The fourth grader stared me down, her nose twitching. I shifted beside her desk, where a laptop displayed her personal-essay-in-progress.

“Was I supposed to bring lunch?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes and thrust her chin into her palm. She might be nine, but she definitely had the teen angst down. “No. The compliment sandwich.”

“Yes, oh, sorry.” As a parent editor, I was supposed to first give a compliment to the student, then make a single constructive suggestion, then finish with one additional compliment.

I scanned the essay. “Um, this part where the coach screams at you–very vivid.”

The eyes rolled again.

The students were all at the point of their essay revision that turned them apathetic. I totally understood their impatience. How many times had I written something quickly, loved it, and wanted to proclaim it done? Oh, so there’s a plot hole or two, and that one character just sort of disappears. And yeah, seventeen pages of backstory exposition is a lot…but it’s good stuff! If we mess with it, we might lose the voice! Disrupt the flow!

I’m also an impatient critique buddy. I know we’re supposed to compliment each other, support each other, keep each other going in the face of near crushing rejection from the industry. But I want to get to the problem, the slow sections, the confusion, the part where I might fail.

Recently I asked (nay, begged) my two writing groups to help me revise Jinnie Wishmaker on an impossible timetable. Thirteen (my lucky number) amazing writers read my book OVERNIGHT and sent me comments the next morning. In a crazy two-day crunch, I fixed most everything they pointed out, things I hadn’t been able to see in two years of writing and revising. And the unbelievable thing — they were all so kind! They were careful not just to point out the weaknesses, but also the parts I shouldn’t mess with.

At no point in the process did I want to just give up. Snuggled within the compliment sandwich, the bitter parts were easy to ingest, and I managed to make it a stronger work (and not break what wasn’t broken.)

I’m known as a hard-core critic. But I’ll learn from this, and along with making a bigger, better book, I’ll try to be a more careful, considerate editor.

Here are the killer 13. They ROCK.

From my Austin critique group Novel-in-Progress:
John R. Jones, children’s illustrator
Melanie Typaldos, author of Celeste and the Giant Hamster
Melissa Gaskill, Travel Writer
John Burch, 3D animator and sci fi writer
Cindy Phillips
Mark Geppert

From Verla Kay’s Blue Boards, the most wonderful place for children’s writers on earth, as I’ve never met a single one of these writers in person, and they helped a virtual stranger:
Kellie DuBay
Alanna Infinger
Larissa Hardesty
Mary Ann
Sharon
Anne
Janel

Writing a good sentence will get the happy squeak from me. For young Elizabeth, it’s anything pink. For Emily, it’s achieving a high score on her favorite games.

But there’s been a whole lot of guinea pig impressions at the Roy house lately. First, Jinnie Wishmaker, my book for 9-12 year olds, was named a finalist in the Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest. That’s top five. Whoop! The winner will be announced June 26.

I’ve also been working with a team to produce an iPhone application with an original story and some killer technology. They needed a writer, and I pitched a story that would work well not only for the current app, but also for sequels and product tie ins. That project is hurtling through production, and all three of us girls get a good squeal in every time the illustrator forwards a new set of images from the story.

There’s nothing better than seeing your characters become real! I’ve already pitched story number two with an open door for number three, and that one may go international, with the setting in Japan.

So many exciting things! Wish me luck!

It’s time for that screenwriting challenge of the year, ScriptFrenzy, where we write 100 pages of a new movie, TV show, graphic novel, or other script in the month of April.

I’ll be serving as ML (i.e., head honcho, cheerleader, glorious leader) for the Austin area for the second year.

And in honor of this…an embed (here’s the link shoud it break: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFicqklGuB0 )

But back to business. I have so many talented friends, and one of them emailed me last week asking if I would like to be part of a project to create a short film this summer. He wanted to try his hand at directing, and looking around at our circle, we had a videographer, a graphic artist, a working actor, and myriad creative types. “What we don’t have,” he wrote, “is a story.”

Just a little over a year ago, I started writing film scripts. I got involved mainly because I knew nothing about it, had not spent years studying it, and therefore could completely fail at it and not mind a whit. I participated in ScriptFrenzy, adapting one of my novels to the screen as a way of trying to edit it down to the essential story. Turns out it was the perfect method for me. I realized where my story’s turning points were weak. I shored up dialogue. And ended up with a much stronger manuscript that immediately started getting requested again by agents.

But then a funny thing happened. I entered a screenwriting contest, and advanced to the quarters on first try. I wrote another screenplay, and it advanced as well. I joined screenwriting groups, and made some contacts, and upon hearing my story ideas, directors were asking to read my scripts.

This was all very strange to me. I had studied novel writing for over twenty years, and still had not broken into the industry. And here, with amateur knowledge, I was having more success with scripts than all my years of writing combined.

