Anna Staniszewski

Post-Revision Crash

Jul 30 2010 | Comments (7)

On Monday afternoon, I finished reading through my fairy tale revision one last time and decided it was finally ready to send off to my agent. After it was out of my hands, I was excited and exhausted all at the same time. And that was the beginning of what I’ve been calling the “post-revision crash.”

There’s a weird sense of emptiness I always get the day after I finish a big revision. Tuesday I wandered around aimlessly, my fingers itching to work on something but my brain still stuck on the fairy tale. So I told myself to relax and kick back with a book. It kind of worked.

crash Wednesday the sense of emptiness turned into irritation. Now that the revision was done, I felt like I should start thinking about what to work on next. But the other projects waiting in the wings are in their infancy; diving into them might be a bit premature, especially since I’ll probably have to do some more revising once my agent gets back to me about the fairy tale. So I tried to keep myself distracted, and tried very hard not to think about writing.

Thursday I hit a wall. Not only could I not think about writing; I couldn’t think about anything else either. It was like my brain had decided that if it couldn’t write, it wasn’t interested in doing anything at all. I was in full-out crash mode.

And now it’s Friday and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. I may not get any writing done today, but I’ve decided to at least sit down and try to brainstorm ideas for some possible other projects. And since the fall semester is quickly approaching, it wouldn’t hurt to do some work on my syllabi either. So it looks like, days later, I might finally be coming out of my post-revision crash.

Have you ever experienced a post-revision crash? What do you do to get yourself back on track again?

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Giveaway Winners and Some Writing Links

Jul 28 2010 | Comments (8)

Thanks so much to everyone who entered my Celebration Giveaway. I got lots of great suggestions for funny books, and now my reading list is downright ludicrous. Okay, on to the winners. According to random.org, they are:

Medeia Sharif

and

Rebecca T.

yay

Congrats to both of you! I’ll be emailing you shortly with further instructions.

In other exciting news, my guest post on writing “The One” is up on Adventures in Children’s Publishing today.

And now for some writing links:

-Agent Mary Kole looks at picture books vs. short stories

-The wise James Scott Bell lists three elements to focus on in first drafts

-And Guide to Literary Agents has a helpful guest post on backing up blog content

Happy Wednesday!

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Making a Story Your Own

Jul 26 2010 | Comments (13)

Today I wanted to talk about fairy tale retellings, especially since that’s what I’ve been focusing on in my writing recently. Right now I’m about halfway through reading Ash, a retelling of Cinderella by Malinda Lo. I’m really enjoying the story and the writing is lovely. As I’ve been reading, I’ve been thinking about the balance of familiar and unfamiliar in fairy tale retellings.

With Ash, I sped through most of the first half of the book in one sitting, wondering what would happen next. The funny thing is, it’s a Cinderella retelling, so in theory I know what the outcome will be. But Lo strays from the familiar story just enough to keep me intrigued. I suppose that’s the appeal of retellings; we know the basic story, but we want to see how the author changes it and makes it her own.

While Lo’s story starts off on a familiar note (girl loses parents and becomes her stepmother’s slave) the supernatural element in the story is much richer and darker than the magic in most traditional versions of Cinderella. And then there’s the romantic element: while her stepsisters are pining away for the prince, Ash is developing feelings for a huntress. This is where the story really takes on a life of its own, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Ultimately, I think a retelling succeeds when the writer finds a way to give the familiar story new life, when she uses the original as inspiration but gives it a new identity and purpose. My fairy tale isn’t technically a retelling (it’s inspired by a few different folk tales) but I’ve still been thinking about what makes the story mine. I suppose that’s something every writer should ask him/herself, whether we’re writing fairy tales or not.

(Check back on Wednesday when I’ll announce the winners of the Celebration Giveaway!)

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Starting Your Story in the Right Place

Jul 23 2010 | Comments (14)

The other day I picked up a book I’d been looking forward to reading for a while. Sadly, I couldn’t even get past the first chapter. The first few pages were almost all description of the setting and of characters we hadn’t met yet. After that, the narrative launched into an extended flashback; it felt like I was being told about an important event instead of actually being able to see it. The overall problem? The story had started in the wrong place, so much so that I wasn’t compelled to keep reading to see when the real story would start.

