Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

So scene sequences are what’s going to save my butt on this book, I think. Scene sequences are scenes in a sequence–go ahead and try to define “baked potato” beyond “a potato that has been baked”–and if you track the sequences you can see the shape of your story. Got it?

Okay, let’s start again.
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I’m trying to figure out where I ran off the road with my writing. Lani and I talked about focus last night after watching Laura for PopD (podcast goes up Monday), discussing it first in the podcast where the screenwriters ran off the road with Laura, and then after the podcast was over, segueing into where I took a wrong turn. I told her when I started writing, it was all juice–excitement, flow, voices talking in my head–and no craft. Then I started studying craft and about ten years ago I hit the center of the bell curve, equal juice and craft. And since then, I’ve been losing juice and relying on craft, which is not a good thing. I said, “If you have to choose between luck and skill, pick luck; if you have to choose between juice and craft, pick juice. And I’m out of juice.” Lani said that was crap, but she’s wrong. Somewhere along the line, I got a juice leak and tried to plug it with really tight craft. I don’t think it’s working. read more >>

I have always been a big proponent of write what you need to write, not write to the market. I still am. But a recent comment on Lifehacker led me to a recent post on the Wandering Mirages blog, that led me to the Hedgehog Concept from Jim Collins’s book, Good to Great. It reminds me of some of the tools in What Color Is Your Parachute, a book that helped me tremendously about twenty years ago in making some big life decisions. The Hedgehog Concept (not to be confused with the hedgehog song from Discworld) goes something like this: read more >>

Lots of commenters on the previous post said, “Write it in third and then change it back to first.” That doesn’t work for me (I’ve tried), which doesn’t mean it won’t work for you. But for me, it’s two different languages. It’s like saying, “Write it in English, and then translate it into German, and then translate that back into English.” If you’re talking about a page full of dialogue, it doesn’t matter much, but for anything else, I lose a lot in the translation both ways.

Here’s a piece from Maybe This Time: read more >>

So I’m writing a book in first person and that’s fun although different–only one POV, for starters–and then I get to the first sex scene. Hmmmm.

Here’s the thing about first person for me: it feels like I’m sitting next to somebody on the bus and telling them a story. Okay, that’s fine. But then I get to the sex scene, and even if it was Lani and Krissie on the bus, I wouldn’t go into detail, not the kind of detail I use in third person sex scenes. It just feels wrong, not morally wrong (we crossed that bridge long ago), but out of place. My Girl Liz would not do that. For one thing, it’d be a betrayal of her lover (“So here’s what he did last night . . .”). For another thing, it would probably make whoever was listening uncomfortable in real life. (TMI.) read more >>