As so often happens in film, far more than in book publishing, things fall through. Special effects aren’t in the budget. Another script has more energy. I didn’t mind. I was having a blast.

And I’ve kept my scriptwriting exactly for that — fun. I am now in charge of ScriptFrenzy in April, and love every minute of it. Since my friend asked for ideas for what to shoot, I’ve come up with several: two four-minute comedies, a five-minute art film (which I am totally going to shoot myself if we don’t do it), and a fourteen-minute psychological thriller.

If art is about feeling that happy creative buzz, about that sensation that you are living in the moment, and taking down your impressions of life to be captured in something more concrete than time, then screenwriting is exactly what I love to do.

I still write novels. And I’m still serious about them. In fact, one is out with agents and one is under heavy revision. And with all these story ideas blossoming in the last few days, some of them might become short stories instead of film scripts.

But I am so inspired to try this new medium. The director and I meet tonight to go over script ideas and decide the level of scene changing, number of actors, special effects, and sound we can accomplish with the equipment we have.

And of course, films like this definitely make me want to stretch a bit, and reach for something lovely and lasting.

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

Cynthia Lord. Her book Rules is probably the most re-bought and gifted book of my life. It’s about the sister of a boy with autism, and the voice is so great, the story is so wonderful, and the lessons so keen, that I can’t help but pass it to friends and family touched by autism, including my own niece and nephew.

Sonya Sones. I read What My Mother Doesn’t Know several years ago and now I anxiously await each new title. Sones’ stories are told in verse, and are so funny, so emotional, and so true. You don’t have to be a teenager to be affected by her characters.

Margaret Atwood. Atwood had me at The Handmaid’s Tale decades ago. I own almost all of her books. I got The Year of the Flood for Christmas and can’t wait to tackle it. When I forget how lovely language can be, how intricate a sentence, how delicate a description, I read Atwood.

Annie Dillard. I knew about The Writing Life but had never picked it up until this year. The first chapters resonated with me so much that I immediately began rewriting drafts of some of my novels, searching for words that were better than the ones I had chosen, hoping to elevate each paragraph beyond an idea to be communicated and into prose poetry. I’m reading A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek now, and enjoy so much how she obviously labors over every choice of a word.

Betsy Byars. I read Summer of the Swans as a girl and I still pick it up again and again as an adult to remind myself that just because a story is written for younger readers, doesn’t mean it can’t be languorous and full of meaning. I don’t have to make the book hurtle along if I don’t want to, but the story can move by its tension, not its breakneck pace.

I look forward to the authors and books 2010 will bring!

But that’s not the main reason why I go.

There are things in writing that are easy to master, if you put your mind to it. We begin to learn the first layer in grade school: spelling, punctuation, grammar, paragraph structure, beginnings, middles, and ends.

The next level most people don’t truly conquer, because they stop writing as soon as they are no longer in the presence of an evil-minded teacher who forces them to. It’s about the story telling: characters, setting, theme, and plot. People who love reading and writing in high school and college begin to see these elements in stories even when not writing a two-paged essay on them. They become eager to apply these concepts to their own work, layering them into their stories with equal attention.

Many literary-minded college courses and even professional workshops stop at this point, although some will move on to smaller pieces of the puzzle: scene structure, dialogue, transitions, pacing, and more poetic word-smithing techniques such as alliteration, consonance, and rhyme–all good pursuits.

I was stuck at this level for decades. I kept taking classes, joined critique groups, and read books. But one additional layer needed attention. And it wasn’t one you could easily come by, because it was large, unwieldy, subjective, and ever changing: writing to the audience.

I think one reason that this is ignored in the literary world is that it sounds like selling out, burnt on the edges in the fire of commercialism.

But when you’ve poured your energy, time, and hope into novels, all written on spec, with the optimism that it will one day be traditionally published, it can be a cold hard dash of reality when the letter come back, often as a quarter-page form, saying your story isn’t competitive in today’s market.

What? How can that be? YOU are part of the market, and you LOVE this. And second, it’s a form letter. It means nothing.

Actually, it’s a form letter because it’s so common. Many of us have great ideas, many of us can string words together that communicate what we want to say. But very few of us can make that message resonate with the readers we are trying to reach.

I see it every day in critique groups or in writers who post their query letters online for review. I’m no expert, and I can still see that they don’t have a handle on their story. Their summaries wander. They can’t write a one-sentence premise about the plot. They know very much what they WANT to do. And this is often worded in their letters in phrases like, “This book reminds us that…” or “Readers of this story will remember what it is like…”

We write sentences like that because we are frustrated  by our own stories, our inability to show the lives of characters who will communicate a message without preachiness or head-smacking. And that last layer of the novel, which is part of every word on the page, is what ultimately causes the novel to fail, either at the query level, because the agent can see the writer isn’t communicating this part, so it’s doubtful the book will be any better, or at the novel level, when an agent has requested the work and stops reading around page 50 because the book just isn’t rising as it should.