I know this is something I’ve mentioned in the past, and it’s one of the big points of Les Edgerton’s Hooked; one of the main challenges that writers face is figuring out the right place to start their stories. It’s a tricky balance. Ideally, the story should start at or near a moment of change, but we need to be clued in to the character so we care that things around her are changing. That, I suspect, was the reasoning behind keeping the pages of description and the flashback at the beginning of the book mentioned above. But ultimately those were symptoms of not trusting readers to “get it.”

If you find that your entire first chapter is essentially an explanation, you might want to consider scrapping it. Some people might argue that readers no longer have sufficient attention spans to appreciate slower-paced books and that all readers want these days is action. But I would disagree. Readers want tension. We want to see things happening instead of being told about them. Ultimately, we want to care about the characters by living their stories along with them, but that can only happen if we feel like we’re right there with them from the beginning of the book, instead of having to wait pages and pages for the actual story to start.

(Just a reminder: It’s the last day to enter my Celebration Giveaway! But don’t worry, the party will continue even after the contest is over.)

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WIP Update: When You Can Smell the End

Jul 21 2010 | Comments (10)

Just a reminder that my Celebration Giveaway ends on Friday! Okay, so do you guys remember that fairy tale retelling I’ve been revising (and complaining about) for months? Well, the end is finally in sight – I can smell it!

Yesterday I finished rewriting a scene and realized it was the last one that needed major reworking. Now it’s time to go through the entire manuscript one more time and make sure it all holds together and flows. I also realized that my time line in the story doesn’t quite add up; it’s supposed to take place over the course of two weeks, but I think I’m going to have to map it all out and make sure that’s actually true.

After all that, my wonderful husband is going to read it. He was one of the first people to see the first completed draft, so I’m hoping he won’t read this version and tell me he liked the old one better (which has happened before). But the end is near, at least for now, and that’s a great feeling.

How are you all doing with your WIPs? Is anyone else nearing the end?

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Two Great Story Recs

Jul 19 2010 | Comments (12)

Ugh, my website is being temperamental today. I had to delete this post and start over, without pictures this time. Hopefully it will work. Okay, here we go: I love recommending good books and movies to people, and it just so happens I’ve come across two of them in the past couple days.

On Saturday, my husband and I went to see Inception, the new Christopher Nolan movie. The ideas were brilliant, the special effects were awesome, and the acting was great (even Leonardo DiCaprio’s). I think what made the movie work particularly well for me was that every scene was necessary and moved the story forward. Often in action flicks, I find half the scenes rather boring and pointless: they’re there for explosions rather than plot. But in this case, nearly every scene felt necessary, and I loved the ending.

On Saturday I also started reading Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass. I’m only about 75 pages in but I’m just loving it. Partially it’s because it’s exactly my kind of story: a magical mystery. But as I’m reading, I’m also admiring the writing and story-crafting. We meet a sympathetic main character on page one and, almost immediately, we’re thrown into a strange adventure with her. The story isn’t super fast-paced, but it’s full of tension and anticipation. I can’t wait to read more.

Are there any good books or movies you’ve come across recently that you’d like to recommend?

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WIP Update: Working Through Distraction

Jul 14 2010 | Comments (15)

I’ve been a little distracted recently. Between book deal excitement and new dog excitement and it’s-so-hot-my-brain-is-melting excitement, my WIP has been a tad neglected. But this week I decided enough was enough: I was going to work on my retelling if it killed me.

Monday was hard. I couldn’t stop checking my email every two seconds and going on Twitter and the Blueboards, and talking to the dog, but finally I managed to get some actual work done. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to tell my husband: “I actually wrote today!”

Yesterday, it took me a while to get focused, but finally I went to e.ggtimer.com and set it for 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes I only checked my email once; the rest of the time, I worked on a new scene. And when that timer went off, I kept writing because I’d finally gotten into the zone. Within an hour and a half, I’d written the scene that had been intimidating me for weeks. It’s not pretty, but at least now I have a draft of the scene that I can rework.

So now it’s Wednesday and I’m almost halfway through the WIP. Even though I’m sure there will be lots of distractions today, I’m determined to keep working. Now that I’ve found my way back into the zone, even if it’s only for an hour or two at a time, the task of revising doesn’t seem so huge. My goal is to get to the end of the manuscript by Friday – think I can do it?

How are you all doing with your WIPs? Are you drowning in distractions or are you managing to work through them?

BTW, have you entered my celebration giveaway yet? You know you want to!

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How It Happened

Jul 12 2010 | Comments (26)

One of the things people have been curious about with MY UN-FAIRY TALE LIFE is the process of writing it and finding a publisher. It’s a bit of a winding story, so pull up a chair and kick back. Here it is, the (somewhat long) story of my funny little book.

