Plotting

Today I am plotting.

Not just plotting a story but plotting a writing career. Hmmm, doesn't that sound haughty and arrogant? Plotting a writing career. As if I have a writing career. As if I have a career of any sort.

Sigh. Such thinking does not help. Back to arrogance. Yes, I mean a writing career. You just don't wake up one morning and say you're going to go out and have a career. You start training, then you serve an apprenticeship and then (hopefully) you get on a rusty, creaky, lurching wooden escalator to success: taking on more responsibility, honing your skills, expanding your network, all that stuff. And then you retire.

Hmmm ... the word career doesn't sound all that great does it?

But put writing in front of career and suddenly the words perk right up. Yes, you write, you get better, you get rejected for years, you gain a little traction, you maybe win some awards and place some stories and maybe ... just maybe get published.

Sounds inspiring and sort of soul-sucking at the same time, actually.

Okay, then so where do I start. Well, I start by writing, which is what I'm wrestling with right now. I have a ton of ideas and difficulty concentrating. I spent years of my energy on a financial memoir, which has lapsed into a coma despite regular attempts to resuscitate it, so I'm going to let that project steep in failure for a while (dramatic much?) and look at some other projects:

I have a collection of short stories, called Lunch is So Hard,
a middle-grade fantasy novel
an idea for a mystery novel

And well, that's it. So I'm plotting what to do next. Every plot has peaks and valleys, right? A continuous line of reversals until everything looks hopeless? Well, I've got the hopeless down, so it's time to climb back up.

Time for plotting, which of course makes me think of villains. Heroes are easy to create; it's the villains who provide the true magic. Ben Bova writes:

In the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil... Fiction mirrors life. Or, more accurately, fiction serves as a lens to focus of what they know in life and bring its realities into sharper, clearer understanding for us. There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds. There are only people with problems, struggling to solve them.

David Lubar adds:

This is a brilliant observation that has served me well in all my writing. (The bad guy isn't doing bad stuff so he can rub his hands together and snarl.) He may be driven by greed, neuroses, or the conviction that his cause is just, but he's driven by something not unlike the things that drive a hero.

My middle-grade novel needs a good villain, one who thinks he or she is the hero of the story. Makes me wonder sometimes, in my own life -- am I the hero or the villain?