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Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

Update on NaNo and Life

One of my classes got way behind due to teacher illness.  This meant that week before this last one I had free time!  In which I got to chapter 13 and just over 45,000 words in my novel draft.

Then said teacher decided to load us down with work to try to catch us up.  Result of that?  I’ve gotten no further in my draft, in fact, it’s been about 9 days since I did anything on it.  I intend to remedy that this weekend and to make a push for 60,000 words before Tuesday.  There are only two weeks of classes before finals and I have papers to write and a lot of extra translating to get done, so we’ll see if that last 40,000 is feasible in only a week and a bit (this novel will, however, be finished by the end of December no matter what that takes).

I also found out that one of my writing instructors next term is the author of “How to Make an American Quilt”  which I think I read as a teenager.  I know it was made into a movie, but I don’t remember if I saw the movie.  Hopefully her workshop will be better run than the one I’m taking this term.  No more poetry workshops for me, no sir, not at this college anyway.

So that’s where things stand.  On the plus side, my Casimir Hypogean characters are chattering in the back of my mind again, though the scenes seem to be working their way back towards the beginning of the story.  Hopefully by January they’ll be at the point I quit writing so I can pick up the threads and move it along.  We’re only a few chapters away now with the current mutterings in my brain.  Maybe I just needed to take a break and let the story get back to me.  We’ll see.

NaNo Update Week 1

I’ve written just over 19,000 words and have six chapters done.

This novel, for whatever reason, is proving hella easy to write.  The characters are talking to me, the setting is coming together, the plot is all there.

I think this is due in part because compared to the setting and many-layered plot of Casimir Hypogean, Chwedl is a simple creature when it comes down to it.  Instead of having to bring together a city-wide conspiracy and a hodgepodge group of misfits and criminals in a quasi-scientific setting that also has some magic with very subtle rules, I only have three main protagonists and bringing them together and figuring out the motivations is blissfully simple.  There is no villain to build up and motivate, no betrayals to figure out how to realistically manufacture, no complex setting built from whole cloth.

Chwedl starts at point A and goes to point B.  The villain, such as she is, isn’t really evil or much of a villain.  She’s selfish, sure, and just kind of cruel in a way that is Other.  The struggles are mostly between personalities.  No gunfights, no highrise escapes, no twisted sex or weird drug addiction.  Just good old Welsh-esque fairytale fun.  (Okay, it is one of my stories, so there is of course blood, death, and some very implied sex).  I don’t think anyone gets murdered in this story, however.  That’s probably a first for me.

I’ve already added to and moved away from my original outline.  I see outlines as being much like the Pirate Code.  They’re more like guidelines really, not set in stone “this is how the story will unfold no matter what damnit” sort of things.  I add and destroy and fix as needed, though I try to keep some version of an outline current so that if I have the rare brilliant idea about where the later story bits are going I can refer to it later.

Stay tuned for week 2 in which I’ll probably ramble about the challenges of the great swampy middle and writing a plausible romantic thread into a story.

In Our Darkest Hour

I’m stuck on Casimir Hypogean.  Not like before, either.  Truly and fubar sort of stuck.   I’m not enjoying the slog, I don’t like what I do manage to get done, and the whole project is sinking my mood.

I find that the most effective of epiphanies are usually the things that seem stupidly obvious in retrospect.  Those head-slapping moments of “why the hell didn’t I think of that weeks ago?”

I didn’t think of it weeks ago.  In fact, I’m not sure I thought of it at all.  The solution stumbled upon me more or less by accident.

I don’t have a deadline with this novel.  Just because it was the first novel rough draft I’ve ever written doesn’t mean it needs to be the first final product.  There is nothing, as long as I don’t give up on it forever, preventing me from moving on and working on something I’ll enjoy.  Clearly Casimir Hypogean needs to get back burnered.  The ideas aren’t flowing like they could, the images just aren’t there.  I don’t see any need to keep forcing myself.

I have other projects.  It was one of these projects that cast the light on this path.  I was sitting here at the keyboard, grinding out another couple hundred words that I would most likely just erase tomorrow, when images came to me in my despair.  Out of the negative self-talk I love so much started to emerge a character I’d thought of over a year ago.  Someone who also is full of negative feelings about himself, someone who leaves his life up to others because he just can’t trust his own decisions.

I quit out of the novel and opened a fresh page. A couple hours and 3444 words later, and I have two chapters of whatever this story is.  I don’t think it will be novel length.  I’m guessing it will be novella at best.  I’m hoping for about 30k words, I think that will be enough to tell the story.

