Road Trip Wednesday: Moving the Block

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: How do you beat writer's block?

Look what Calvin did to us, folks. Just look.

I struggle with two types of writer's block:

1. My muse is taking a nap/I'm not inspired.
2. I've pantsed the entire novel and now find myself in my underwear with nowhere else to go/I don't know what should happen next.

If my muse is asleep, I bribe it with artistic activities that will inspire it, such as reading and dancing. Reading's good if my muse is fully rested, but if they're groggy from an hour-long sleep, I need to dance. Dancing makes me raw--though I'm not as big of a fan of her as others, Adele's music is the best for this--and that naked, pumped-on-adrenaline state allows me to write with the honesty I need to.

If I'm in my underwear, I look for pants. I recently realized that writing through blocks does not work for me, because the plot either goes nowhere or somewhere ridiculous (gosh, I love plot-twists far too much), and my frustration causes my writing to fall flat. So, I close my document, hide my computer, and go for a walk, out to coffee, to my couch to watch Big Brother, anything that will distance me from my novel. Even I leave to do something mindless like the dishes or laundry, I don't intend on focusing on my novel. But, if I'm bored, I default to thinking about my novel, from there I brainstorm, from there I come up with plot points, and from there I write. The most important thing is that I take time and space away from my novel.

In both scenarios, I also like to act out my scenes. When I had to play Romeo in a performance for my Shakespeare class (this paragraph gets better and better, doesn't it?), I struggled to project my voice. To practice, I acted out a fight in my novel, and because I knew it would be easier for me to project as characters I cared about, and I'd go from there. That exercise did more than help me with my performance, it inspired me to write. Even if I don't go as far as acting, I'm always talking to myself through my stories.

Like anything else, sometimes these methods work, and sometimes they don't. They're a start, at least, an attempt to move the block Calvin gave us.

How do you beat writer's block?

Love Triangles

I know.

Love triangle has become a taboo term in YA. They're overdone! They're unrealistic! They're melodramatic! They anger me so much I need to use exclamation points to express myself!

Yes, they're overdone, yes, they can be unrealistic, yes, they can be melodramatic. But, they can also create suspense, they can make your characters more sympathetic, and they can be an adequately dramatic plot-device. They can be awesome.

There's an important love triangle in my current WIP, so I've been interested in exploring what makes my favourite love triangles so successful. Using the example of Jason/Lyla/Tim from Friday Night Lights, I'll share what I've found. 

For those of you who haven't seen the first season of Friday Night Lights, there will be spoilers below. Also, if you haven't seen Friday Night Lights, why not? Get thee to a DVD store, Netflix, Hulu for you lucky Americans, and watch all five seasons. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be all WTF at season two, and it'll be good times. Promise.

So, the Jason/Lyla/Tim saga can be summed up with this quote:

Lyla: What do you want to talk about, Tim? The fact that you're sleeping with your paralyzed best friend's girlfriend?

Uh, yeah. Jason and Tim were best friends, on the football team together. Jason and Lyla were together, the perfect quarterback and cheerleader couple. Jason becomes paralyzed after a football accident, and his relationship with Lyla suffers. Lyla turns to Tim, they have sexy!times, Jason finds out, Jason tries to fight Tim, at one point they run off to Mexico...you know the story. Here's a fan-made video I found that showcases all the teenage angst of their triangle, set to one of my favourite songs:

This is what I think makes this love triangle successful:

• Everyone is connected. Love triangles are often two guys who love the same girl, but have no connection to other (except, perhaps, for a shirtless fight over her.) Jason and Tim, however, were teammates and best friends. This leads to:
• High stakes. If Tim gains Lyla, he loses his best friend. He also loses the respect of his teammates, since he betrayed their paralyzed hero. If Lyla gains Tim, she loses Jason. She also loses her perfect reputation--as is shown so well in the episode It's Different for Girls--as she cheated on her paralyzed boyfriend. Lyla's also a Christian, and after she has sexy!times with Tim, she says, "I just hope I don't go straight to Hell for this." All of this gives the audience a reason to be invested in the outcome of this triangle.
• Love. It's easy to see Jason and Lyla as couple who are together because they're supposed to be, but I think the show makes it clear that they do--or, at least, did--love each other to some extent. It's easy to see Tim and Lyla as a couple who are together just to rebel, but considering their constant on and off relationship, the audience knows they love each other as well. Tim's guilt over Jason's accident and everything else he does for Jason, even after Jason ends their friendship, shows that he loves Jason.
• There's no Good Guy and Bad Guy. I think most Friday Night Lights fans shipped Tim and Lyla over Jason and Lyla, but I don't know of any who hated Jason. No matter who you want to be together, the show encourages you to root for everyone's happiness. 

Many of those points are connected, which I think shows that a good love triangle needs two factors: three well-developed characters readers care about it, and confusion. Invest your readers in your story, create suspense through confusion as to who should be who with who, and you'll be on your way to writing a successful love triangle.*

* Take all of my advice with a pound of salt, especially since there are always exceptions. 

Road Trip Wednesday: Setting

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: What is the most inspiring setting you've ever visited? 

The picture on the left is of the mountains in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I lived in Almaty for a month, and the walk to the university involved fifteen minutes of walking along a canal with an incredible view of the mountains, and fifteen minutes of walking in a beautiful park.

Almaty was a new, foreign, and beautiful city. I fell in love with it.

