Process Examination #23: Lights, Camera....Uh, Where's the Set?

Last week I threw my writing skills against a chapter for what felt like an eternity. Every night I would sit down and tell myself that I would finish the thing. And every night I would shut down the computer after having written another 4 pages that extended the chapter instead of bringing me to the concluding action sequence. It drove me nuts and made me wonder what the heck I wasn't getting right.

At first I thought it was a problem with writing action. This seemed a very plausible theory. Writing action requires a detailed knowledge and understanding of your characters, the story so far, and the setting. Plus, I wanted to get the action as right as possible for this draft because it would be hard to know if a sequence that essentially went "and then this happened, then that, then this other thing..." actually served the story I was writing or just served the purpose of finishing the friggin draft.

So I gave myself a pep rally, reminded the left and right brains that I can write crap, and plunked myself down Sunday afternoon, determined to finish a chapter that was already long at over 4K. And I discovered that as soon as my MC described the room she was in, the rest of the chapter flowed very very well. Turns out visualizing the surroundings was holding me back. Wrote 2K in two hours to round out the chapter at a shocking 6.5K. Yeah, probably will need to break that into two chapters in revisions, assuming it stays in the book in any recognizable form.

To further prove the point, yesterday my vague outlines for the next chapter featuring the MC crystallized once I sketched out the area of the antagonist's ship in which it occurred. Now the only thing holding me back is plot and backstory details, knowing what three characters were doing before the MC busts into the room with a goon hot on her trail. I know essentially how I want those three characters to interact once my MC is in the room, but I want to know what they have to transition from to get there. That will certainly make it easier to start writing this next chapter.

By the way, I have only the denouement to write after this chapter, and that's already well sketched. I'm thinking I'll definitely meet my July 31st deadline. Go me.

Process Examination #22: PLOT!

I am looking at anywhere from two to four chapters remaining in THUMB. My current word count is at about 93K. I could conceivably finish this draft this week, and by the end of the month looks imminently doable. Part of my brain is already trying to map out the bumps and scrapes that need to be smoothed and schelacked; the other part is hamster-wheeling these last few chapters to wring out as much plot as possible to tie it all up into a complete draft.

The vague ideas and hazy outlines of these chapters will no longer suffice. I have to get down to the details and step through a viable course that carries the characters to a resolution that I might have even set up in a chapter or two way back at the beginning. I'm tugging at all sorts of half-remembered threads from Act 1, retconning shamelessly some events in all previous acts, referring to things that I know will easily fit into previous chapters but aren't there as yet. Every trick I can muster to make the plot two-step its way to The End.

There is no discovering what happens as I write at the moment. No, now I'm discovering what happens as I notebook and block the scenes. The characters have had their chance to surprise me. Now they must submit. For the most part, they're cooperating. As I've said before, this process for me is all about finding a common language between the right and left brains to tell a story. The characters have been a part of that, they know that there's a lot of work to be done and that just finishing the simple "who does what next and how" quickly will get everybody fully on the same page so the real heart and soul of the story can get hashed out.

(As a very interesting aside, my brain kicked out the notion that this story isn't the flogging of family matters that I thought--or, at least, that's only the most obvious thing going on and may not be the most significant. Last night my brain started going off about the Singularity and how I think it's not going to create a world unfathomable to us. Rather, the Singularity is going to get absorbed the same way all technological advances have been and humanity will chug right along in much the same way, just with neat-o tools and tech because today's laws and economies aren't equipped to deal with humanity evolving past our current boundaries, even if the tech might one day exist to do so. Or something like that. Could be just a lazy way around explaining why my story can have tech that allows for cloning and consciousness transfer, but is just Big Business in Space. That's what the Month of Short Fiction is for, to let wacky ideas like that stew and fester and, you know, develop into something I can actually type coherently and with a straight face.)

It's actually rather nice to be able to look at various methods of accomplishing what needs to be accomplished for each scene in the notebook stage and having all the info at my fingertips to compare and contrast those methods. I think it's something that, for me, I can only accomplish after achieving familiarity with the story in the course of the draft. To do so before writing any words feels arbitrary to my process.

Still, I am taking notes on how I'm outlining these last few scenes, how I'm notebooking the various ways everything can shake down. It's very possible that I'll figure out a way to do more advance planning earlier in the draft game by paying attention to what I'm doing now.

Process Examination #21: The Home Stretch

I mentioned that, a few weeks ago, the last handful of chapters in THUMB popped out of my brain in a very vague outline. I was all set two weeks ago when I took time off from work to start the crazy dash to the finish line. And I did manage a good 5K words or more those few days. Then I seemed to lose a bit of steam. I think I've figured out my silly brain again.

Given that my first draft is all about finding a common language for my left and right brains on a particular story, it's unsurprising that the two halves of me will be in synch a bit more somewhere in the third act of the story (I use a four-act structure). That's about at 70K of story, and it makes sense that enough groundwork has been laid down in the draft that the left brain can finally understand a bit better the crazy talk my right brain is using to explain the story. The left-brain/right-brain dictionary (i.e. the first draft) is nearly done.

This is bliss for the left brain. At last, efficiency can take the lead and we can quickly finish the silly draft and start fixing the bloody thing to sell it and publish it and move that career forward, dammit.

The right brain is not as enthused. Afterall, the left brain is jumping ahead of her a bit. Sure, that control freak is getting it mostly the way she sees it, but she's not discovering the story any more and sharing it. And she can't start going through the rest of the draft to find threads that need polishing until the draft is finished because there's a chance something's still lurking there to surprise her, or that a particular way an event in the vague outline is set down will influence the best way to fix something earlier. In essence, the poor thing's bored.

Yes, my brain is so lovely. In the early part of writing a novel, the left brain is hyperfrustrated to the point that progress is often derailed to go back and make the opening "just right" or to stall a scene while researching precisely how ionic propulsion works or to grind forward momentum to a halt by asking logic questions regarding plot point feasibility and such. Meanwhile, the right brain keeps dragging the story along as best she can, working fast to deflect the left brain's issues and keep him engaged. In the later part of writing a novel, the right brain starts to lose interest while the left brain charges ahead with only the goal of "The End" driving him, not caring that he's leaving the creative half behind as he goes.

Just lovely.

(Brief aside: I wonder how much of my ruminations on my process are driven by being a Gemini. I've always tended to think of my self in terms of duality, just seems natural. Taking it to this extreme is a bit new, but still feels normal and not in any way crazy. Wonder what others less comfortable with Gemini's twin-nature think about this.)

The way to combat the early novel left-brain/right-brain combat was to convince the left-brain that the right-brain's way was more efficient in the long-run. To deal with the late novel battle phenomenon, I think I need to convince the right-brain that the left-brain is looking at the story from a completely different perspective that will probably surprise her (or at least entertain in its simplicity and/or ridiculousness). If she's waiting to see what the left-brain will do next with the story as vaguely outlined, she might be more willing to contribute her part to finishing the silly book.