In some ways I’m in the infancy of my writing life.  The writing I did in grade school and high school, it was the baby steps.  I was fitting shapes into other shapes.  Now I’m a toddler, learning to walk. Learning that there is a whole huge world outside myself and figuring out how to relate to it.

I get to be a child again.  I don’t have to decide right now what works and what doesn’t.  I’m a freshman in this world.  I’m still in that stage where I can be anything.  I’m reborn, remade.

In the desperate race to get something done so I can start the submission/publishing phase of life, I’ve been ignoring the gift that is this time of being an infant, of being unknown, unvetted.  I don’t have to do one thing or the other.

I just have to write.

Seems stupidly obvious now, doesn’t it?

The First Cuts

There’s an anecdotal story about Michelangelo’s David which goes something like the artist spent 15 months just staring at the marble before he ever cut into it.

I feel that way about this novel. An awful lot of staring is going on and not so much is happening with the cutting (writing). It’s the damn plot. I’ve constructed it in a way that for the next 4-5 chapters the whole rest of the book is set up. This is the climb towards the crest of the rollercoaster. And if I go off the track now, the whole thing will fail. I want to get this right. Which means I’ve been stabbing at the same couple paragraphs for the last week and a half.

To continue the stream of unrelated and piss-poor metaphors: this is probably the writing equivalent to opening the oven door every two minutes to check on the cookies. I know I need to stop obsessing and apply word to page. Let the whole thing sort itself out later. If I break it, I break it. That’s what editing is for, right?

The only problem is that once again I’m faced with the paralyzing fear that I’ll break this draft as badly as the first one and have to rewrite the novel in its entirety again. And again. I deeply respect and admire authors who are able to run through five or six or more completely different drafts of the same novel. I really do. I’m just not sure I have the fortitude to be one of them. We all have our own styles, our own ways of writing and working. I don’t think I’m a gazillion draft writer. Or maybe I am and I haven’t accepted my fate. Who knows?

I think I’m going to just try to press on. If the novel ends up broken in a way that small scene rewrites and repairs won’t solve I think I’ll be done with this book for a while. I’ll stick it in the proverbial drawer and move on to the next novel. Lessons learned. I can’t take another rewrite, this one is hard enough. Hopefully my future first drafts won’t be quite as broken as this one was. I have a feeling writing the thing on a bet in 19 days pretty much doomed me there.

I also think my next project will be fantasy. Probably the Welsh fairytale novel. It will require minimal research and have nothing to do with science. Making the world believable and constructing the pseudo-science is one of the things slowing my current novel project down a great deal. The next novel that requires research will definitely get better research done before I write it.

Of course, the next novel that will take lots of research will likely be my thesis project. I’m hoping I can do the War Witches idea as my thesis. That novel is slowly percolating and building in my mind and would be perfect for a MA thesis. Lots of research, lots of history, lots of texture, and plenty of Important Themes to explore.

All right. Back to hacking up the stone. Which really feels a lot like trying to gnaw the David out of titanium. With my teeth.

Tasty.

Little by Little

I’m well into chapter 3 now. The set up is going slowly. I can’t wait for this part to be over. Another three or four chapters and the plot will have taken shape. From there it will be just writing my characters running headlong into peril after peril. That part I’m looking forward to. The setup? Not as much. I’m working hard on the characterizations and descriptions. Which means I’ll likely have to cull a great deal from this in the later edits, but for now I’d rather include the kitchen sink (and its five paragraph description) than wonder what I’m missing later.

In the last week I’ve had no less than three people ask me what I’m doing for a living now. It feels awkward to say “writing” because I’m not exactly making money at it yet. If you count my editing and freelance writing work from the past, I’ve technically made money doing it, however, so it sort of counts, right? And I am writing now with the goal of publication and monies in the future. I’ve no other paid work at the moment. So I nervously answered “writing” to all of them. No one questioned it. Which probably means I should stop questioning it too.

However, my trying to write full time led to a fight with a sibling. She was in town and so I took a day off to see her. She then wanted me to take another day and drive her some places (which would have taken the whole day). I refused. Driving for hours at a time eats a lot of energy. I knew that if I did this, it would mean no writing got done that day. I’ve been working hard to make sure I spend at least a few hours everyday working on the novel. This is my job now. If I’m going to have a draft done by the time classes start, I can’t really put off writing too much. There are already many things scheduled (like PAX 2008 this weekend) that will take away writing days.

