This weekend I’m at FenCon, taking a writing workshop with Kevin Ikenberry. We’ve spent a couple days going over story structure, correlating the major story structure methods & terminology, examining their relative strengths and weaknesses, and their focus on plot vs. focus on characters… as relates to a story we’re working on, so there’s practical application in there.

The highest-stress part of the whole thing for me was figuring out what to send in for the writing sample. No guidance beyond length was given, and analysis paralysis set in. Finally, on advice of a friend, I picked something I sucked at and want to improve: beginnings. That worked just fine.

The story I chose is a stalled WIP (Work Not In Progress?) I had recently picked up and started reading (and editing) my way back into. It was one of several stories that I had started and been unable to sustain in the long stretch of Sudden Unexpected House Renovations and Impressive Medical Bills Without Resolution.  For months, I’ve tried to figure out why it stalled out on me, but couldn’t spot where I’d broken it. Turns out, in the beginning of a chapter, my heroine woke up furious because she was reflecting the emotions I was feeling at the time, after an unsuccessful surgery, not what she should have been feeling at that point in the story. Once I wrote a missing chapter before the last to flesh out a non-POV character’s emotional arc, the heroine’s contrasting emotions (and the mismatch) became clear.

Rewriting with the correct emotion fixed the WIP, and allowed me to proceed on, but the story still felt… thin. Like I’d forgotten things, but trying to spot what isn’t there is a lot harder than spotting what’s wrong.

So, essentially, this weekend I broke it down into character goals and motivations, character arcs for major and minor characters… oh, oops, I forgot to actually put in the character arc for some side characters. No wonder they felt thin. And in working those out, and figuring out their end state, it became clear that I wasn’t going to get to the scene that spawned this whole thing; that was an epilogue. I was trying to do too much, so the pacing was out of kilter. Clearly, trying to write when exhausted, ill, and highly stressed breaks the stories in new and interesting ways!

So, it was a very successful and productive weekend: Highly recommend the workshop. It was fun to watch another classmate suddenly realize what her ending was, another unravel the issues in character motivation… and even better, if I can successfully take what I’ve learned and not only finish this story, but apply it to other stalled stories from the last couple years, then I will be able to clear the workload and the queue. (Assuming new stories don’t spawn faster than I can finish old ones. Um. Yeah, saying that might be tempting fate.)

I will also pay more attention to stress and emotional levels, as well as exhaustion, because life doesn’t stop coming at us fast.