I'm really looking forward to putting my revision process in terms of this left-brain/right-brain conflict. Now that they have a common language to use in discussing this story, nothing else can possibly go wrong, right? Heehee.

Process Examination #20: Research is for Revisions

One of the points of entry for the vast amount of suck in my first draft of THUMB is the lack of research I've done for the book. Sure, I've looked up a thing or two here and there. I've spent a small amount of time getting to know the current thought and research regarding ion propulsion, but it's not nearly enough to do anything more than put vague references to things that could happen in the draft. And it's going to have to stay that way until I have a completed draft. Same goes for interior design, small business planning, medical technologies of various stripes, intellectual property laws, non-profit org formations, and so on. The draft is just going to have to keep on sucking as my characters talk in generalities and my narrative skips important details to get from Point A to Point B. I have accepted this.

Why would I knowingly commit Suckitude? Given the way I learn and given the way I write, trying to research the topics I need for the draft would mean I'd be researching for years. I am so eager to study new topics and really dig into them that I wouldn't be able to stop when I got the information I needed, mostly because I wouldn't know if I needed this piece or that piece or both, so better to understand fully each. I need to research from a less general "hmm, what about ion propulsion?" point and from a more specific "my ship needs to get from this station to that station in this amount of time and have this sort of problem that this character can fix" point. It's the same reason why I haven't pegged down whether the communicators my characters use are external cell phones, garment buttons a la Star Trek, or bio implants. I have a general sense of needing communication technology that is omnipresent, but the methodology is not integral to the story at the moment, and I don't want to waste three months poring over details about the feasibility of implanted cell phone tech if it turns out it's not necessary for the needs of the story and/or distracts from the story.

This first draft is all about getting the right brain and the left brain communicating. The draft is the only common language these two sides of me have at the moment for this story. While the left brain would love to hammer out all of the details for how the ship works and the nitty gritty of each character's daily grind, the right brain knows that such details may not be important or might need to change. And if there's one thing that the left brain understands loud and clear, it's someone pointing out an avenue of inefficiency.

What I'm trying to do, though, is log what I think I need to research as I go, indicating where knowing X detail would be great to insert it into page Y for a better story. This method also strikes me a as a great way to cut back on telling and maintain the effectiveness in showing, mostly because I don't have a glut of details to insert into a story as I create it. Instead, I'll have a bunch of patches to make and holes to fill in the story with specific details I will hunt down later. Much easier to keep the research organic this way. Or, at least, that's the impression I'm getting.

Stay tuned for the Process Examination post likely to come later this year when I start doing all this research. I wonder what I'll be saying about "research is for revisions" when I'm actually revising.

Process Examination #19: Talking Heads

As I approach the 60K mark in the official first draft of THUMB (which excludes some 25K or more of backstory and an excised draft POV), I've come to sense a particular trend. This thing is about 80% dialog. Possibly more. My critique partners have consistently labeled dialog as one of my strengths (one of my weaknesses apparently being a knack for constructing sentences as if German and not English was my first language--my elementary school Host Nation teachers would be so proud), and seeing as how I rely so much on dialog in composing the story at first, I must at least feel very comfortable with that piece of writing craft.

I got to thinking about that a bit last night and today, thinking of the big conversations I've given my characters throughout THUMB, recalling how Act 1 drags because I was more likely to make my characters talk about something that had just happened rather than describe it happening. And I had a curious idea: no matter how visual and complicated and multi-layered the right brain creates the story, the left brain needs to have it verbalized, even if only in the proxy of fictional characters talking to each other about the story.

This creates two possible complications (well, two I can think of at the moment):

1. Revisions are going to be an interesting balancing act of translating dialog into action and description. Will this scene work best as folks arguing, or will it work better as folks doing something in conflict and saying very little?



2. My subtext is actually text, for the most part, in this sort of draft. I will need to bury the too-honest or too-straightforward lines into action, body language and different dialog.

I'm sure when I dive into revisions after completing the draft that I'll find all sorts of other problems with dialog-heavy prose. This might also explain why my drafts want to drag on forever. I can't have my characters just shut up and do something. They discuss, they fight, they whine, they lecture, they argue, they tease, they talk over each other. They should be doing all of this, ostensibly, while also moving the plot from Point A to Point B, but I'm not sure I've got that juggling act down.

We'll see. In another chapter or two, Act 2 is going to start ramping up the action in a cascade that should carry me through to the end of Act 3 fairly relentlessly. I'm going to pay attention and see if the action keeps getting delayed or drawn out in favor of my characters chatting each other up. I'll figure me out yet.

Process Examination #18: In Which I Hack my Brain a Second Time*

With short fiction, I write by letting the story pour out of my fingertips as fast as it can, heading in whatever direction muse decides to go. I might have a general sense of the ending or the character arc or something, but usually I get an inital idea, spill it out in a small amount of time, and then leave it be for a bit. When I come back to the story, I look at what I wrote, compare it with the original idea, figure out if there's a disconnect to fix or if the story I wrote evolved into something else entirely that needs a new framework. Then I do serious revisions of the sort I did for PPR: Toss out 6K words, write an extra 25K. This brings me to the place where a lot of other writers are when they finish their first draft and then have to go in for revisions. I do said revisions, then the once or twice over for grammar, etc. Voila, I have a finished product of the short fiction variety.

For novels, though, my brain clearly wants to do this same process, but the left brain absolutely panics and gets in the way of the story-purge, trying to take me in directions better suited to give me a viable novel. See, the left brain is all about logic and efficiency and sees that spending six months to three years banging out 100K words or more that are going to get axed anyway is just Not Acceptable. The right brain, trying to translate the story vision to words fast enough to appease the left brain, gets all twisted in knots and misinterprets the vision and gets things horribly wrong. I end up in a terrible snarl anywhere between 20K and 80K because of this. The left brain wants to finish the draft and get on with fixing it so it's actually a novel that can, you know, start the process of getting representation and/or publication. The right brain sees the mangled corpse of what it originally intended to write and can't pick up any narrative thread that has a fraction of a chance at carrying a draft through to the end in any way that relates to the story I'm trying to write.

I compromise by starting revisions of the words I've alredy written, to help the right brain find my story vision and to convince the left brain that I'm making changes that will translate to less time spent on revisions later down the road. But the conflict between the two hemispheres inevitably starts again, this time snarling me within 5K to 20K from the original snarl point. I might compromise again with revisions or the left brain will retreat and let the right brain try to carry the story through to the end. Neither option works. When my brain realizes that I am stuck and conflicted within myself as to how best to proceed to finish the project, I start all over again on a new novel idea.

