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Posts Tagged ‘how i do it’

. . . can I pull it off?

On August 9th, I’m taking a trip to Dallas.

My current pace of work puts me neck-deep in the Giant ‘Splody that is the end of the book right around the time I’m supposed to be out of town. While this is what I have a laptop for, those are not the ideal conditions under which to be finishing a novel.

Nor is it ideal to take a lengthy break from writing said novel while in the middle of the Giant ‘Splody.

To this awkwardness, I can see only one solution:

Finish the book before I go.

. . . which I think I can do. Maybe. It will mean I’m even more head-munched over the next two weeks than I would be otherwise, but the bright side is, I could then relax while in Dallas, take a break, and come back refreshed to polish it up and get it to my editor. These are Good Things. But they are Good Things that would require me to work at something like pace-and-a-half to double-pace from now through August 8th.

I think I can do it. Maybe.

I’m going to give it a shot. (Yoda, get out of my head.) I know almost everything that lies between me and the end of the book, which is the usual metric for whether or not I can safely speed up. This should be feasible, right?

If you don’t hear from me again, please come find my headless corpse in my office and give it proper burial.

christ.

Quoth Mrissa, on her own work: “Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter.”

Quoth me, in response: “You know, that perfectly encapsulates the current state of my life.”

I go to sleep, and I’m thinking of this book. I wake up, and I’m thinking of this book. Leave me unattended for five minutes, and where does my brain go? I can only break out of it by scheduling other things: there’s X-Files watching on Sunday; I’m going to go do that. (But if there’s a crazy person in the episode, my hindbrain is taking notes for Tiresias.) There’s D&D on Tuesday; I need to remember to switch gears. (And it’s a good thing Lessa’s so easy a character for me to play, or that wouldn’t work.) HP7’s coming out soon; I’ll be spending most of Saturday reading it. (If it takes me too long, will I quit so I can get my writing done, or just pull [another] all-nighter?)

The last time I remember a book eating my head so thoroughly, it was the first one I’d ever written. It was (and is) an urban fantasy set in Canada (no, I don’t know why; that’s where the book wanted to be), and during the home stretch, kniedzw would look at me periodically and say, “you’re in Canada, aren’t you?” Now it isn’t Canada; it’s the sixteenth century. It feels like my brain has taken up permanent residence in the story, and is only coming out occasionally to visit the twenty-first century, rather than the other way around.

I’ve got a theory for what the similarity means, and I hope it’s true. Writing that first novel was a watershed for me. I consider it my transition from apprentice to journeyman work; I’d acquired all the basic skills, the last one being the ability to finish what I started, and after that I was qualified to earn a day’s wages as a writer (though it took me some time to actually do so). I’m not going to claim MNC is my transition from journeyman to master — that shift is yet in my future — but I think, I hope, this is another watershed for me, another transition to a higher level of skill. It feels like it, when I’m not wallowing in Standard Writerly Self-Doubt, but it’s hard to judge how sharp and white and straight its teeth are when it’s lunching on my brain. (Oh yes, it’s getting not just breakfast, but lunch and dinner out of me.) It’s the best explanation I can think of for why none of the six novels I wrote in between, including Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch, ate my head this badly.

Or at least it’s the explanation I like best.

So if I’m staring off into space, or I don’t answer e-mails, or seem otherwise to be Not Quite Here, you’ll know why. I’m in Canada the sixteenth century. And since I probably have another thirty thousand words to go, I won’t be coming back any time soon.

gotta love the little lightbulbs . . . .

Having written and pasted in the Gog and Magog scene, I figured out why I like writing these flashbacks so much.

Up until I was about eighteen or so — nearly nineteen — I wrote stories non-linearly, starting with the scenes that excited me the most. This ended up not being an effective strategy for me, for reasons I’ve documented elsewhere. These days I write mostly from the beginning to the end, so that the material that comes between the big set-pieces and watershed character moments won’t utterly suck.

These flashbacks, though? They’re all the fun of my old method, with none of the downside. I don’t need connective tissue, with them. I don’t need them to grow organically out of the scenes that come before them in the text. They’re snapshots of important stuff happening, presented with all the drama and spectacle I can cram in, and then the minute the excitement’s over I’m gone, back to 1590 and the main narrative. I can sink fleets, murder giants, generally Blow Shit Up, and then bounce off without fretting the details of what happens immediately afterward.

I get to write my shiny flashy candy-bar scenes whenever they come clear in my head.

No wonder I’m having so much fun with them.

remixing scenes

I can tell I’m getting better as a writer, not because the best that I’m producing is any better — it may be, but I can’t judge that — but because I can spot and fix flaws that would have confounded me much worse a few years ago.