The Story is Born

Way back in 2007 I was working on a very dark and somewhat depressing manuscript. While I was enjoying writing it, being in that dark place was starting to get me down. So, to find some kind of balance, I also started working on what was then called JENNY THE ADVENTURER. What inspired the story? A medley of things, I guess – lines and ideas I’d picked up that I wanted to use somehow. I wrote the book in spurts, giving my husband and my writing group chunks to read along the way.

When I’d revised it a bunch, I sent JENNY to an editor who I knew through a grad school friend. The editor got back to me a while later saying she loved the ideas and the characters, but the plot needed to be much tighter. I wasn’t sure how to even attempt to rework the story at that point, so I put it aside and focused on other things.

The Story is Revised (A Lot)

Fast forward to June 2009 when I signed with my agent with a different project. Joan asked me if there were any other books I was working on. I told her about JENNY, which I had just finished reworking with my new writing group. She said there’s always a market for funny MG and encouraged me to send JENNY to her.

When Joan got back to me, her comments were eerily similar to what the editor had said: great characters and ideas, but the plot needed tightening. Based on Joan’s fantastic feedback, I wound up cutting two pretty major characters and simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. Then I sent it back to her and waited.

Joan’s next feedback made me really scratch my head. She said that while the plot worked much better, she felt that I now had a voice issue. From the beginning, the story had been in third person. I’d been going for a smart narrative voice to help bump up the humor, but I guess what it was really doing was distancing us from the characters. Joan suggested I simplify the voice, but it just didn’t seem to want to work.

The Story Finds Its Voice

One day, on a whim, I rewrote the first chapter from Jenny’s POV. The results made me giddy. It was like Jenny had been waiting to tell her own story, and boy did she have a lot to say! I rewrote the entire manuscript in first person and sent it off to Joan. She was thrilled! We tweaked a few more things (including putting in a new element to make the ending more logical) and JENNY went off into the world.

Well, I’d like to say that the first editor who read it snatched it up, but it didn’t quite work that way. We got some very nice rejections and one revision request. After the first round of submissions was over, Joan and I chatted about what to do next. I was leaning more towards revising, even though I’d just spent weeks revising another manuscript and was pretty burnt out.

Finally, based on Joan’s suggestions, we decided to send it out to a few more editors before embarking on any more revisions. And among those publishers was Sourcebooks. They were enthusiastic about the project from the start, though they did have a couple concerns (namely the title). So after some brainstorming, Joan and I came up with some possible new titles and a few taglines to help pitch the story. It worked! And thus MY UN-FAIRY TALE LIFE was born.

And that, boys and girls, was the very winding journey of young Jenny the Adventurer. Good thing she’s a feisty gal, or she might have given up long ago…

Edited to add: If you have a minute, hop on over to the Elevensies where I’ve put up a post about myself and my book. Coming up with 11 random things about myself was really hard!

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Celebration Giveaway!

Jul 9 2010 | Comments (48)

First off, I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who commented on my BIG news post and sent me emails and tweets and Facebook messages. I was just overwhelmed by all the congratulations and kind words – you guys are awesome! What better way to keep the party going than to give away some books?

The Prizes:

Since my debut novel, MY UN-FAIRY TALE LIFE, is a funny middle grade story, I’ve decided to give away two of the most hilarious MG books I’ve ever read.

THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY by Adam Rex

and WHALES ON STILTS by MT Anderson

I will be choosing TWO winners. Each winner will have the choice of receiving both books in paperback or one of the two books in hardcover.

To Enter:

- Comment on this post and tell me about a hilarious book you’ve read recently. (1 entry)

-Become a follower of my site (click “Join This Site”) and leave another comment telling me so. If you’re already a follower, or my friend on LiveJournal, leave a comment letting me know. (1 entry)

-Post a link to this contest (on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and leave a separate comment with the URL. If you post in multiple locations, please leave a separate comment for each URL. (1 entry per link)

***Basically, whenever you do anything that would give you another entry, leave me a separate comment to let me know about it.***

Please note:

The contest ends on July 23rd at midnight EST. Make sure to check back to see if you’re a winner; you’ll have 30 days to collect your prize or some lucky soul will snatch it up instead!

The contest is open internationally as long as the Book Depository delivers to your location (please make sure your country is on this list).

Good luck and happy reading!

Comments (48)