My problem in dealing with this pattern is that I have only fully understood where the left brain is coming from. Finish the book! Revise it! Sell it! Get going on that professional writer path, already! You only have a small number of hours each week to write! The longer you take to write one book, the longer it will take to sell that book, the longer it will take to eventually earn you the money that will allow you to quit the DDJ and have more time to write more books! So write! Write better, faster! You can do it, I know you have talent! Let's go, go, GO!

The right brain never explained itself to me, it just refused to produce at the pace the left brain demanded and developed skills in telling me that I wasn't being true to the story vision, not in the least. But I figured it out, all the same. It gets back to the map analogy and how I can't outline a novel. This is because story ideas come to me in complex, three-dimensional images (or groups of images) that have all sorts of sensory and extra-sensory elements embedded in it. The trouble comes from not being able to convey that image accurately into words for the right brain. The right brain is constantly frustrated at its inability to communicate with the left brain, and the left brain keeps trying to boost efficiency by throwing more words at a story, only to frustrate the right brain even further because they are the wrong words, and not just "fix this in revisions" wrong, but taking the story sometimes far away from the complicated images.

Getting back to taking a trip without a map, let's say that one person, Jack, is trying to meet up with another, Jill. Jack starts driving towards Jill, asking her for directions on his cell phone as he goes. Problem is, Jill can only describe her surroundings in ways that don't help Jack at all. Jill says she's in the place where the air smells just like the end of summer. Jack asks what's around her. Jill says she got some mountains to the west. Jack asks how far. Jill says she can pinch the highest peak between her thumb and forefinger while she squints at it. Jack asks what's to the east. Jill says a gray, three-story building with no numbers or letters on it, but many of the windows are missing, and some have been replaced with green glass instead of clear.

Jack asks for a street sign. Jill says there are none, but the asphalt is cracked on one side and smooth and deep black like new on the other. Jack asks her what city she's near. Jill says the energy of the place reminds her of a sprawling urban center that hasn't swallowed up all the rural pockets just yet. Jack asks her if there's anyone around her who can answer his questions. Jill says the few people nearby are stuck in a loop of some drama or other and are far too busy unraveling their own crises to help with hers, and would Jack like to hear some of the things these folks are saying? Jack says only if they're talking about a street address.

This goes on and on until Jack finally gives up, calls Jill's cell service provider, and has them triangulate her location with the satellites. He swoops in, gets her into the car, and drives them off to someplace new.

Dealing with these two yahoos for the course of a novel is going to drive me insane if I don't find some way of managing their miscommunication.

---

*Not only does this post make clear to the world that, yes, in fact I am a gemini, but it also demonstrates my left-right confusion issue admirably well. Or, at least, it did before I edited it to be, you know, accurate. I got the left and right brains pegged correctly for the first paragraph they appear, then it went downhill from there. Fixed now.

Process Examination #17: Stepping Around the Steaming Infodump

I've become allergic to infodumps. Nothing makes me feel more patronized as a reader than an infodump. "See here," the author is saying, "this is how this bit of worldbuilding works and connects with the story." I'd rather figure it out from context, thankyouverymuch.

I'm not sure when the allergy started, but I stopped using infodumps in my writing very early on. Unfortunately, I didn't learn a decent replacement technique to get vital character backstory and/or worldbuilding information across to the reader. Thus, the most consistent complaint I get in the first chapter or two deals with not understanding the odd references characters are making to each other about something that happened in the past or being perplexed by whatever geewhiz element of worldbuilding I shoved into the early going.

Yes, of course I ran into this with PPR. My frist critique contained several "Huh, wha?" reactions to my protagonist's job and to the broader world I established and to the basic rudiments of the paranormal element central to the story. I'm happy to report that, with just a sentence or two in dialog that did not in anyway resemble "as you know, Bob," questions about my protag's job became a non-issue for Mark. Alas, the paranormal element and the broader world details were still fuzzy for him. For the former, Mark and I figured out exactly where he got fuzzy and that adding a mere two words solved the problem. For the latter, Mark kept saying, "you need to explain that" and I kept saying "no" because I will not knowingly commit infodump. I quickly figured out a way around the problem in general but then had to struggle with the specifics.

Well, I figured out the specifics in a way that shouldn't add more than 100 words to the story and enhances the connection to the worldbuilding in a very nice way. Also, the fix is a nice segue into PPR: Novella the Second, which, if PPR sells, will be nice to have either well-outlined or underway should I happen to nab a multi-project contract out of the sale. I also have broad outlines for three other stories in this same universe (one is the third story in the current PPR timeline to complete a little trilogy, one is a prequel to this trilogy, and one--which I have rather a bit more outlined as I was working on it in a completely different capacity until I realized it hooks up well with this universe--is the backstory to how the paranormal element PPR universe came to be). So, success with the informing without infodumping, at least in theory.

Process Examination #16: Zooming Ahead to Revisions (In Another Project)

I'm not entirely sure why I've needed so much off-time from writing THUMB, but my brain keeps asking for another day or another week whenever I try to organize my thoughts on that topic. So I've shifted focus back to PPR, trying to really dig into the text for revisions and learn more about that part of my writing process.

What I've done in the past is just read the completed manuscript of whatever piece I had just finished, marking, deleting, and adding stuff as I go. It's a good way to get a sense of what's working and what isn't and apply some fixes, but I've come to realize that it's not quite effective for actually improving the whole of the text. That is, larger scope issues like arcs and story structure and theme and such didn't get the attention they needed. Not to say that I wasn't thinking about those things as I revised, but that I kept all of those concepts in my head as I read through the manuscript, expecting problems with those topics to pop out at me in much the same way I can find errors in spelling and sentence flow and character portrayal. Not so much, apparently.

I've been suspecting this for a while now, so I've been developing a plan for a couple of months. Or the notion that I ought to have a plan, at least. That doesn't sound like much, but it means that, in the course of my regular reading of blogs and books on writerly topics, I've been looking for methods to help me. And I found some. Rather, I found addtional tips that helped bring some older ones into focus as well as giving me new ideas.

In the past, via Holly Lisle's One-Pass Revision and some other places, I realized it was important to have a scene outline handy while doing revisions. However, I didn't know what to do with that thing. Hence, I just extrapolated from how I do basic edits and tried to keep everything in my head. After working through Jenny Crusie and Bob Mayer's He Wrote, She Wrote Writing Course, I found a way to use the outline much more effectively. Specifically via the concept of scene analysis Jenny outlines here and the critical questions she dumps out here. Now I have a better sense what I'm looking for when I do my initial read-through (which I used to flag scenes that needed scene analysis for tightening and general fix-it stuff).