There are certain pivotal scenes in this novel that I suspect I will keep revisiting from now until they pry the book out of my fingers. They’re finicky, delicate little things, that need to convey fragments of information in an order and density and context that will let me tease out the strands of backstory at appropriate times, and as such it looks like they’re going to need continual tweaking. Today was a day of tweaking, as I ricocheted around several scenes toward the end of Act Three, cutting out a sentence here, sticking in a sentence there, changing the interpretation put on certain things, re-ordering the conversations and polishing the seams where bits got cut out and pasted in. I’m not done, and I know it; there are bits still marked with square brackets, reminding me of the places that will need further tweaking when other bits of the story get settled.

It used to be that once I got something on the page, if it wasn’t carved in stone, it was at least carved in clay and waiting to be fired. I’m sure I’m a better writer than I was when I first finished a novel, but perhaps more importantly, I think I’m a better reviser. I’m much more capable now of cutting a scene out, putting a new scene in, or remixing existing scenes to serve different purposes. I still think I’ve got a lot of room to grow on that front, but it’s obscurely satisfying to be able to fix stuff in such a fashion, even if it doesn’t technically move me any closer to the end of the book.

So I got all that in order, then did today’s writing, because I needed to make sure the fixes I’d thought of would work when put into the text, so the next bit of finicky backstory work will (hopefully) not need the same kind of changing later.

Even though it’s dumb, I may write again later tonight. I’m standing on the edge of a backstory precipice; I’m finally getting to talk about Suspiria. For a character who was one of the driving reasons I wanted to write this book, she sure doesn’t have much of a visible presence in the story, and it makes her few appearances all the more important. I’m not sure I want to leave this one for tomorrow, even if it means I’m unnecessarily squandering one of the days I have to figure out what I do after I talk about her. (The rest of Act Four is still muddy in my head.)

And somewhere in my life, I need to find the time to write the Gog-and-Magog and Onyx Hall flashbacks, and the one about the Queen of Scots that I’ll be arriving at soon, and also the Tiresias scenes. (The good news is, if I get all those done, I’ll hit 90K by the end of the month no problem; probably 95K, even.)

We haven’t yet crested the top of the hill, i.e. the transition to Act Five. But when we get there, it may well be a downhill sprint all the way.

Authorial sadism: nekkid Lune! Also, Suspiria.

LBR quota: Love, in a variety of odd ways.

How can I go crazy?

Okay, I know I’m crazy already. But I’m crazy in a “oh crap I’m trying to do way too much this summer and I’m going to snap” kind of way, which is not the way I need.

So — because I’m amused to see what responses I will get — I will throw this open to you, the great LJ mind.

Tiresias, a seer in Midnight Never Come, lost his mind years ago, through spending waaaaaaay too much time living in a faerie palace. He can’t tell his prophetic visions from the things around him from the stuff he’s just making up, and he’s lost any sense of when events are taking place; the few parts of the book written from his point of view will not have dates attached to them as everything else does, and do not take place in the order they’re presented. His is a very particularly dream-like madness.

. . . but I have a hard time remembering my dreams, and don’t do dream-like writing well. So I ask you, oh great LJ mind: what methods would you recommend for getting myself into the proper state of mind to write this book’s Tiresias scenes? How can I make myself go the right kind of crazy, or at least play it on TV the page?

turning point

I shouldn’t have stayed up this late, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of either of those scenes.

I’ve passed the halfway point in the novel. It came just shy of 60K — I’m at 60,210 right now — which might or might not be precisely half the wordcount; I think not. It’s probably about three-quarters of the way through Act Three. But it’s the point at which the novel pivots, at which it stops moving away from the beginning and starts moving toward the end.

Things went boom, as one might expect.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Technically I wrote the crucial moment a month ago, on my way back from London, but it wasn’t real until it went into the novel. Now all the stuff that created this situation will start to come out. Now the depth of backstory — the reason I’m writing this novel — will become apparent.

Now my characters are scroooooowed.

It seems the right place to leave them for tonight.

Authorial sadism: All of it, of course. But the “forgive me” lines are the ones that hurt the most.

LBR quota: Love led to blood. As it so often does.

50K!

Tonight, I passed fifty thousand words.

The problem is, once I pass 40K, I enter the dreaded Middle Of The Book. It’s a wasteland in which the initial momentum of starting a novel has worn off, the end is not yet in sight, there are a variety of things to be juggled that range from inoffensive little balls to flaming chainsaws, and there won’t be any more meaningful landmarks of progress until I hit 80K, which is the lower limit for what one might reasonably expect to publish as a fantasy novel.

