My thoughts about Harry

Last Saturday Big Chimp and I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. 

We chose the time carefully—we didn't want to be tired, or distracted about going to work the next day. We paid extra to go to an 18-and-over screening to avoid loud kids. We ate beforehand and bought water bottles and candy to keep us going throughout the film. I used the restroom at the last possible minute—after the commercials had finished and the movie trailers had started. We had our earplugs ready in pockets (we use them to protect our ears during loud scenes). I had on my freshly ironed Harry Potter T-shirt (Comic Con 2010). In short, we were thoroughly prepared.

The reason for all this preparation is simple: I love Harry Potter, and I wanted the experience of watching the last film to be perfect. Of course, I needn't have bothered with all the preparation; from the first scene to the close of the epilogue, I was lost in the story. I have no problem in admitting that I was in tears a couple of times (I was prepared for this; I cried while reading the book, too).

The Harry Potter films can never be what the books are for me—in fact I don't think any film could be what a novel is for me—but that didn't stop me from loving this film. Sure, they changed some things, but I thought it worked well; I don't think it's possible to be entirely true to a book in a film adaptation anyway, because books and films are such different things. One of my co-workers warned me not to get my hopes up for the movie as it was bound to disappoint. But I didn't find that at all. It was everything the trailers promised: it was visually beautiful, full of action and excitement, dark but with touches of humor here and there to keep it from being too bleak.

Balancing writing with your day job

Today has been a really good writing day for me. The words have just been flowing steadily for a few hours now. I may have mentioned that I'm rewriting most of the first half of Water Magic. I'm now 18,350 words into the rewrite, and it's looking really good—way, way better than my rough draft. And I seem to have reached a balance between my household tasks—running to the grocery store, tidying up, exercise, laundry, cooking, wedding planning—and my writing time.

Problem is, not every day is like that. There's this thing that gets in the way—I call it my "day job." And as far as day jobs go, it's not so bad. I work in a library, hanging out with the books and the people who like books and the people who need me to help them find books. Which is cool. But when I spend a full day at work, including the 45-60 minutes of travel each way to get there and home, I'm really, really tired! So tired that sometimes when I finally get home and settle down on the couch, I open my WIP and just stare at the screen for ages, trying to will my brain to think of something clever for the dragon-speaker to say (or the sorceress, or the brownie, or the water spirit). And sometimes I can't do it. I'm just too exhausted. And that makes me feel pretty bad. After all, everyone knows that writers are meant to write every day. One of my favorite authors once told me that in person.

So I've been trying to think of ways I can keep to the "write every day" rule even on days when I'm working, or just have a lot of things to do. Susan Sipal from Harry Potter for Writers (an amazing blog that you should be reading if you love Harry Potter, especially if you're a fantasy writer) suggested getting up an hour early and getting some writing done in the morning before work. I think that's a good idea, but with my level of sleepiness in the mornings I'm doubtful that I could stick with it. Another idea I had was to take my writing notebook to work with me, and outline/work on the chapter I'm focusing on that week during my lunch hour. I normally reserve that time for reading, but I could read when I get home instead.

I don't know. Do the rest of you writers struggle to find a balance between writing and other commitments? What time management strategies work best for you? I'm going to be searching for a second job at the end of the summer, which will make my schedule even fuller, so I'm in desperate need of advice!

A shed of one's own

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

I love when authors and aspiring authors post photos of their writing spaces. There's just something fascinating about seeing the places where other people do the same thing I do every day.

I've been wanting to do a "writing space" post for a while now, but until we moved into our bungalow last January, Big Chimp and I were living with his parents. It was a comfortable enough set-up, but my writing space was limited to a corner of the bed in our bedroom. However, after the move, I found myself lucky enough to have an entire room dedicated to writing:

(Don't) Explain yourself!

So, there's this TV show here in Britain that Big Chimp and I like to watch. It's called Springwatch, and it's a live nature show broadcast over three weeks every spring. These people put cameras everywhere: bird nests, badger setts, fox dens, bat caves, and anywhere else you can think of out in nature. It's a fun, informative program. But a couple of years back, Big Chimp noticed one of the presenters, Chris Packham, doing something funny. As Packham talked about the animals, he would drop in titles of songs by The Smiths. He never acknowledged or made reference to what he was doing, and I probably wouldn't have even noticed it if Big Chimp (who is a huge music freak) had not called it to my attention. Shortly after that, we noticed something else—the note cards Packham was holding had artwork on the back of them—album artwork.