I completed my first scene anlaysis yesterday and was delighted to discover two things: 1) At least for this first scene, I had a natural rhythym for beats in the scene that kept the conflict going and accomplished a bit for the story, and 2) I have a much better sense of how I can improve a few bits and lines in the scene to reinforce all the big scope concepts I've lost before without derailing those beats. Awesome.

We'll see what Mark things. I've decide he is going to be a beta-reader of my "I've done all I can on my own with this thing" version without any previous exposure to this piece. He'll be my barometer of how well I've revised with the new techniques. No pressure, honey. :)

Process Examination #15: In Which I Finally Hack My Brain (Or a Portion of It, Anyway)

There's more going on here than just looking back at the mess of Act One and realizing why it's 40K long and mostly pretty dry stuff (that would be the logic stranglehold). Now I'm trying to figure out why I can't seem to drag myself on with the novel. I think I pieced together some of it last night.

I fear letting a first draft of a novel be really, really rough. I can't let myself write full-on crap just to get to the end and have a complete story unit to look at, analyze, and perfect into an actual novel. Not at 100K words a pop, at least. With short fiction, this isn't a problem. Take PPR: the original draft of that story was 8K words, and I kept only 2K of them in the revised story, which ended up being 29K total (yes, I finished it Monday night; now to let it alone for a couple of weeks before I tackle the next round of revisions). That's 25% of the original story that stayed, and it comprises only 7% of the current draft. Translate those percentages into the 100K words of a novel's first draft, and yikes! That's a lot of words that get cut and take a while to create in the first place. It doesn't sit right with me to be so wasteful and inefficient with something I have so little time for in as it is.

But I looked closer at the comparison to PPR. Those original 8K were quite rough indeed, in the sense that my big reveal at the end was 2-3 pages of infodump that would have been much more satisfying revealed in the course of the story with my MC getting enough pieces of the puzzle to put some of it together herself. Also, the central conflict needed a good deal of work to make sense beyond my initial sketch. And the two characters in conflict were neither of them likeable, though they were interesting. While it was fun to write that way and part of me wants to see if I can tweak those 8K into a different interpretation than the one I went with, I overhauled the story into something with a good arc, with good character tension each step of the way, with a logical though not transparent plot and narrative flow, and with a complicated ending that didn't make things overly nice and tidy like I'm beginning to hate in some books. For some reason, just because it's a novel, I'm expecting the first draft of THUMB to deliver all of that already. I'm not giving myself permission to fail in order to see how to succeed with this story because that means risking a lot of words and time in creating those words.

How to fix this? I've started this a little. The past 2K of THUMB that I have dragged kicking and screaming out of my fingertips are definitely not going to stay in their present form. It's pretty much all infodumping on my gee-whiz tech in the story, but I wrote it because it provided a chance to get my MC showing her stuff, it led to some fun dialog and character action, and I know I'm going to end up keeping snippets in some fashion because at some point, I'm going to need a "Here's Where I Geek on Future Tech" scene. Today, I'm hoping to grit my teeth and summarize a bunch of activity as my characters get the ship ready to roll so I can finally write the fun piece that officially kicks off the conflict of Act 2. Hopefully I will keep giving myself permission to write outlines and sketches and distillations to keep me moving along.

I think part of the problem has been in trying to hit a word count goal in the first draft of a novel. It keeps me tied into the concept of "this is a lot of words, and I may lose a lot of them." Short fiction has shown me that my first drafts are very exploratory and take as much or as little as they need. And I find it very interesting that THUMB gummed up right around the 35K mark. I think I lasted to about 45K in SoZ before I came up against this wall. That time I forced myself through it, not thinking about the story or what the block could be telling me, and I got thoroughly off-track. There may be a very good reason that my first novel, HD, is told in three parts of about 30-35K a piece over the course of thirty or so years and many critiquers have complained that each part feels like it's trying to be a novel on its own and not part of a whole. A draft beyond 35-45K is outside of my natural comfort zone, apparently. And a draft that actually gets the novel out of Act 1 is problematic, as well, it seems.

I would find this more fascinating and helpful were it not for the fact that it took one complete but very broken novel (100K words) and three aborted attempts at novels (135K words) and myriad pieces of short fiction (hmmm, maybe a total of 100 or 150K?) spread out over five and half years (actually, seven if you count the very first 10K I wrote in HD before I considered myself serious about this writing thing). I don't like taking this long to figure something out, especially if it's about myself (though I have taken longer, and will likely take longer still in the future), and especially if not knowing the piece of information delays events that will get me closer to the dream of writing full-time.

Ah, well. I'm just going to have to get over that, aren't I? At least I did figure it out. Isn't that why I'm doing this series of posts anyway?

Process Examination #14: It Seems Cruel That Logic Should Let Me Down

I hadn't intended to take a day off from writing today. The easiest source of blame is Emma Bull's Territory, a story that absolutely sucked me in and refused to let go until I read the last page not an hour ago. But I have to be honest and admit I was looking for an excuse to step away from writing today. I didn't really need to, at least, not where PPR is concerned. It's just that the stutters and stalls and hiccups of THUMB have me all twisted and turned, trying to figure out where things went wrong this time.

As I mentioned yesterday, logic is what did me in. Or, rather, strict adherence to a logical flow of time and events and patterns. I've been writing THUMB in such a way as to cover just about every single waking minutes in these characters' lives, highlighting the dialog and character interactions and downplaying the action. Finally, in the past two days, I figured out why: I had set up a POV rotation pattern that I slavishly followed, forcing events to unfold in this step-by-step way, revealing what happened as the clock ticked on because that's exactly what that POV pattern demanded I do unless I wanted to pass too many important things by. For example, I couldn't skip ahead a couple of days in Jasper's POV because that would mean having to summarize and infodump on important things that had happened during those days in Elzie's and Rafe's POV. And I couldn't not have the Jasper POV scene because I had set up a structure based on it being there.

Logic has been my friend for a very, very long time. I suspect it still is, but it's laughing at me for taking it so literal. The laughter wouldn't hurt so much were it not for the fact that literal logic would get me to a completed draft, but it would take a good deal more than 100,000 words and a couple of months. And the revision process would be murder. Literal logic is not the way to write novels. Rather, it's not the way to write this novel.

So I'm trying to shift gears and ease the POV pattern and loosen my stranglehold on logic for Act 2. And I'm trying to do it without going back to rewrite Act 1. And I'm trying not to think about the fact that writing short fiction, even a novella, seems to be easier for my brain to parse. I want to write novels. I have tons of novel-length stories in me to tell, and I have to tell them. And I'd rather not take years to get each one out of me.

Part of the reason I started this series of posts was to, obviously, examine my writing process in frequent, honest terms that would help me navigate my way from the beginning of a story idea through to the point that I decided to cut the cord and send it out into the world. I can think of a number of different ways to interpret this crossroads I feel is before me and, in so doing, pick a direction. All of them, if I wrote them out here, would likely sound extremely plausible. All of them would point in different directions.

