TALES FROM THE REWRITE, by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer

Last week when I was at the beach, I worked on reading (aloud) the proof copy of Cat Winter, one of my latest WIPs and the 2^nd book of the Cat Seasons Tetralogy. The manuscript has been through several edits, a beta reader, and a trip to my editor, so I went into it thinking, with a few tweaks here and there, the book would be ready to publish. The first pages came off without a hitch; then the red lines began. The way I proof is to mark directly in the proof book with a red pen—soon there were more pages with red lines, circles, and arrows that not.

Okay, that's pretty normal—for both Cat Café and Cosmic Cat, I slogged through two full proofs before I was happy. But then I ran into a bigger conundrum: you see, Cat Winter, like all the Cat Seasons Tetralogy, is in two parts. The first part is relatively tame violence-wise, but part two, when my heroes travel back in time to antediluvian South America, things begin to get ugly. I suppose like many of us, I had been traumatized at a young age by stories of atrocities committed by people of that era. I'm not sure if it was a catharsis to write about such horrors, but none the less, I got down and dirty. That would be fine since this isn’t by any means a “cozy” story, except that part 1 of the book flows in a completely different vein. The ultra-violence doesn’t fit. I need to tone it down. This means a huge rewrite. Not what I had planned.

How much violence do you tolerate in your fiction? How much do you enjoy? Where does violence fit into your taste in books? 

With the pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests, our penchant for reading violent stories is changing. We no longer want to hear about the rogue cop who does it all his way, no matter what laws he breaks or who gets hurt. But we don’t want a tiptoe through the tulips either. 

Cat Winter, being a sci-fantasy about cats saving the world, doesn’t have any cops, but it’s not all tulips either. Rewriting is hard, sometimes harder than the original draft; still, it’s the right thing to do. Be warned, however, I won’t be throwing out all the carnage. It’s way too much fun! 

Note: Cat Summer, the first book in the Cat Seasons Tetralogy, published by Fire Star Press last year, just won the Cat Writers’ Association Muse Medallion for best sci-fi/fantasy book 2019! This prestigious award is an exciting badge of honor for my debut sci-fantasy.

SHUT UP AND WRITE, by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer

Artwork: Mike Maihack

Christmas is coming! The emails for holiday book events are piling up in my inbox. Some of my best events are during the holidays, but it just adds more stress to an already stressful time.

When I get all balled up in promotion, I sometimes forget why I’m doing this in the first place. I long ago accepted my writing would never make me rich or famous, but a few bucks and a few fans mean a lot, so the promo must go on. What also must go on is the writing, itself. The story must continue, because that’s what it’s all about.

I love writing, though it isn’t terribly easy for me. After a stint at the computer, I feel like I’ve hauled a few truckloads of hay, then run a five-mile marathon. Carted a boulder up a steep hill. But I love that boulder and will do it again soon as my mind recovers enough to carry on. (The purring cat on my lap reminds me to mention that writing is a perfect opportunity to spend time with a favorite feline, as long as you don’t plan on moving too much.)

So even now I am being distracted from my stories. Blogs, announcements, posts, event pages, not to mention the daily living stuff like vacuuming and feeding the cats. All important, all reaching out to me like needy children vying for attention.

“Yes, kiddies, “ I say to the chorus of demanding cries. “All will be done in its own time.”

I press save, exit the program, turn away from the computer, and—tea in hand—move to my internet-less laptop which is where the stories happen.

The cat follows me, curling up for a quiet nap.

Check out more blogs by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer at:

Mollie Hunt: Crazy Cat Lady Mysteries and more

Happy reading!

Plotter or Pantser?

Writers tend to fall into one of two broad categories: plotters or pantsers.

Plotters are those individuals who tend to have every aspect of their story recorded in a detailed outline before they ever put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard as the case may be. The most die-hard of outliners  may even include sticky notes and color-coding in their process. I am both in awe of and somewhat baffled by these people. While I am a huge fan of both sticky notes and brightly colored pens, outlines are beyond me.

You see, I fall firmly into the pantser category. What's a pantser? In short, we don't outline, we fly - or in this case, write - by the seat of our pants. Outlines just don't work for me and never have, no matter how many well-intentioned teachers insisted on them. As much as I enjoyed my various Enlish/literature classes, the constant insistence on outlines brought out my rebellious streak. I never wrote an outline until after I had finished the paper. I never understood how I was supposed to know what I was going to write until I wrote it. I still don't.

Outline? No outline? There's no one right way to write

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A friend and aspiring writer recently contacted me with a few writing-related questions. She was taking an online writing class sponsored by a well-known author and said that he had them doing a lot of outlines and wanted to know if I did them. I told her that I do not. Of course, he is a best-selling author and I'm not, so my advice might not carry as much weight but I think the most important thing is to find what works for you and run with it. In my case, when I begin a story I know who my main characters are, how they meet, how the story begins, and how it ends. I also have a few random scenes and pieces of dialog that fit somewhere in between - the rest comes as I write.

I enjoy seeing the story unfold as I write. My husband is still baffled as to how my characters can do things that I don't plan but it happens all the time. When I was writing Dial V for Vampire (released by Fire Star Press last year), the hero suddenly offered the heroine a job. It caught me completely off-guard and wasn't what I had planned at all. I had to take a step back and rethink my story line a bit but I think the story worked better for the change.

