{"id":882,"date":"2011-04-11T11:05:27","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T15:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=882"},"modified":"2011-04-11T11:08:16","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T15:08:16","slug":"pondering-next-ideas-with-agent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/pondering-next-ideas-with-agent\/","title":{"rendered":"Pondering Next Ideas with Agent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since I talked to my agent Kirby Kim last week about what to write after the Birthmarked<\/em> trilogy, I\u2019ve been feeling optimistic and encouraged, both about the ideas themselves and the open-ended direction of my writing.\u00a0 I\u2019m normally optimistic anyway, but I did wonder if Birthmarke<\/em>d was a fluke.\u00a0 Now I believe my brainstorming is leading me in good directions, and I\u2019m grateful once again that I have a great agent to work with.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Food for Thought<\/p><\/div>\n

As far as I know, there\u2019s no prescribed way to move onto the next project, but I\u2019ve hoped to avoid the anxiety that some of my writer friends have gone through.\u00a0 It\u2019s not unusual for a writer to start the next novel, send a few chapters to her agent, talk it over for feedback, and proceed from there.\u00a0 It\u2019s emotional, especially if her agent doesn\u2019t like the chapters or predicts the project won\u2019t sell.\u00a0 Then the writer must decide whether to keep writing a book because she loves it despite expecting it\u2019s doomed, or abandon it for another idea and start the process over again.\u00a0 Discouragement, self-doubt, and a sense of helplessness can ensue.\u00a0 More than one writer has quit at this point.<\/p>\n

That process looks miserable to me, frankly, and I try to avoid misery.\u00a0 Besides, I trust my agent a lot, but I would never make one other person the gate-keeper with veto power over my writing.\u00a0 Instead, I decided to try a different approach, one that takes advantage of Kirby\u2019s savvy at a critical, early point in the process.\u00a0 I decided to run a whole bunch of ideas by him, not just my one favorite.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a little metacognitive back-story on my philosophy of generating ideas.\u00a0 Once, when I was in college, my art teacher told me to paint 100 watercolors of the same object in a week.\u00a0 A hundred is a lot of paintings.\u00a0 My object was an old-fashioned, hand-held drill with movable gears, a thing of innate interest to me.\u00a0 I started early, and put in a lot of hours on very meticulous realistic paintings, until after about twenty of them I realized I was not going to get the rest done at that pace.\u00a0 I had to go faster.\u00a0 I needed more ideas.\u00a0 I got sloppy and started having fun, mixing the colors and shadows, using negative space and everything I\u2019d learned in other art classes. Around eighty paintings, I completely ran out of ideas.\u00a0 I started painting with the drill, drilling the paper full of holes, painting on small triangular scraps of paper, making things that were hardly paintings at all.\u00a0 In short, it took me a long, long time to work my mind all the way around inside the box, but by the end, I painted my way out of it.\u00a0 100 paintings in a week taught me little about painting, but a lot about my mind.<\/p>\n

For starters, I know my first idea or my fifth idea or my tenth idea might not necessarily be my best idea.\u00a0 I need to focus, have fun, and keep trying.\u00a0 I know a seemingly insignificant spark can explode, and that dissimilar things can be combined into something cool.\u00a0 For months, whenever I\u2019ve had a trace of a book idea, I\u2019ve jotted it in my brainstorm file on my computer, but I only had about five ideas that way, and they weren\u2019t exciting me. Then, a few weeks ago, after I sent in my first pass pages of Prized<\/em>, I started brainstorming in earnest, thinking What if?<\/em> and How about?<\/em> With about fifteen different ideas, I began pondering them more deeply.\u00a0 I found that a few overlapped and could be combined.\u00a0 I fleshed some out into a paragraph, and then into a couple paragraphs or a page.\u00a0 I ran them by my daughter to see what interested her, and realized a murky idea had a lot of potential, so I let that grow when I was taking a walk.\u00a0 I started shifting my less favorite ideas further down the file, and ones that were more promising to the top.<\/p>\n

Of the fifteen concepts, I decided eight interested me enough to pursue further, either because I liked the premise of the plot, the character, the format, or all three.\u00a0 So I organized them into YA and MG groups, kept the ones I liked best at the top, and arranged a call with Kirby.<\/p>\n

It was super, super fun to talk over the ideas with him.\u00a0 He asked questions, knew which of my projects were the sorts editors have been looking for, connected the ideas to books, films, computer games, and scientific theories he knows, told me which concepts were in realms that had been overdone and would need more to make them original, and poked around in my mind to find out why certain concepts interested me or seemed risky.\u00a0 We talked about how the next project should build on what I\u2019ve done with Birthmarked<\/em>, but how that shouldn\u2019t stop me from writing out of sci-fi if I want to, too. He asked which concept I thought was furthest along, and which I was most eager to write.\u00a0 We laughed a lot, too.<\/p>\n

I came away with a plan I can work on while I’m between revisions of Book 3 of the Birthmarked<\/em> trilogy, which is still my top priority right now.\u00a0 The YA sci-fi concept I\u2019m most excited about I\u2019ll fill out more to get a firmer idea of the plot issues.\u00a0 Another YA sci-fi project that also fascinates me is so ambitious it\u2019s going to take longer to figure out, so I\u2019ll ponder that one.\u00a0 The third project, a contemporary YA concept, seems like it will just fly out of my fingers, so I\u2019ll start writing that and see what happens.\u00a0 It\u2019s all so cool to me.\u00a0 I\u2019m so excited about my writing, and I love the idea that I\u2019m working on viable projects that my agent is already excited about, too.<\/p>\n

Always there\u2019s more to learn with this job.\u00a0 I\u2019m psyched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since I talked to my agent Kirby Kim last week about what to write after the Birthmarked trilogy, I\u2019ve been feeling optimistic and encouraged, both about the ideas themselves and the open-ended direction of my writing.\u00a0 I\u2019m normally optimistic anyway, but I did wonder if Birthmarked was a fluke.\u00a0 Now I believe my brainstorming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[53,63,37],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-agents","tag-ha","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":885,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}