So why don't I cut right to the chase? Any falter now feels like it's admitting I can't finish a novel. That was the Awful Troof I feared back when I set aside SoZ for this crusade. And here I am, roundabouts the end of Act 1, with 40K words in the story, hitting a speedbump that has me looking back at the starting line and wondering if maybe I should try this race over again.

Damn. It. To. Hell.

No. Screw this. I'm going to finish this damn book. And I'm going to do it by the end of January, as I know I can. I'm going to take the ideas I've got to get me to the end and, by golly, use them to get me there. They may not be perfect, they may not work as well as something I'll figure out later, but they will get me to a completed draft and then I'll fix the stupid thing, no matter how painful that process is going to be.

Take that, logic.

Process Examination #13: It's All a Placeholder for the Real Thing

Sigh. I'm trudging my way through the first draft of THUMB, and I've realized that there is so much I have to fix. Just about every scene has something that is my shorthand for "make this not suck in revision." It was not a shiny happy moment when I took stock of Act One and realized most of it fits into that category. But still I keep slogging, although it's harder to do so when you're staring at a scene that is just mired in Suck, when you're having characters talk about conflict and action rather than actually putting them in conflict and action.

Of course, it's not all bad. Even in the "slime, filth, putresence" stage, I see the gems still, which means that there are likely more of them than I'm letting myself see at the moment. And all this talking head phenomenon I've got going on and the punches I'm pulling so my characters aren't cut too low too soon (I know where they're going to end up by Acts 3 and 4, so I'm trying to be a little nice to them right now; Bad Author! Bad!) is helping me see where the story's lacking, what I need to fix. I even managed to figure out a better way to do a certain plot and character point last night because of all the vast amounts of suck surrounding me. (By then, though, it was my bed time, so I only managed to choke out about 150 words in that new direction. Thank God PPR is going well so I'm not feeling completely stupid in writing.)

I think I might have even mastered part of the trick of changing plot or characters in mid-story and not having to go back and revise. We'll see as I keep moving forward, though. I feel driven to finish this draft without getting stuck in loops, so I'm going to keep pushing on, asking questions when I stumble to make sure I don't get too far away from the story and the characters that I have to scrap 82K like I did with SoZ. (I know I've said that before. Writers pay attention to refrains, sometimes we even figure out what they mean before our readers do. I'm pretty sure the essence of this motif is this: Me want finish book! Now!)

One thing that might help me through this is to actually track the Things That Suck as I notice them in a document so I can have a revision guide. Of course, that also runs the risk of starting out my revisions in a very negative light. Must ponder.

Process Examination #12: Juggling Two Projects

I've always been a multi-tasker, sometimes compulsively so. It's very rare that my brain will actually allow me to buckle down and focus completely on one thing. At the very least, I require background music and/or noise for some part of my brain to analyze and follow while the rest of the gray matter addresses the primary task at hand. So I was surprised when, early on the writing of THUMB, I was unable to work on the revisions for another story. But I duly noted the chaos that ensued from attempting to pre-write and start a draft at the same time as revising a completely different manuscript. And I set aside the revisions for later.

Now, here I am making remarkable headway in two projects at once, one of which is a rewrite of more extensive proportions than I had originally thought it would be. And I'm thriving. The key for this success has been to keep the two projects divided by time of day that I work on them. I work on PPR during Drew's naps, and I work on THUMB in the evenings. Reserving the time for both projects had allowed me to focus and not get so hung up on the little stumbles.

I'm reminded of how much I enjoyed research as an undergrad, juggling two different labs in two different states between semesters and breaks. I could concentrate on the project in front of me, shrug away the annoyance of a setback and focus on getting data. All because I knew I would be setting aside the frustrations in front me in favor of another project in just a few months, and that I could come back to the current project with refreshed energy and perspective. (Seriously, there are times I wish I could be paid to be an undergrad researcher, complete with a full course load; I think it was the most successful "career" I've ever had.)

I think the key to this successful juggling is that both projects are well underway. THUMB is just about out of Act One and PPR was already complete in draft form (of course, the departure from the draft is a bit more extensive than I had thought it would be; still, I know where I'm going and what needs to be tweaked to get me there because I've already traversed this particular path). I don't think the juggling would work if I were trying to start a new novel or even working on an already started novel (such as SoZ) as that's just too much to ask of my brain.

(Another aside, it took the ickiness of my first trimester to understand that it is possible to demand too much of my brain while multi-tasking. That led to me running a red light and totalling our car while I was fourteen weeks pregnant. I can still remember quite clearly the moment when I tried to add one more thought to the mix in my brain and my brain just went mushy and came up empty until I realized the car next to me was breaking hard, which meant I should likely be doing the same. Only I was a bit too slow on the uptake.)

So with two projects feeding off of each other, I have plenty of faith that I can reach my goals quite handily for these two projects. Here is the state of their progress:

THUMB: 32,072 of 100,000

PPR: 8,642 of 30,000

Go me and my mad juggling skillz.

Process Examination #11: Notebooking Again

It's funny. Now that I'm fully into draft composition mode and buckling down for a regular writing schedule, I managed to forget the tricks that did well during pre-writing and the initial stuttering. For example, while laying down the law for my writing times, I went on about this "freewriting" thing. It was a good idea at the time, born out of a feeling that I should be writing at the computer during my writing time, even if it's just brain spew vaguely or not at all related to the novel. I never kept myself to that concept of getting the fingers typing, though, and I didn't really need it until Sunday. And I just froze up.

Now, part of the problem was that I had just picked up J.R. Ward's latest Black Dagger book, and those books are like crack. I can't really explain it. I seriously can't put those books down. As a writer, I want to know how this is done so I can do it in my books. Is there some subliminal printing thing going on? Are the pages dipped in a narcotic? Maybe the ink is laced with something that forces the eyes to follow it? I can't even pin down the story elements and the construction that really grabs me. That's how totally I get sucked into these books. If my interest wanders at all, I can usually figure out why, but that doesn't happen often. At any rate, being in the middle of this book did not make it easy for me to immerse myself in my writing on Sunday.

But I finally figured out that the bigger problem was that I hadn't notebooked the upcoming scenes and chapters at all. I don't mean outline. What I write for notebooking is taking a general concept of what has to happen in the next scene (sometimes it's as broad as "Jasper is the next POV character; need some action and plot revelation here") and then I sketch out ideas as they come. It really ends up sounding like a conversation (details are variabled out so as to prevent spoilerage):

Maybe I should have Jasper say this while doing that, and Celestina gets pissy?

No, because then she'd never let him do that other thing, and that has to happen in this chapter or else the next chapter isn't going to flow.

