To my disappointment, after explaining how much I liked the job, my friend sighed to himself and told me I should be an art teacher.  I was a bit taken aback, and appreciated the thought until I heard his reasoning.  The phrase ‘waste your talents’ came up more than once, and I know he meant it in the best way…But still.

It bothered me a little once I thought about it again later.  Truth is I had already thought of teaching as a career path, and I’m still considering it.

Put simply, I think I’d go insane if my day job (because that’s what it is to me.  ’Writer’ is the career title I’d rather have on my sleeve) was in the least bit creative.  I think it was in Ignore Everybody (Hugh MacLeod) that a point was raised about a man who went after the dream job that started as a hobby and ended up just as depressed as he was working the meaningless cubicle work.  The hobby died away.

When and/or if I become a professional writer, painting will be my hobby.  Right now they both are, which is why I’m so freakin’ busy.  This was the mistake I saw in considering to be a graphic novelist — sure, it’s a story and it’s made all pretty; that should suit both my talents fine, right?  But it’s a whole other skill set I just don’t have.  It’ll never be a career; nor, I think, would I truly want it to be.  Side projects done for the simple joy of it.

So hell.  I might yet consider the teaching thing for if ever the bills get tight, but for now I’d rather keep my passions in the realm of hobbydom.  As hobbies, my writing and art is mine and mine alone.  They’re like toddlers to me.  I’m not nearly ready to let go of them yet.

It was a little over a month between the first idea and me actually sitting down to write the first page of the rough draft.  I would write out extensive dot jot notes in the beginning, then think up scenes on sticky notes and rearrange them until they vaguely resembled something like a story.  Then, used those notes to write in- depth chapter summaries.  After that I’d make charts about each chapter, organizing what each scene would do for the story and how the characters would evolve.

I don’t think all that was necessary. But hey, I like being organized. The way I understand it, after some brainstorming most outliners write up paragraph summaries of their chapters before they feel ready to start writing. That’s probably enough for me as well, but I really liked the outlining bit. So I dragged it on for a while.

On the downside of that, I used up a lot of time before I had really started working. I was having a great time organizing everything, sure. But I could have started writing a couple weeks earlier. Then there’s the fact that I had decided my outline was mostly worthless after writing a dozen or so chapters. So I started over, and that time I outlined significantly less.

I liked that story a heck of a lot more than the outlined one. I still used most of the concepts I had come up with while outlining, just used everything a little differently. What did I learn that works best for myself? Outline to a general feel, but take the time to get to know your characters before you do anything else. I have a character profile* that I fill out with every new major character, some questions that help me analyze their personality and make them more concrete for myself. It’s very useful questionnaire, asking me to think about everything to do with my characters down to the last detail.

Once I had my ideas set, I loved to let my fingers work out the story in their own time. The first rough draft I wrote with the outline wasn’t very fun to write. I had to follow my guidelines too closely for it to be fun. I love being organized, but that didn’t really work for writing.

Could have just been a fluke, of course. But next time? I think I’ll try to outline as little as possible, see how it goes. Rusalka’s outline won’t get very detailed. A paragraph per chapter. Maybe I won’t even bother for the next one. We’ll see when it comes to that.

I was very, very certain that I’d be an outliner, and didn’t even think I could work better organically. Beginning writers would do well to try both methods, and a few variations in between; not just assume they already know what they’re doing.

* As incredibly useful as the questionnaire is, I don’t want to post it here. I copied it off a website sometime back when I was just starting to write at about nine years old, so I have no idea where it came from. I might try to find the source sometime, because it is very good, but just in case whoever wrote it wouldn’t like it posted without a credit, I’ll leave it out for now.

Upsides:  Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast was the very first writing resource I found when I decided once and for all that I wanted to be a writer.  Very thorough, covers just about every question a beginning writer would ever think to ask.  Mur gives tips of her own, as well as author interviews and answers questions from listeners.  There’s also a LOT of episodes, old ones you can download from the site in archives, regular episodes, as well as (as of recently) ISBW Lite episodes every single day.

Downsides:  Well, if you’re like me and you have a relatively low bandwidth cap but can’t stay away from Mur’s sweet, sweet voice like crack – there’s a LOT of a episodes.  It can be a lot to fish through if you’re looking for the answer to a specific question and aren’t quite sure what episode it might be in.

2.)  http://www.writingexcuses.com/

Upsides:  Writing Excuses is probably the most fun I’ve had listening to a podcast.  Hosted by Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Howard Tayler.  These guys have great chemistry and make for wonderful listening.  They’re entertaining as well as informative.  Like ISBW, there are a lot of episodes available and the feed is very regular with new content.

Downsides:  The episodes are only about fifteen to twenty minutes long.  Occasionally that’s an upside if I’m not in the mood to listen to something that drags on for long, no matter how helpful the topic is.  But sometimes I feel like their topics could be expanded on a little bit more than they are.  Sometimes they call can of worms on topics that don’t get followed up on (or not very quickly), though only rarely.

3.)  http://www.stormwolf.com/thesecrets/podcasts/

Upsides:  Michael A. Stackpole runs The Secrets podcast and a Newsletter counterpart that goes into vastly more detail than the podcast does.  Sometimes uses his own books as examples to make his points even clearer.  He is very helpful, and very detailed in his topics and overall a worthwhile listen.

Downsides:  The Secrets is either not being updated anymore or updates so rarely I’m not entirely sure it ever will be continued.  I am subscribed in iTunes and find the archive episodes still useful, but I wish there was more content.  Also, some of the archived episodes off his website are (unlike ISBW and WE) not for free — though I understand he has every right to ask for payment, but it’s still a downside to my own wallet.  Just sayin’.

The next day I began to outline my story.  It took about a month of plotting and planning before I started writing, and then I ended up restarting the project almost entirely from scratch because of a substantial plot change early on.  Two months had passed before I started the rough draft of Summeryear that I ended up keeping.  That rough draft has become a first draft after an intensive edit, and now sits comfortably in the hands of two remaining beta readers out of five that I had sent it to.

The first readers – all beloved friends – who have responded already with notes and comments have been incredibly helpful.  It’s a goal of mine to have a final draft finished and ready by Halloween so that I can begin sending it out to publishers and agents, or consider less conventional options (Podiobook, self-publishing, etc).  Regardless of when or if I ever get published, I want to do this story justice.

I tend to be hard on myself after a writing session, thinking that it wasn’t great (but as the wonderful Mur Lafferty* always says – you are allowed to suck) and that I’ll end up redoing most of it in an edit somewhere along the line.  Even through what I perceived were the sloppiest bits of writing I had ever pounded out in text, I was irreparably and irrevocably in love with these characters and their story.

And that is, as far as I’m concerned, the most important part of writing – loving it.  That I do, so I will write for all my life.  And that starts here, with Summeryear.

* Mur is a fantastic writer and podcaster, check her out: http://www.murverse.com/ and the I Should Be Writing podcast: http://isbw.murlafferty.com/