As the show went on, we began to appreciate it on two levels; we were still learning all about Britain's amazing wildlife, but we were also playing the game of seeing how many of Packham's popular culture references we could spot. Last year, Packham was at it again, but with song titles by The Cure. This year, it was all about sly references to Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers. And the allusions didn't stop there. At one point, while examining a nest of writhing grass snakes in a compost heap, Packham took a small model airplane from his pocket and placed it on top of the pile. Then he walked away, moving on to the next segment without any further explanation.

Springwatch presenters Chris Packham, Kate Humble, and Martin Hughes-Games*

Birthday resolutions

I like to make birthday resolutions. They make more sense to me than New Year's resolutions because after your birthday you're starting a whole new year of your life. And a new age requires new dreams and goals. Last week I turned twenty-six. Here are a few of the resolutions I made:

1. Read more poetry—Whitman, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Larkin, Eliot, Lowell...I read a lot of poetry in college, but I've spent a lot of the past couple of years reading novels, novels, novels. Which is great, because of course I love novels, but I think it would be a mistake to neglect reading poetry. This weekend I retrieved my copy of Leaves of Grass from its dusty shelf and I've been happily reading my way through "Inscriptions," "Starting from Paumanok," and "Song of Myself." My Kindle will be arriving next week, and I'm already planning all of the poetry volumes I want to put on it.
2. Read more nonfiction—history, biography, popular science, social science, memoir...nonfiction books provide immeasurable opportunity for learning. As they say, knowledge is power.
3. Draw more—I have a modest collection of art supplies that has been too often neglected over the past couple of years. Vincent van Gogh decided he wanted to be an artist at the age of twenty-six. Why not me too?
4. Finish drafting my novel—Of course. I want to finish my second draft, get some feedback from my beta readers, and edit some more before sending it out to betas again. I want to have had at least one round of feedback by this time next year.
5. Learn Spanish—just because I've always wanted to.

So, what about you, blog reader? Do you like to make plans and set goals—literary or otherwise—around your birthday, or am I the only one?

What I've been doing (not writing, for once!)

 Exploring Scheveningen, the Hague, Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Hanging out in Amsterdam.

 Learning about art.

 And history.

 Meeting this man and his dog.

 Watching the Foo Fighters perform at the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf.

Feeling infinite.

 Riding retro bikes around the Hague.

And visiting the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice.

How long should my chapters be?

As I'm revising and rewriting away on my manuscript, I've been thinking a bit about chapter length. What is a good chapter length, and what makes it so? In my WIP, I've noticed that my chapters are getting longer in my second draft. I'm taking what were previously two or more chapters and combining them, so where in my rough draft I had chapters averaging around 2,000 words, I'm now averaging about 3,000 to 4,000 words.

So what are the determiners that decide how long your chapters should be?

Genre

You may have noticed that different genres tend to have different chapter lengths. Literary fiction, with its generally slower pace, its emphasis on character rather than plot, tends to have longer chapters, and sometimes no chapters at all.  The benefit of having longer chapters is that the author can get deep into a character's mind, immersing the reader in that character's world and viewpoint without interruption.

Young adult, which I've been reading a lot of lately, by and large has shorter chapters  (in the YA novel I'm currently reading, Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, the chapters are sometimes only half a page long), as do crime fiction, thrillers, and other fast-paced novels. To have longer chapters in fast-paced books could be exhausting for the reader, and could cause the action to drag. Short, episodic, choppy chapters can add to the sense of excitement in the story, moving the reader through the novel at speed.

(That's not to say that literary fiction doesn't ever have short chapters or action, or that all YA books are fast-paced or have more emphasis on plot than characters. Of course there is plenty of overlap between different genres, and YA alone has lots and lots of subsections—contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, romance, historical, etc.—and authors obviously have their own individual ways of dealing with pace and plot.)

Tension

So much of deciding when to end a chapter depends on finding a great stopping point in a scene—what will make the reader want to continue on to the next chapter? What questions does the ending of the chapter answer, and more importantly, what new questions does it raise? This isn't to say that every single chapter should have a crazy twist at the end or a breath-stopping cliff-hanger—save those for the really important points in the plot—but there have to be enough unanswered questions, enough curiosity evoked in the reader to keep him or her engaged in the story and wanting to continue.

So, writers, do you ever have trouble, as I sometimes do, deciding where to end a chapter? Do you prefer to write short, episodic chapters, or longer, more continuous ones, or does this change depending on what you are writing?

Readers, what sort of chapter length do you like in a novel? What about in a nonfiction book?