OK, so maybe Jasper does X because of A that happened ten years ago, and Celestina was part of bringing A down on his head, so she gets to grin and--

WAIT, Lutgard shows up and totally has to say E while doing Y so that Celestina gets G piece of information that Jasper completely misses, but he gets H piece of information, and so does the reader so Elzie's next chapter makes sense.

Me rikey.

Don't worry if you didn't get that. Chances are, in another couple of months, I won't get it either. But it's exactly what I need right now in order to write the next scene. And when I set up my writing schedule last week, I completely forgot to work time in for that. Not that I need a lot of time. I can usually get the notebooking done in the first half hour or so I sit down to write and then still make my minimums. Or I drag out the notebook during the day and scribble stuff down as I'm working or running after Drewbie.

I'm sure when I get to the end of draft comp and also during revisions that I will have similar process examination posts that amount to a "Duh!" with regards to forgetting about the power of notebooking. Maybe I'll be quicker on the uptake next time.

Process Examination #10: Lowered Expectations (aka Reality Bites)

OK, so I finally did some number crunching and frank assessment of THUMB and another project that has come up.

(This other project is a revision of a novelette into a novella for a sub opp with Samhain publishing, which is primarily an e-book publisher and their stock is primarily romance. This project is much more toward paranormal romance than SF, so I'm going to submit it under a pseudonym as a nod toward perhaps starting a career in that genre and in e-books. The career that I want is in traditionally pubbed science fiction and fantasy novels, though, and I've seen more than one writer suffer due to a backlist in a romance genre and in e-books. Hence the pseudonym. But I do have a number of shorter pieces and ideas that don't seem to fit in with the SF short fiction markets, so I might as well see if I can turn a coin where they might fit better.)

Anyway, a draft of THUMB is going to be 90K minimum and 100K maximum, and I've only written about 23K so far. That's 67 or 77K by the end of the year if I want to hold myself to my original goal of a draft by the end of the year. I was thinking I could buckle down and likely make this work. But with the sub opp that fell into my lap, I need to add a minimum of 12K to the novellette and a maximum of 22K to bring that story into the range this opp is looking for. So that means about 80K minimum and maybe even as much as 90K by the end of the year.

While I would like to be producing at a level that would have me reliably writing 30K a month, I'm not there yet, and with holiday guests and travel coming up and my stubborn refusal not to give up one night of downtime with my husband every week (I will not sacrifice my family or my marriage for any career), I just don't think it's possible to get 80K or 90K by the end of the year. Because the sub opp is due Jan13, I pushed my THUMB goal back by a month, giving me just under four months to finish that draft and about three months to finish the paranormal revision.

It's a bit more manageable, but I know that I have to push myself harder than I have been, hold myself to what I'm capable of doing each night. I'll be revising the novelette during Drew's naps (that's an hour of guaranteed work), and in the evenings, I'll be working on THUMB. I can fairly reliably produce a minimum of 500 words for every hour I have my BIC, often 750, and sometimes 1000.

So I'll need 24 to 44 days of pure writing at 500 words to get to the right word count on the novella. Add in 15-20 for pre-writing and rewriting, and I'm set for meeting the sub opp deadline with a good amount of wiggle room.

As for THUMB, I need 134 to 154 days of pure writing at 500 words/day to get to the end of the draft. Given that I usually have more than an hour to work in the evenings, I think I can shave off 30-40 days from that estimate. I'm also going to work out a weekend schedule with Mark that gets me a couple of extra hours during the day and boost my output that way as well.

Basically, I've taken a hard look at my writing goals, at my writing output, and at the habits I've fallen into that reduce the output for no good reason. For example, when I had a great writing night last week and then felt my brain turn to mush the following nights, I gave myself a half hour each time and called it quits without trying anything to get words. I'm going to start employing freewrite mandates at times like those. If I feel in any way that the words aren't going to come the way I like that lets me write my usual output, then I will start freewriting in fifteen minute intervals. The freewriting can be an examination of why I'm not feeling the words come, it can be a rambling examination of the chapter I'm trying to slog my way through, it can be the same word over and over and over and over and over again. But I have to freewrite for fifteen minutes and then re-evaluate how I'm feeling about producing actual draft content. Given how I've seen my mind and muse work in the past, I'm pretty sure that this will trigger something I can run with, if not in the first fifteen minutes then definitely in the second. And if it doesn't, then at least I will have tried.

This is the way I'm going to get a better handle on my regular writing abilities and start treating myself and my goals seriously in yet another way. I want a career in which I write a book a year at minimum, preferably two. I think I'm capable of it, but I really haven't given myself a chance, haven't worked on discipline enough to see what I think of a schedule that would give me that output. I know I'm happier when I'm consistently producing, regularly working my way toward the end of a project. I think this is going to have great results.

Process Examination #9: Variations on the Theme

I should've known better than to submit a query letter for critique by an editor who doesn't publish SF. I tried to quibble a bit in the opening paragraph and highlight elements that might be more fantasy than SF so it wouldn't look totally stupid to be submitting this query to her attention. Unfortunately, in that quibbling, I opened the letter with this lovely sentence and got appropriately dinged for it: "I don't know where to draw the line between fantasy and science fiction." So, of course, the editor talked about how unprofessional that sounded, that you don't know your own field, etc. An excellent point, but it made me wince all the same.

She then went on to say that query letters don't need to summarize the plot and to stay away from big blocky paragraphs that belonged more to a snyopsis. The query letter needs to get to the heart of theme and characters that create an intriguing concept to entice the editor to ask for more. Another excellent point, phrased in a way I either hadn't heard before or hadn't absorbed as it wasn't my own query letter on the chopping block at the time.

That got me thinking, can I even begin to distill this novel into its selling concepts yet? I've got some ideas, but it's hard to mention the one element I know that's fun and sets my story apart--80s hairmetal throwbacks--in a way that explains why that element is in the story without bogging it down in a worldbuilding infodump. So I turned to that squirrelly concept of theme to look there for something that might make a query letter stand out.

OK, I also looked at the characters, examining what makes them unique and fun to write, what conflicts they get tossed into that make the story interesting. But that, in turn, brought me back to theme as I started noticing, well, themes in my characters and conflicts.

Unfortunately, all I've got are words: chosen vs blood family, decisions under pressure, corporate shenanigans, and breaking the rules. I had the first three more or less from earlier contemplations on the concept of theme. The last one came up while considering the query letter and what stood out about it as strong. Every single one of my characters breaks the rules in some fashion and often for interests that aren't self-serving. Well, my bad guy's the exception, but even there, he's more concerned about his family's company surviving, not really about his own power and interests. I guess the key difference is that my good guys don't break rules that put others in danger without the consent of those others, whereas my antagonist doesn't see a need for any such thing. To him, everything is expendable as long as his family's company endures.