But it hasn't--and I don't imagine it will--inspired any stories. The city that has inspired multiple stories, and really, has had the strongest influence on who I am as a writer? 

Orangeville, Ontario. 

Uh, yeah. That's Orangeville, and it's as average of a town as that picture makes it look. I have family there, so my summer vacations have been in Orangeville for as long as I can remember. Maybe I'm so inspired by it because it was the first time I saw people living day-to-day lives outside of Nova Scotia, but I didn't think that way when I was five.

I was fifteen when we were driving through Orangeville on a vacation and I thought: Wow, this place is small. Really, it's not that small, but it certainly was in comparison to the city I grew up in. 

From there, I thought of what it would be like to live in a small town, and from there, characters were born, and from there, a plot was beginning to form, and by the end of the car ride, I knew I had something good.

And for a fifteen-year-old who didn't know who I wanted to be as a writer, I did. I wrote a ridiculously long piece of  fanfiction and had the most fun I'd ever had writing. Looking back, it's so bad--I was re-reading it the other day and yelling at myself, honestly--and I wasn't totally oblivious to that back then, especially once I had some distance from it. I knew the writing wasn't great--not to mention that I was yet to realize loose and lose were two different words, the dramatic "I don't want to loose you!" scene lost some of its effect--and the plot was sloppy, but there was something in the characters and the heart of the story that was worth something.

I realized that I'm a character-driven writer, that I love to write about relationships (romantic and non-romantic ones) and it's what I'm best at it, and that I really love to set my stories in small towns, or at least in a setting with few people and few distractions from each other (like the cottage where three people stay in Duets.) The majority of the work I've written since then has taken place in an intimate environment, even if that wasn't my intention when I started the piece. It always turns out that way.

I always loved going to Orangeville because I loved seeing my family, but now, I love the town itself, too.

What setting has inspired you?

A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler

Fifteen-year-old Aura Ambrose has been hiding a secret. Her mother, a talented artist and art teacher, is slowly being consumed by schizophrenia, and Aura has been her sole caretaker ever since Aura's dad left them. Convinced that "creative" equals crazy, Aura shuns her own artistic talent. But as her mother sinks deeper into the darkness of mental illness, the hunger for a creative outlet draws Aura toward the depths of her imagination. Just as desperation threatens to swallow her whole, Aura discovers that art, love, and family are profoundly linked—and together may offer an escape from her fears. (Summary taken from goodreads.)

Based on its premise, Holly Schindler's Playing Hurt is my perfect match. I love reading about romance, sports, physical disabilities (especially in the context of sports), and love triangles, and Playing Hurt has all of the above.

But my library didn't have it. They had her debut novel, A Blue So Dark, which looked like a great book, but a great book for someone else. Poetic prose, mental illness, exploration of art, little romance...it just wasn't my type.

But it does have a gorgeous cover, so even though I wasn't crazy about the premise, I took it out because it was good looking. Ahem.

I approached it thinking: Ok, I'll try to appreciate this book for what it is, but if I can't get into it, it'll be nice eye-candy.

Now that I've finished the book, I realized the book approached me thinking: You have no idea what I'm going to do you. I'm going to go so far inside you that you'll forget what's fictional and what's real. I'm going to bring up memories and emotions you've worked for years to forget because they hurt too much. I'm going to explore your biggest fears...

And show you there's a way out of them. I'm going to show you that you're ok.

I'm going to make you write again.

Sure, I could talk about this book's gorgeous prose, realistic characterization, incredible portrayal of relationships...but who really cares when a book does that to you?

I have no experience with mental illness, so I did not see this coming. But I had a mom, and I have best friends, and I've had crushes, and I'm a writer. And I understood Aura's experiences, even if mine were different.

I'm between projects and haven't written more than 2k in the past two weeks. I had plenty of ideas, but I wasn't inspired. I didn't remember why I wrote, and honestly, it was all starting to seem pointless.

But I read this book, and I remembered, and then I wrote. And I'll just keep writing.

Road Trip Wednesday: Do You Hear What I Hear?

Road Trip Wednesday is hosted by YA Highway.

This Week's Topic: The Five Senses. How you use them in your writing, how you are inspired by them, pictorial essays, that character with smelly socks, books that have used them well, the ones that are currently missing from your work, etc.

Guys, I'm so bad at this. Detail is not one of my strengths as a writer, so I rarely write passages which describe a sunset, the sound of a train, the texture of snow, etc. 

My current WIP, Duets, calls for description. My last novel was intentionally set in Nowhere Specific--it's a nice place--but Duets is set in the maritimes, where I've lived all my life and love too much to misrepresent. Also, the three main characters in Duets are musicians, so sound and how that affects all the other senses is incredibly important.

I'm going to share what inspired this novel in terms of the five senses, and hopefully it'll help me see what details I need to incorporate in this novel.

Sight

The ocean, especially when the waves are big

The inside of a cottage, where my characters stay

Smell

One of my absolute favourite smells: Sunscreen

 Touch

The texture of saltwater-hair

Taste

Barbecue!

Sound

Since Duets is about, well, duets, there are so many songs I could've picked for this. The Civil Wars' album Barton Hollow pretty much is my playlist for this, and I chose "Forget Me Not" to represent it because this video is adorable and captures everything I love about The Civil Wars. Most of the music in Duets is folk or country, and this is its playlist (which is also a work in progress) if you're interested: Duets' Playlist.

How do you use the five senses in your writing?