So it turns out that an unexpected benefit of dividing this book into five acts is, I get other landmarks. Somewhere between about 60-65K, I will finish Act Three, and that is a closer thing to look forward to than 80K is. And it mitigates my usual difficulty at estimating total word-count; when I finish Act Three, I’ll be three-fifths of the way through the story, though not necessarily the work.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to hit 50K until a couple of nights from now, but this afternoon I wrote the other flashback Act Two needed, and stuck that in where it belongs.

<examines the flashback>

Apparently this novel is about people figuring out what it is they really want, and then deciding what price they’re willing to pay for it.

Most of them are paying too much.

Authorial sadism: Deven’s turn to be wrong wrong wrongitty wrong. (Except for the bit where he’s right. And that’s even meaner.)

LBR quota: Both blood and rhetoric, with love gasping for air as it tries not to get crushed to death.

book! (sort of.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a novel.

Not a complete novel, mind you. I didn’t somehow magically finish Midnight Never Come when you weren’t looking — though it would be awesome if I had. No, all I’ve done is pass the 40K mark, which is the official lower end for novel-hood, according to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula award guidelines.

The things you see on the shelf will all probably be 80K or longer (sometimes much longer). My contract specifies 90-110K, though this is generally flexible (within reason). I’ve got my own vague estimate of something between 100-120K, though as I pointed out in that meme, I’m crap at such estimates. In other words, this benchmark means something, but I don’t really know what it is.

But it seemed a good time to make a progress post.

Stuff’s starting to go more seriously ka-splody for the characters. Lune’s in trouble. Deven’s in trouble but doesn’t know it yet. [Names withheld] will be dying soon. Boom!

I can feel that I’m stretching myself with this book. Stretching myself with description: it’s the Renaissance, it’s fae, it’s stuff that demands more verbal embroidery than Doppelganger did . . . but while I stretch for that added detail, I also have to make sure I don’t wander off into elaborate prose that will alienate my readers who appreciate the simpler style. (And for my next trick . . . .) I’m stretching myself with the politics, tossing extra pieces onto my chessboard so this isn’t a story about half a dozen characters with clearly defined and obvious goals. I’m stretching myself with historical research, with depth of backstory, with attempts to make sure the things my characters achieve carry real prices, costlier than the ones I would normally subject them to.

And I need to make sure I don’t stretch so far that I crash and burn. Because I don’t really have the time to pick up flaming pieces of novel and scrub the soot off them for an in-depth repair job. Not if my publisher is going to get this thing on the shelves when they’re hoping to.

But stretching, of course, is good. Because I’m at the point where I look at my own past work and think of it as mediocre — well-loved mediocrity, mind you, and not without its good points, but I Can Do Better. And pushing to do better is how we succeed in this field.

Edited to add: I almost forgot these.

Authorial sadism: Oops, somebody overheard that?

LBR quota: Lately it’s been all about the rhetoric, of a particularly backstabby sort.

meanwhile, in Weird-Metaphor-Land . . . .

While dozing off last night, I came up with another weird metaphor for writing.

When sewing, if you stitch together two pieces of fabric whose seam edges are of equal length, you get a nice, straight, perfectly functional seam. But if you need more fullness in the garment — as you do when making skirts or shoulder seams for sleeves — then one technique is to cut one piece so its seam edge is longer than the edge you’re joining it to, and then pleat or gather the longer edge until it fits against the shorter one.

It’s important for me to take my time in writing something, to not leap on my ideas too quickly, because by taking it slowly, I give myself time to pleat or gather the story.

Here’s what I mean.

This came into my head because I had an idea while dozing off. It wasn’t a big idea; actually, it was just a complication of an idea, a way of adding depth (or in this metaphor, fullness) to the next bit of story. I knew from a while back that a scene would come when Lune would convey a certain piece of information to another character: that’s like the dots or notches you use to line up two pieces of fabric before stitching them. This needs to go here. And had I been sprinting through this book more quickly, that scene probably would have happened more or less straightforwardly, with no frills. But in between deciding I needed that scene and writing it (which I’m in the middle of at present), I had some time to think — and so the idea got more complicated. Lune isn’t going to want to convey that piece of information: there’s a bit of fullness. But she’ll end up having to: more gathering. And she’ll be in trouble for having tried to conceal it: now we’re getting somewhere. And she’ll owe someone a favor for not causing that trouble: that was last night’s pleat. Bit by bit, I’m adding these complications (and other, more spoilery ones I won’t describe) that don’t really create subplots or anything — I’m not adding in new pieces of fabric — but create more fullness in the subplots I already have, packing a greater amount of fabric/story into the space/seam provided.

Okay, now raise your hand if that made any sense to you.

(I suspect most of you with your hands up have experience with both writing and sewing.)