I could probably force myself to outline but I think my stories would suffer for it if I did. I know me and if I commit an idea to an outline, I'm probably going to make myself to stick with it even if it isn't working. Not having an outline hanging over my head gives me more flexibility. In my newest short story, It's Meow or Never, I had a hard time writing the ending. I knew how I wanted the story to end but it just wasn't working. Every time I sat down to work on it I just got bogged down. I started thinking of it as the story that refused to end. Then one day I had a flash of inspiration - I removed the hero's fluffy white kitten and replaced it with a pit bull named Elvis and bam. The end of the story fell into place like magic. Who knew a pit bull could make such  a difference?

Fellow authors, are you  a plotter or a pantser?

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WRITERS’ BLOCK, by Mollie Hunt, CatWriter

One of my most useful writing tips came from an unlikely source in an unlikely place. The place was a mega-Star Trek convention in Las Vegas; the source was William Shatner, known best for his role as Captain Kirk in the short-run but long-lived Star Trek, the 1966 to 1969 original series. 

To be fair, Bill Shatner has written a multitude of  books of his own. Goodreads lists 95 with 61784 ratings at an average of 3.78. He has several sci-fi & sci-fi series (yes, he brought Captain Kirk back to life after his untimely movie death in Star Trek Generations) as well as non-fiction. His most recent are Leonard, memoir about his long-term friendship with Leonard Nimoy, and Spirit of the Horse: A Celebration in Fact and Fable, a subject Mr. Shatner knows and loves. And we mustn’t forget his 1999 classic, Get a Life! where he mocks the Trekkies for not having anything better to do than play Star Trek. (A stance he recently rescinded after setting out on a mission to discern the true meaning of Star Trek and its hold over a legion of devotees. “Though Star Trek’s fandom may be rooted in science-fiction,” he writes, “it revolves, and thrives, around friendship, belonging, love, hope, and understanding.”)

 

Shatner is no slacker, in fact he’s one of the most driven people I know. He dives into his projects with passion and enthusiasm. He pushes himself to deliver the best he can create. He seeks and learns with every accomplishment. So with 95 books under his belt, (even if a number of those have been co-written) he has to have gained some perspective on the craft. At the convention, on stage with 15,000 Trekkies watching, he proved it. 

The format for the con’s guest stars usually begins with a few minutes of talk and then questions from the audience. Most of the questions for Mr. Shatner have to so with Star Trek and his famous role as Captain Kirk. “What was your favorite episode?” “ Tell us some of the behind-the-scenes anecdotes.” “Why aren’t you in the new movies?” But one young man asked another sort of question: 

“What do you do when you get writer’s block?”

Shatner didn’t hesitate. “When you get writer’s block,” he said, “it’s because you’ve gone wrong somewhere in the story. Go back to the last place that your story worked and start from there.”

Simple. Elegant. True. 

People ask me why I go to Star Trek conventions? I can honestly say that, among other things, it’s to get writing advice from William Shatner.

Next time: A revelation from another Star Trek writer alum, David Gerrold.

Check out more blogs by Mollie Hunt at:

Mollie Hunt: Crazy Cat Lady Mysteries and more 

 

Happy reading!

Write to Express, Not to Impress

The definition of a writer’s voice, as found on Wikipedia, is “the individual writing style of an author, a combination of their common usage of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works).” I believe that each writer’s voice is as unique and natural a part of them as are their fingerprints. However, learning to trust that voice can be hard when faced with the overwhelming amount of writing advice we are inundated with each day.  A writer can’t swing a pronoun without hitting advice - it’s everywhere and most of it begins with the word never:

“Never use adverbs.” (I kind of feel sorry for the poor adverb. It gets such a bad rap.)

“Never use a dialogue tag other than ‘said.’ ”

“ ‘Said’ is over-used as a dialogue tag. Change it up.” (Did I mention that much of the advice conflicts? No? Well, it does.)

“A chapter must be at least five thousand words.” (No. Just no.)

Trying to follow all of the advice given not only stifles our voice, it can completely stifle the creative process. To be honest, I’m still learning to navigate the advice minefield. As a general rule of thumb, I’ve learned to avoid the advice that begins with never. I’ve got enough living under my belt to be a firm believer in the old adage, “Never say never.”

For those times I am feeling overwhelmed by what-ifs, and should-I’s, I fall back on the one piece of advice that has saved my writing sanity more than once: Write to express, not to impress. 

I’ve learned that when I am really struggling, when the words are feeling heavy-handed or I’m staring at a blank page, unable to begin, it’s usually because I have started writing to impress. When writing to impress, I become more focused on the turn of a phrase rather than the story I am trying to tell. Writing to impress also means that I am worried about what others might think of what I am writing, or whether it meets the myriad of “rules” that I’ve read that week. When that happens, I have to take a deep breath and remember why I write, which is to express all of the stories that I have to tell.

Once I put my focus back on the story, make that my story, the words come easier. There is nothing like the feeling when the words suddenly click - that feeling is what lets me know that I’m once again using my voice to tell my story. After all…

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