Ms. Snark, in her query bashing and crushing responses to reader questions, cut through the literary high-brow and got straight into the issue of does this book work for the reader it was intended to impact? She did this with humor, with biting candor, and intelligent analysis. She made us able to look at our own work more critically, to slip on her stilettos and step back from our emotional attachment to what we’d written and see it from a difficult-to-please point of view.

It’s a debilitating blow to realize you’ve spent a year, or several years, on a novel that doesn’t work. But only when we fail can we figure out what we don’t know. Until you’re querying, putting your tender babies into the world, it’s not easy to know what you’ve done wrong.

But Ms. Snark can educate you ahead of time, before you burn through the agent list, without dealing with the hard reality of rejection in your inbox. Go, and read, and learn from her, not just once, but every year or two. We can’t absorb everything until we’ve moved to the next layer, when all the things we’ve fixed about our work reveals the next set of weaknesses.

It’s not an easy process and there aren’t any short cuts. But reading Ms. Snark can cut a lot of time out of the write-revise-rejection period of your authorly rise to success. And you can laugh along the way with Killer Yapp and hearing that once again, Ms. Snark has read something that makes her want to set her hair on fire.

So, what are you waiting for? Discover her again. I’ll see you there.

________

Once more, I apologize for keeping comments closed. This web site has been around since the dawn of the internet (when it was just me and Al Gore) and therefore is a magnet for foreign-language comment spam, which, loosely translated, all says, “Buy our grossly-inappropriate-for-this-blog leisure toys!” If you want to comment, visit my LiveJournal or friend me on Facebook.

Of course you do. You’re just that old.

Other than being a brilliant use of alliteration, rhythm, and outrageous trademark repetition, the old Tootsie Pop ad justified all the silly questions in our lives. It didn’t matter that the old owl only took three licks and bit into the lollipop (Don’t try THAT at home. You’ll break a tooth. Really.) We could investigate ourselves to find the answer to this timeless question, simultaneously wrapping our happy tongues around pure sugar satisfaction.

So what if we’re suckers.

My question today: how many hours does it take to write 10,000 words? And not 10,000 words of gibberish. Real words. Real dialogue. Real story.

See, I was way behind on NaNoWriMo. As in, well, 10,000 words behind. And I had this marvelous day where my parents had been here and just left. So my house was CLEAN! And I’d killed myself catching up on my work before they arrived. And I’d played LOTS with the kids.

I had no guilt. And no chores. And best of all, no kids! (Off with dad.)

And so I set a goal that was rather obscene. 10,000 words in a day. It seemed pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic. I figured I’d fatigue around 3K, the most I’d ever written in one sitting before.

But I knew I could punch out a thousand per hour. I also knew it was like saying you can type 100 words a minute. Sure, maybe for one minute. Or even five. If pushing, maybe fifteen. But could you sustain this level for a long haul?

The answer: yes.

Caveats: I had an outline. A good one. And on Friday, I found a change of direction in voice that I felt crazy passionate about, the sort of outrageous exuberance that leads to lofty goals. I just didn’t have time to implement it.

Until today.

So yes, I wrote 10,042 words today. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo and you’re behind, take heart. It can be done.

But now my fingers hurt and I’m hungry. And my butt may be permanently shaped like my chair.

I think I deserve a Tootsie Pop. How many licks will it take to get to the center of chewy chocolatey goodness?

The world may never know.

The fourth-grade class hustled to pack up their bags and sit on the floor around my chair, more motivated than they had been all day.

I hadn’t served as a substitute in ages (although last time had been memorable), but their teacher had taught my daughter, and personally asked for my help. I tucked the pink hair away as best I could and at the last minute tossed my middle grade manuscript Jinnie Wishmaker into my bag.

The students had worked quickly and quietly in order to get a chance to hear a story no one had ever read. I told them I needed help editing my book, because something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. This happens, I explained, when you edit your own work.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I began reading aloud. The class had been antsy all day. But the idea that they were doing something “for real,” not just as an assignment, really motivated them to finish their work and pile onto the carpet to listen.

I reminded them what was important to the beginning of a novel: a character that interests you enough to read a whole book about. And a story that doesn’t just sit there, but moves forward, and makes you worry about what will happen next.

So they settled in, twenty nine-year-olds curled around backpacks and lunchboxes, more riveted than I ever expected. The opening scene unfurled, a girl and her younger bother plotting to run away rather than to be taken to live with their snobby rich aunt and uncle, characters taken from a page of Roald Dahl, where the grown ups are hyperbolic and the kids represent the voice of reason.

