Join me in welcoming Mary Eastham to The Roses of Prose.
Whenever I want to write faster, my
go-to challenge is NaNoWriMo, a free contest held every November challenging
you to write a book in a month. I wrote the first drafts for my books The
Shadow of A Dog I Can’t Forget and Squinting Over Water during a NaNo challenge.
I finished a first draft of my third book Little Earthquakes– Fast Lit To Go in
the November 2016 Nano contest. Here’s
the plan I followed. Hopefully it makes you a faster writer too:
1. Each night, an hour or two before I fell asleep, I wrote
down what I wanted to accomplish in a story the next day. I brainstormed the
perfect conflict for my character, the highlights of scenes I wanted to write.
I tried to determine how he or she loves ‘cuz come on, isn’t that at the core
of most good stories?
2. If I got stuck in my writing, I followed the good advice
of an L.A. screenwriter who suggested writing down the words AND THEN and keep
going. If I’m still stuck, I ask myself: What are my story’s interesting
events? Do my character’s meet randomly or is there an interconnectedness
nobody saw coming? Does the story have any dark secrets, any crash and burn
moments? If I was really stumped, I got some exercise, either a fast run or
some jumping jacks and push ups! I try to remind myself often of why I write –for
me it’s to find out what every story is about.
3. During this manic fast writing month, I kept a fragment
file. Good ideas are everywhere, sometimes you just don’t know where to put
them. I found the name for my narrator in Little Earthquakes, Holliday Crisp,
on a discarded apple crate in a Whole
Foods parking lot! As writers, we’re all little spies. Nothing is ever lost on
us.
A good resource book I found is Master Lists for Writers by
Bryn Donovan. If I found myself using
too many he said/she saids, I’d open up Bryn’s book where she’s got lists of
everything we need to create a great story broken down into sections:
Descriptions (Gestures, body language, emotional descriptions,
evocative images);
Settings – (Sounds, scents, 100 interesting settings for
scenes); Plotting; Action – (Words for action scenes, sex scenes, that show
attraction, etc.); Dialogue; Character Names; and Character Traits. I never
used an exact idea Bryn suggested but just reading through some of her lists
got me back on track with my story.
Here’s my quick take on what fast writing is to me:
F= Feel your character’s mood & emotions. What does your
character want? What obstacles
are in the way? Get that all out on the page.
A= Accountability. Nothing keeps me writing faster than
deadlines like NaNo.
S = Scenes, surprises, side trips & set backs, your
story needs all of this.
T = Try to thread what matters most to your narrator
throughout the story. Like the hem on a dress, you can’t see it, but it does an
important job.
Thanks for having me! READ…READ…READ… & WRITE…WRITE…WRITE.
For inspiration anytime, please contact me -marylovesdogs@sbcglobal.net
Twitter: @WordActress
Instagram: wordactress/Mary Kennedy Eastham
Website: www.rp-author.com/MKE
Thought I’d share with you a story from my third book Little
Earthquakes:
TRUCK
STOP
A human
life lasts an average of 30,000 days. The man on the phone said it was Exit 89.
I asked him to repeat it twice. We’d know it, he said, when we crossed the line
from California into Nevada and saw the giant drive-in theatre screen they
forgot to tear down. It’s just a truck stop now, he said, an easy in and out
for guys like him, too long on the road. His voice softened. I can still
remember wiping the extra butter, melting down the sides of those big tubs of
popcorn from my baby girl’s pretty lips. She’s a teenager now, making bad
choices. He blamed himself. A lawyer
already told him all about us. There wasn’t much else to say. We arranged to
meet on Wednesday, early evening.
The summer
wind was easy that night. I hung my head out the car window
ready to puke, thinking we should turn back. The exchange
was quick. He handed us each a twin baby and that was that. Kentucky Fried
Chicken Wings and a warm Coke split between us and we were a family. The babies
whimpered in my arms, a first cry for us, that sound like fireworks in the
crescent mooned sky. My husband found an easy-listening station, something he
thought the babies might like. Driving away that night, SUV tires crushing tiny
pebbles under us, the lights on the freeway were firefly eyes open to young
strangers making babies they couldn’t afford at a truck stop, and me with a
dream in each arm, the Ziploc bag I’d crammed half our savings into blown flat
against the windshield as the radio announcer said we were now 280 days into
the year and they’d just felt their first little earthquake on the
California/Nevada border.