While all of these meditations on theme and characters and conflicts are enlightening, I still don't have a theme I can articulate in a sentence or two. I still can't convey clearly the awesome in my book. I know, I know. I'm not even at 20K yet, so I shouldn't be fretting about this too much. I'm sure by the time I get to "The End" in this draft I'll be able to express theme and Teh Awesome in a way that's going to make a wicked query letter. But I don't think I'm going to stop analyzing THUMB for theme and intriguing elements as I work through this draft. It's helpful. It keeps me on top of what my characters are doing, on how my conflict is twisting and shaping.

Process Examination #8: Maintaining the Narrative Thread

I'm in the process of completing a very tight-focused revision of the 17K words I've written in THUMB. The only purpose of this rewrite is to add in new narrative dots and delete some old ones so I can connect them in a slightly adjusted narrative thread.

I've discovered that I am not the sort of writer who can say, "Hey, if I change/add/delete this plot point way back in Chapter 2, the story will look like X here in Chapter 8 where I'm at now," and just keep going ahead with draft. If I try to do that, I get lost in the many ways from Point A to Point B in each chapter and end up building an entirely different narrative thread than before I came up with the new plot points but that doesn't follow from the new plot points, either. It's one of the ways I got to 82K in SoZ without leaving Act One.

It's not easy to force my way through a "only look at this one aspect" revision. There's a part of me that wants to burrow down into the nitty-gritty of every sentence and Fix the Whole Damn Thing. But that would take way too much time, and I'm not willing to invest energy in that sort of revision when it's likely I'll be making more substantive narrative thread changes as I work my way through the rest of this draft. But it's hard to catch a bit of dialog or description and wince a bit, knowing it could be better, but just zip right past it because it's out of scope for the revision.

So I've decided to dangle a carrot for this task. Via Sarah Monette, I have discovered the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. They specialize in perfumes that represent poems and literary characters and the like. I'm not really excited about it for dousing myself in scent (though I have no objection to that, should I enjoy the scents I purchase), but Muse is practically pinging with the possibilities. Scrolling through their scent descriptions, looking for character matches, getting olfactory input for the novels. And I'm completely caught up in Muse's excitement.

In one of my backstory scenes, I have a character spritzing herself with perfume. It's more than just a "hey, it smells good" thing. To her, it's like armor and a weapon. It hides her even as it empowers her. She knows this and revels in it. But I had no idea how to describe that kind of a scent. Now, after wandering through the BPAL website, I've got a couple of ideas based on their allegorical connections.

So, as soon as I finish this limited rewrite (which I'm thinking I can get done by the weekend), I'll be rewarding myself with a purchase at BPAL. And then it will be back to the draft, armed with the super sniffer and an intact narrative thread. Nothing's gonna stop me then.

Process Examination # 7: Focus Point

For this writer, inspiration doesn't always come in the form of a great character, or a fascinating conflict, or a beautiful setting, or some intricate thematic concept, or a grand plot. This is particularly true when I'm in the midst of writing a novel. Inspiration comes in odd ways during the novel writing, often when I'm thinking about some niggling macguffin of one sort or another. That is, the niggling detail is important in that it frames a daily aspect of the characters' lives but isn't really central to the plot.

In this case, I was trying to get some details figured out for exactly what the medical device that one company sells and that my MC repairs/maintains/audits/what have you does, other than the hand-wavey "it uses advanced tech to sequence DNA, hunt for illnesses, and monitor cellular processes in a short amount of time". Hand-wavey is good for vague plot directions and outlines. It's bad for actually composing draft (unless you don't mind going back in to put in details). And I was in the middle of a chapter in which I realized how much the hand-wavey details sucked for my space ship mechanic.

So, of course, I side-stepped the mechanic's details and went to the MC's job details. Helpful for the next chapter I need to write, not for the one I'm currently mired in. BUT, it worked! I got the most amazing idea for my medical device. It's specific enough that it acts as a focus for further research I need to do on the topic.

Research of any kind needs a focus point. As someone who participated in academic research for five years, I obviously knew this. I just don't think I ever quite understood it. I've known for a while now that THUMB was going to be addressing cybernetics in a big way. I even tried to do a little bit of general research on the topic to get my bearings, but I was frustrated that no clear path to what I needed for my story emerged (not in the sense that I wanted answers for how a futuristic technology would work; more in the sense that I couldn't escape the general). So I set the research aside and kept writing, wanting at least to keep the story going, knowing I could add details in later during revisions (though this would not make for a pleasant rewrite).

Now that I know how the medical device works, that serves as a focus point for the cybernetics research. I know what interface of biology and technology I'm looking for now. I can read articles and books with that in mind, culling details when they turn up. Another chunk of the novel falls more securely into place, serving as greater assurance that I can in fact make my way to "The End." It's the reverse of "connect the dots." Pre-writing inspiration, of the sort I described in the first paragraph, provides snapshots of an overall picture, which I then dutifully piece together in a way that seems to make sense. Inspiration while I write is like a microscope, showing me the subtleties of that picture. But if the microscope has nothing to focus on, it's still a big blur.

Process Examination #6: I'm Kellie Hazell, Reminding You to Help Control the Pet Population. Spay or Neuter Your Plot Bunnies Today.

Oy, the perils of the first three chapters. The brain is supplying ideas, various routes to get you from Point A to Point B, various morsels of character info that ratchet up conflict and promise for a big pay off. Beware the lure of the plot bunny.

I have not been successful in fighting the plot bunny temptation in my previous novels (and, no, I don't consider it an accomplishment to reach for the kitchen sink, pause, then decide against tossing it into the first act of the novel). Those bunnies are just so darn cute. You pick up a pair: protag and antag. And you examine their coats and decide they are perfect for the novel. You will enjoy watching these two square off, detailing their triumphs, their failures, their every single nose twitch and tail wiggle. Every hop will have significance, every nibble of the carrot. Then you step away for a moment, your attention on finding just the right novelty item to put in the cage with them to enhance their surroundings. Only when you turn back to the bunny cage, you find that there are suddenly quite a bit more than 2 bunnies in there. But you can tell how they sprang into existance, what traits of the parents they kept, how they provide so much more context and conflict and depth to the story.

So you get a bigger cage for the little beasties and write away, not missing a single juicy detail. Somewhere in there are your original bunnies with their particular story to tell. You may even develop that appropriately in and around your meticulous recounting of the progeny's antics. But your reader probably isn't going to have much luck finding that thread or giving it greater weight then the rest of the stuff you've shoved on her, and she's probably not going to be able to develop a coherent story question to carry with her as she reads.