I tried to explain this to my sister. I carefully explained that I had to work. She didn’t get it. She figured I could just take whatever time I wanted since I’m unemployed. Eventually I gave up trying to explain how I wasn’t really unemployed, just self-employed (which is how I see it, despite the no incoming money yet thing). It didn’t end so well.

I have a feeling this is only the first in a line of battles to guard my time and have my writing life taken seriously to the people around me. Once I’m published, perhaps, they’ll truly understand. But I’m not sure they can, being non-writers, understand the sheer volume of work that is writing a good novel. It’s hard. It’s really fucking hard. Maybe it isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. Writing takes a great deal of mental energy and lots of time. I can spend ten hours working on something and end up with only a couple hundred usable words. And unlike most jobs where you have bosses and coworkers and such, if I don’t do the work, it doesn’t get done. No one is going to write my novel for me. The more time I spend not writing, the longer it will be until I can expect any kind of compensation. This is how it works, for me.

Little by little. I have to guard my time. Writing is my job, and as such, I have to make sure I take it seriously. I don’t want to dabble. This isn’t a hobby. I want to write for a living and the only way I know how to do it is to actually write.

Thank You Fruit Tree

Six false starts and as many days later and I’ve finally moved into chapter 2.  Apparently it takes techno, sharp cheese (Razors of flavor…sounds like a bad punk band), and giant glorious bing cherries.  As William Carlos Williams put it,

“Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold”

So today I have 3.5 pages of decent progression.  I’ve decided to tell foreshadowing to take a hike, it’ll work itself in or it won’t, but the plot bus is leaving.  Foreshadowing is something I can write in later if needs be.  I’m still annoyed with myself for getting stuck in the first place.  And for it taking a mental pumping session akin to psyching myself up for athletic performance to get me working again.  Not that I believe brilliant gems should fall onto my screen without any effort, but it is always frustrating when you can see the story in the periphery of the mind but not quite make the leap to reach it.

Onward! Tomorrow, I finish the chapter and perhaps start the next one.

I have failed short story Monday, however. I might write one this week, but frankly, I’m thrilled enough to be writing novel again that I might just go with the momentum of that. We’ll see.

Perfectionists Ate My Baby

I’m stuck. Yes, again.  I think in some ways the first draft of this novel has broken me.  It is such a mess (hence the total rewrite instead of just editing) that I’m terrified to let the second draft be anything less than perfect.  So I agonize over every word, every concept, until builds into a huge pile of stagnated nothing.

I think I know where I want to go from here. I think I see how to start doing it.  But I can see the little problems that will crop up later, the complications of plot and character that I’m not sure how to write myself free from.  I’m suffering from a desire to get it right the first time, amusingly enough because I didn’t get it right the first time.  I don’t know if I have another total rewrite in me.  I don’t know if I love this story that much.  I feel I owe my first novel a better chance at life than just that one messy draft.  I’m terrified that it will come out just as ugly and misshapen, another monstrosity to expose on the hillside as I tell myself “oh, there there, you’ll have more children.”  What if they are all monsters?

So, I’m stuck.  What’s my plan of attack?

To write.

As they say: here goes nothing.

Thoughts on Rewriting

I’m one chapter into the rewrite of my first novel.  I’m glad I decided to start anew rather than continue trying to fix what came before.  I doubt I’ll use much of the old material beyond the plot, characters, and some ideas.  There are particular challenges, however.  In rewriting I’m essentially constructing another novel from scratch.  This means I have to do most of the work over again.  It would be very easy to overwhelm myself with the concept of “Too Much Work.”

To combat this, I’ve decided on the major large changes and then have narrowed my focus.  I outlined with the major changes.  For this rewrite, however, I’m mainly working on getting the characters motivated.  Looking at the first draft I don’t really feel connected to anyone in the novel.  I feel like I could, maybe, like a couple of the characters, but they aren’t quite there yet for me.  They feel flat.   This is not acceptable.  I read novels 70-80% for the people in them.  I want to write novels that have the same draw.

To do this, I’m plunging in and going (perhaps) a bit overboard.  I’ve done a lot of hand written background brainstorming for everyone.  I’ve made RPG character profiles for a couple of them.  I’ve given them disorders, quirks, interests.  Essentially, I’ve thrown the kitchen sink of character building at my people.  I was in the bath when I realized that I needed to do this.  Before a day or two ago, they weren’t talking to me.  I couldn’t really see the characters as more than wooden dolls in a nice set I’d created.  I don’t want to play with dolls (dolls are creepy. Seriously creepy).

