being a student or how to overcome writer’s block. I’m still in the middle of all of this,  and I’m hoping that it will get better and I can tell you for sure that these things worked for me. I hope that these strategies work for you, too, if you’re having a hard time, and I hope it helps to know that you’re not alone in your feelings. And I would love to hear others’ opinions on how to overcome this cosmic writing block and how to successfully manage being a student and writing.