Choosing Not to Muzzle the Muse...Or Her Associates

Sometimes, my characters won't keep quiet.

After I finished Chasing a Second Chance, I was determined to revise another novel. One with different characters. One that had been sitting patiently on my hard drive as I continued to wrestle with Marita, Angel, Charli and all their friends.

At first, I stuck to my guns, as my mother would say. I was making progress, too: tightening prose, clearing hurdles, bringing revised pages to my critique group....

Until the characters from Casting the First Stone/Chasing a Second Chance started chiming in.

They didn't want to be in the book I was working on (fortunately). Oh, no. They wanted one of their own.

Another one.

They actually started clamoring for more attention as I was finalizing the revisions on Chasing a Second Chance, giving me all sorts of ideas for what should happen next.

Next? They were supposed to be finished after Casting the First Stone.

But, I'm no fool. When the muse visits, you drop what you're doing and offer her a cup of tea. I jotted down all the ideas, even typed up a scene or two to humor them and organized everything by character so that when I finished my revisions, I could return to my notes and figure out what I (they) had been thinking.

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Were they satisfied? Of course not. Jealous of the new characters (perhaps), they continued to tempt me with story ideas. And, like the author who dreamed them up in the first place, they're no fools. They knew exactly how to do more than tempt me -- how to suck me in so that just keeping notes   (no matter how beautifully organized) and writing partial scenes wasn't enough.

I had to write.

So, here I am, writing the third book in a one book series, while simultaneously revising the novel I'm determined to breathe life into. Not surprisingly, I can be as stubborn as they are.

But when the characters visit, I drop what I'm doing and offer them a cup of tea.

I might even take them to Starbucks.

Anatomy of a Sprint

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One of the best things about the break between semesters is the opportunity to put my writing first. And, thanks to a great presentation by fellow writer Ramona DeFelice Long, one way that I do that is to make sure I get my writing sprints in. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know all about my writing sprints, so you understand that getting myself into the habit between semesters (when I have lots of one hour time slots at my disposal) makes it easier for me to maintain the habit once the semester begins.

For me, the ideal sprint remains the one Ramona taught me: one hour, first thing in the morning, before the day takes over, with a goal of writing 1000 new words. This is the gold standard, the one to which I aspire.

The reality, however, is somewhat different.

On a good day, my one hour sprint consists of sixty uninterrupted minutes sometime early in the day. Because I have a high school student living in my house, and because procrastination is part of my writing process anyway, these sixty minutes rarely occur right out of the gate. I usually putter for a bit, checking email and often writing and posting my blog before settling in for my sprint, which occurs anywhere between mid-morning and bedtime.

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Some days, I end up with a split sprint -- the first thirty minutes in the morning or early afternoon and the second thirty minutes in the late afternoon or evening. I try not to cut my sprint into more than 2 pieces, but some days, it happens.

Perhaps the most useful sprint variation I've stumbled across is the sprint as a means of digging into an unpalatable or overwhelming task. For me, that task is revising. I hate revising, but there's something about breaking revisions into one hour chunks that makes the process much less painful. By telling myself I have to revise for only an hour, I've already taken an insurmountable task (revising an entire novel!) and made it more approachable.

I rarely "cheat" and count writing I'd do anyway (blog posts, for example) as my sprint time. Regardless of how I do it, when I do it, or how many chunks I break it into, I think sprinting is meant to advance a work-in-progress.

What task do you want to tackle, but keep putting off? Could a sprint be the answer for you?

5 Questions from the Porch Swing for Cate Masters

Today, I'd like to welcome my friend Cate Masters to my porch swing. Hi, Cate!

Hi, Lisa! Thanks so much for having me on your cozy porch swing. I love how relaxing it is here.

What have you written? Writing's a constant evolution for me. I began writing poetry, as a girl, and then fell in love with journalism. Then short stories, then novels. I concentrate on the story, not what label a publisher might need it to fit under. My contemporaries might have a bit of fantasy, my historicals (especially lately) have some fantasy or steampunk, my paranormals might dance along the line of fantasy, or mix the two. I've always loved fairy tales, too, so elements of those show up in various stories. Same thing for mythology. One story I'm finishing up is futuristic and the other, well, I have no idea what a publisher might call it. The most important thing to me is the heart of it, and of the characters.

What do you read? You've probably already guessed that I'm an eclectic reader. From Ray Bradbury, to Tolkien, to Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Alice Hoffman, Neil Gaiman, T. C. Boyle, Dean Koontz -- I want to be all of them rolled into one, LOL. My latest obsession is steampunk.


Why do you write? I just always have, and I always will.

Fun writing factoid (not technically a question, I know): Starting in about third grade, my friends and I all wrote poetry and songs together. It was the best childhood, and we're all still friends.

One more thing: I write under another pen name for mainstream stories -- C. A. Masterson. I'm probably going to write under two other pen names for steampunk and futuristic stories.