With this focus, now I can continue the rewrite.  Plot and setting can be tweaked.  If I can manage a few compelling, interesting, dare I say memorable characters, the rest can follow.  The rest will follow.

Here’s a list of the changes between drafts one and two.  (In no particular order).

The Dude is now named Ryg.  He’s also agoraphobic and OCD.

Sif talks less.  In fact, she pretty much only talks to Hex.  She’s also far more psychotic and less moral than before.

Sif and Hex are already in a relationship.

Hex is not the jealous type anymore.  He’s now the type to hide his insecurities with sarcasm.  He’s also more accepting of Sif and her issues.

Kadin is a more major character who contributes to a twist.

The setting is quite a bit different.  There are no cars now, just small electric vehicles  and personal transportation.  Stuff is transported on the electric rail system under the city or via carts hooked to the personal vehicles.  I’ve refined and altered the food system as well as government.  The city only has one main street now, the whole thing is a spiral.  The districts are more defined (and in fact can be closed off from each other if necessary).  The setting is much more complex, but also I hope more unique and interesting.  Since I’m focusing on character, not setting as much, I will definitely have to flesh some things out later I think.  That’s what the next bit of editing is for.

The plot is essentially the same, but with some more challenges and complexities tossed in.  I’ve removed the secret society and am working on making everyone motivated due to character desires rather than using the GM Stick.

On another note: sometimes I think I definitely bit off more than I really should have for this first novel.  I’m writing what boils down to a Political Cyberpunk Adventure/Thriller with medical and fantastical elements.  Couldn’t I have just started out with a nice straightforward quest fantasy or something?  It feels like learning to walk by running a marathon.

Premier of Short Story Monday!

Short Story Monday Begins!  I’ll try, for the sake of organization, to keep these Monday posts at least similar in appearance.

Story Title:  Space Bones

Word Count: 4158

Plot Summary: While being escorted to her Court Martial, a Captain and her escort encounter something wondrous in hyperspace.

Time to write first draft: About 4.5 hours.

Other Comments:  This story is actually in two parts because I got to what felt like one ending and wanted to continue from there just to see how it worked.  So the first part is 3332 words and the second is 826 or there abouts.  When I sat down to write in the wee hours, I had nothing but the title.  I liked the title, however.  I started and got about a paragraph into one story and realized it wasn’t the Space Bones story.  So I cut and saved it to a note file for later and started over again.   After working so much on my novel, which is third person omniscient, I really wanted to write something in first person.   I find first person much easier to sustain than third, so it’s sort of like taking a big old brain break.

I used The Rough Guide to the Universe by John Scalzi to generate some places and names and ran with it from there.  The story is a rough sketch, sort of like the bones referenced.  I like that about it.  We’ll see what my unfortunate readers think.  Because, oh yes, I’ve created a nice little list and I’m going to mail these Monday stories to my dear friends.  Don’t pity them too much. They can opt out, I won’t hate them for more than a year or six. Truly.

Now, back to breaking my brains on Casimir Hypogean.

24 Hours Sleepless and Counting

Insanity tastes like…  Everything said here might be a giant lie someday.   We’ll see.

I’ve been thinking about practice.  I read a quote by someone (or someone quoted it to me? I can’t quite recall) that referred to art, but I’m going to appropriate the meaning for writing.  Basically the gist was that if you want to be good at drawing, draw something 1000 times and you’ll excel.  I think the idea has merit, which is good because it is essentially the idea behind the Ten Novels in Ten Years project of mine.  If I do it ten times (and really, with all the rewrites, drafts etc… it will be triple that at least), I might get halfway decent at this whole writing thing.

So I’m going to extrapolate this concept out even further.  I’ve decided that since I now have the time, and certainly the ideas, I want to write one short story a week.  I accept they won’t be good.  That’s fine.  Some will likely be variations on a theme in nature.  Who cares?  I can sort through later and revise the ones I like, steal from the ones that have promise, and murder the ones that should never see Others‘ eyes.  So from now on, Monday is Short Story Day.  Each Monday for at least the next year, I plan to write a short story.  My only rule for myself is that it has to be at least 2000 words (about 6-7 pages double spaced depending on dialogue etc…).

So begins Doom, part 2.

Now, I go sleep. Maybe.

Novel is creeping along.  I think aiming for ten solid pages a week is good enough. Yeah.

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