At the end of first chapter, I asked them what they thought.

“Is Jinnie going to be mean the whole time?” a boy asked. “She seems mean.”

“Yeah,” a girl said. “She’s angry.”

I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t I seen it? The Jinnie I knew was sensitive and fairly shy, but in this first impression, with just her little brother to tug around, they were right. She was mischaracterized in the opening scene.

The story had been through four critique group grillings, read by five or six other writers, and even several agents had nurtured it though some revisions, and yet still, I hadn’t seen it until now. No one had been able to just say it.

We lined up by the door, my head buzzing. I knew I could fix it. And I couldn’t wait.

One of the boys tapped my arm. “Ms. Roy? Will you be back tomorrow?”

I had no idea. “Not unless your teacher still needs me. Hopefully she’s better.”

“If you come back tomorrow, will you read some more? I want to know what happens.”

Are you kidding? “You can count on it.”

The superintendent lived across the street from our school. On the edge of his back yard, surrounded by a fence, was a lovely heavy-laden pomegranate tree. And, you know, it wasn’t like he was our English teacher or something. He couldn’t flunk us, right?

So during the summer, when the fruit was ripe, my friends and I would make a loose, clumsy tower of pre-adolescent bodies to steal them right from the tree.

We couldn’t wait to go home and properly soak the pomegranate so the seeds would separate from the inedible pulp, but scraped the scarlet beads out with our hands, bursting most of them and staining our fingers. We often could not stop at one and would return a few hours later for more. We got caught once, the squeak of the screen door heralding our doom. But we were fast, and took off in different directions. It was escape or death, because the evidence was undeniable.

Recently, my friend Anton held a reading for his latest screenplay, a suspense film bordering on horror,  along the lines of The Orphanage. Pomegranate seeds played a big role in the movie, symbolic, frightening, blood-red, and sensual, all things the story conveys in its theme.

But everyone kept spitting the seeds OUT.

This was strange to me. You EAT the seeds. You don’t spit any part of them out.

Widipedia agreed with me, saying the seeds are ingested whole, but at the discussion after the reading, about half the group said they also spit out the seed pods after popping them for the juice.

It’s been a year since I ate a pomegranate, last season, but one of my neighbors has a tree in her yard. I stopped last summer to warn her I had a history of fruit thievery, and might purloin a pomegranate, and please not to shoot me out of the tree.

She said she’d try to remember me if she saw a figure outside her window.

And so this is how, three decades later, I again trespassed and stole, this time with the added fun of tree climbing at my advanced age, with no cohorts to give me a boost, trying to see if the pomegranates were indeed ripe right after Independence Day, as the script called for fireworks, and to determine if it made sense to spit out the seeds.

The lowest fruit was just out of my reach, so I had to grasp the spindly branches and heave myself up. I chose to do this near dusk, mosquitoes buzzing my head, in hopes no one would catch me. I finally grasped the yellow ball, even knowing from the color that it was all wrong.

And indeed, the fruit wasn’t quite ripe, bitter and hard to break, so I didn’t really get to test the seed theory. But I did covet my neighbor’s fruit, trespass on her property, and scale a tree just to answer a question. Because, you know, going to the grocery store would just be too easy.

Earlier this year, I was passionately in love with my middle grade novel. We were together every day, often long into the night, mutually basking in the glow of each other’s fond admiration.

Then, we hit a rough patch. She got some attention. Things looked promising for the long term. I developed expectations. But she faltered, then failed. So I ditched her. Sorry.

And so I was single again. I had options — the sequel to the middle grade, or maybe, just maybe, this sexy new manuscript I had started during NaNoWriMo.

It called to me in the night, edgy and full of appeal, rife with longing and promising of secrets. So I slipped into a new relationship and even started a screenplay version of the story.

But then, trouble. Characters behaved erratically, refusing to be reasonable. I admit — I got controlling — trying to force them into who I thought they should be. The story rebelled; I offered a fresh start. But we began to grow apart.

And today, I opened a file, something I’d written a few years ago but recently freshened up the opening for a fellowship application. I read the first 18 pages and didn’t change a word. It was perfect! Beautiful! Tantalizing.

And so I began to plan our time together, makeovers, meaningful conversations, pillow talk.

But the old story nipped at me. Not fair, it called. You can’t leave me like this, unfinished, in disarray.

I’m torn. Old love or new. Manage my problems or fly a new direction. Without a deadline, an expectation by anyone, I flit from work to work, writing only what feels good at the time, like a book gigolo.

Maybe if one of them manages to snag me for real, binds me with a contract, I’ll settle down. But until then, sweet works-in-progress, take it from Rod, it’s a heartache, nothing but a heartache, hits you when it’s too late, hits when you’re down…