The Plot Bunny Problem crystallized the concept of the story question for me, actually. I always understood what was meant by a story question: it's what you want your reader to be asking about the story, usually by the end of the first page, definitely by the end of the first chapter. Will the hero beat the bad guy? Will the heroine and hero get together? Will the protag learn that family isn't just about bloodlines? But I didn't understand just how powerful that story question needed to be and that even directly related information and questions can dilute it, especially in those first three chapters. In order to figure that out, I had to get somebody to critique the rough, rough first three chapters. Sure enough, my critter asked a whole bunch of story questions, two of which were what he needed to be worried about in that chunk of text. But he couldn't tell that. And I really couldn't see the problem with the other questions until he gave them equal weight to the important ones.

Now for my next process dilemma: to rewrite based on that critique or to move forward? I think the first antag POV chapter will help clarify this in my mind.

Process Examination #5: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Draft

When I set out to write backstory in order to better write the draft of my current work in progress, I hadn't expected to write over 20,000 words of backstory. I thought 10,000, maybe. Just enough to sketch out a couple of defining events that brought my characters into the situation that starts my story.

One thing I have learned very well over the past five years of writing is that I suck at estimating how many words any one scene idea is going to take. I always think it'll take less than it does. Always.

But that's OK. In this case, it was perfect, particuarly because I was able to write over 8,000 of those 20,000 words in one week, and the rest over three weeks. I don't mind spending a month on writing backstory. Or, at least, I don't mind it when writing the backstory reveals a gaping plothole that necessitated a change in my antagonist's plans. A significant change. I can just see how writing the draft would've been like pulling teeth with the original concept. I would keep writing and writing, trying to find through each new scene and chapter what was wrong and how I could fix it. Introducing new plot angles, maybe even new characters, throwing all manner of tangentially related ideas into the draft in the hopes that something would stick.

I can just see it because that's pretty much how I've written every idea before.

The backstory, though, revealed my plothole before I even had a chance to write my way around it, simply because it forced me to ask a particular question: What exactly did Toby do to escape his previous life and get himself stuck in his current one? Without the answer to that question, it was impossible to write one particular piece of backstory. Three days of mind-probing later, and I realized that the science I had set up for the story--terraforming--wasn't going to work. It just wasn't logically possible (no, not the concept of terraforming, just its place in my story).

This brought me around to the concept of theme. For a while now, I've been asking myself what the theme of this book is supposed to be. What point am I trying to make? I could never shake anything clear out of my head. I could feel something there, a whole mess of mental connections and thoughts and ideas, but I couldn't articulate it. When I asked that question after 20,000 words of backstory and a clear outline of the requirements of my story's science, I got a question in response: What trends have I noticed in my pre-writing?

That simple question gave me both the beginnings of a theme and a science concept that works for the story.

I've still got that last backstory scene to write, but I need to do a few bits of research first, so I'm not trying to talk cybernetics out of my ass (or, at least, not entirely out of my ass). I'm also ready to start writing draft as well, at least the first two chapters that don't yet involve the science because my two protagonist POV characters have no clue that the current problems they are twisting themselves around are because of a science project that will mess with their lives so much more.

I think this experience has finally kicked away the fear of writing a full novel's worth of words that have to be tossed out as I did with Shadow of Zehth. I know the hallmarks of that problem. I recognized them pretty quickly in just writing backstory. I figured out the right questions to ask, and I figured out how to organize the information I did know so I could tailor my search for answers.

Also, I figured out that, yes, it's possible to look at the draft you're creating and realize that it needs work before it's a finished product and to fix it as you go. But, I've also realized just how productive I can be when I stop thinking of the draft as a stepping stone to a finished product and just get on with telling the story. I'm less concerned with the work of revision now. Something finally clicked in my brain to tell me that revision is a separate step, and I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. That's going to be some monstrous process examiantion then, I'm sure. In the meantime, I've got a story to finish.

Process Examination #4: Dodging the Draft

Ah, the writing life and its bountiful ironies and contradictions. Not long after I posted my bit about how I felt I was ready to start in on the draft only to discover I wasn't, I started getting very involved in writing backstory and finding my characters' voices and avoiding getting back into the actual novel draft. This is not to say that I did excessive backstory writing or pointless character navel gazing. Rather, in focusing on the backstory scenes and letting them reveal what they would about the characters, I better understood the plot of the novel itself. And in better understanding the novel's plot, I had a better grasp of just what it would take to write my way from Chapter 1 to The End.

Eep.

One of the benefits of organic, completely fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants writing is that you have a vague destination or goal in mind and this lets you focus rather completely on the journey. It's a great metaphor for life, and you do get lost in the joy of exploring a world or a set of characters or a story without worrying about the destination. It's my comfort writing. It's not how I want to write professionally, though, because it's damn inefficient and frustrating when you'd like to boost productivity. It's possible that I have yet to channel my muse appropriately to allow for the best organic writing experience. Maybe one day after I've finished at least one more novel I'll try it again and see what happens.

But even as I've figured out how to get out of truly organic writing while still avoiding rigorous outlining, I hadn't considered what it might be like to have worked out enough of the plot and character arcs--in the sense of staring down a daunting 100,000 words. It's one thing to broadly outline where you're going and why and who's going to be doing what when they get there. It's quite another to sit down and type in all the details of that journey. Nevermind that I've done this before for Human Dignity. I'm still a little twitchy from writing 82,000 words of Shadow of Zehth and realizing I had to go back to word 1 and start all over.

So I might be writing a bit more backstory than I though was necessary when I first realized I wasn't ready to start the draft. But I'm getting a lot more puzzle pieces for this book in doing so, and I'm getting to know my characters very well. I'm also getting a good sense of the further research I need to do to write some key scenes better and incorporate stronger details into the going. This is the benefit of doing backstory, at least for me. It's like taking a practice test. The pressure's off, so you can play around a little, figure out where the strengths and weaknesses are, if it's possible to use this character in this way or not (found out that one of the plot arcs I had set up for a non-POV major character wasn't going to work because that character, when I wrote backstory from her POV demonstrated a slightly different set of morals than I expected).

But, of course, this could become excessive very quickly and thus allow me to stall when I should really start digging into creating the novel. So I've limited myself to one scene per character that I want to learn more about. I have a cast of six characters, and I know I want to write backstory scenes from five of them. I've already written one and a half of those scenes. My backstory has also yielded a seventh character who will play a major role in a subplot (and a minor role in the plot), and I think I might want to do a scene from her POV. But that scene and the odd man out of the first six I mentioned will be extras as things stand now. I might use them to kick start me out of any potential future stalls.

The one very good thing about dodging the draft is that I've seen how vital backstory free-writing is for me. It's solidified plot and characters. It's highlighted weak spots that will need attention either in research or revision. It's given me surer footing in the world of this novel, but it has its limits.