It’s good to let ideas sit for a while. Not only does it mean you have a chance to notice when they aren’t good ideas and replace them with better ones, it gives you time to improve on the ones that are already good. Other metaphors come to mind — I’m embroidering the idea, for example (what is it with me and textiles?) — but I like the three-dimensionality of this one. Because that’s what it feels like I’m doing: making the story more three-dimensional.

*blink*

Dude. I must have eaten inspiration for breakfast today.

While engaged in late-night stupidity at Kinko’s (involving photocopiers, a paper slicer, metric crap-tons of scotch tape, and the Agas woodcut of Elizabethan London), I had an epiphany about the plot point my brain insists on calling the Great Misunderstanding — even though it isn’t really a misunderstanding at all.

Yes, I just found a way to make my characters’ lives suck more. Aren’t you glad? I know they’re glad. (Hah.)

I would be writing those scenes right now, but the late-night stupidity has tired me out, so to bed. But I have more leftover ham and applesauce in the fridge, which is what I had for breakfast today; maybe I’ll have the rest of it tomorrow and see what else pops into my head . . . .

oh, hey.

I figured out something fascinating about Lune today. Sometimes it happens like this: the realization just fell into my lap, out of nowhere. I don’t even think I was thinking about Midnight Never Come at the time. It was just, blar, need a break, I think I’ll read the Tiptree antho I got at ICFA, do I want a Sprite to drink?, oh, that’s what’s going on with her.

Or rather, what should be going on with her. It isn’t really in the text yet. In fact, there’s stuff in the text that probably contradicts what I realized today. I’ll need to think about how I’m going to work this in. But I will do so, one way or another — even though it will require some revision — because boy howdy is it important.

I like important. Important means the book just got one step better. (Or will, once I’ve put this in there.)

LBR tally: it’s actually been love for the last few days. With a bit of rhetoric (i.e. politics) mixed in.

Authorial sadism: the love is the sadistic thing.

putting things in order

Every so often, I enter a very visual mode of operation.

So far, I’ve been writing Midnight Never Come along three separate tracks. The two primary ones are Deven and Lune, each of whom I’ve been writing as a continuous block of scenes; the secondary one consists of flashbacks, kept in a separate file. Last night I realized I was at the point where I needed to interleave the Deven and Lune scenes and decide how this opening chunk is going to flow, which also meant inserting flashbacks where appropriate.

I used index cards for this when I did it to the first half of Doppelganger (originally it was structured as three-chapter blocks of each character; my editor asked me to change it, and was right), but I knew that book like the back of my hand, so a couple of notes on a card were sufficient to guide my thinking. MNC is much newer, so this time I printed the actual manuscript out, shrinking fonts and margins so as not to waste more paper than necessary, and putting a page break at the end of each scene.

Then it was time to use that high-tech tool known as my living room floor . . . .

getting back on my feet

I came home from London Wednesday, and spent Thursday mostly being a useless lump of uselessness. But the last two days have been solidly productive: good progress on unpacking (or really, organization after unpacking), to the point that the kitchen is finally all put away, and of course writing.

I’m liking my current plan for approaching this novel. For the month of June, I need to produce thirty thousand words (an average of 1K a day), but this number will only count things written in chronological sequence. That is, neither flashback scenes nor things I let myself skip ahead to write will qualify for the day’s total, because I might not end up using those.

So I got about 2K or so while gone, and another 2K the last two days, for a current total of about 14.5K. Plus two future scenes while I was out to town, and today, some special bonus earl of Leicester flashback action. (He’s dead by the beginning of the novel, so the only way I can include him is in flashbacks.)

Authorial sadism: getting advice you don’t understand, and being held over a barrel by your political rival.

LBR quota: we’ve had all three, lately. Though the love is looking a bit bloodstained.

naming woes, part two

So here’s the problem, really. I keep embarking on projects (short stories, novels, games) where the people — the guys in particular — need to have relatively mainstream English names, the sort that have been used historically. And when you get down to it, there aren’t a lot of those. And the more of these projects I build up, the more of the mainstream names I’ve used for major characters, such that I would feel weird then applying them to someone else.

But at this point, it means I’m hesitant to name anybody Julian, Robert, Leonard, Roger, Luke, James, Gregory, Edward, or Jacob, just to choose the most major ones. If I let Memento get in there, I have to add in Thomas, William, Simon, Francis, Stephen, Philip, Jacob again, Christopher, Archibald, and Nicholas. “Nine Sketches” also used Nathaniel, Francis again, Charles, Richard, and Jonathan. I could keep going, but you get the point; a lot of the common names have strong associations for me already.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing left. I haven’t had anybody important named Henry (except oops, there will hopefully be the thing about Henry Welton someday) — okay, George (wait, that’s Caroline’s husband) — how about Samuel (Eleanor’s father) — crap. And some of my remaining choices, I don’t like very much; Andrew isn’t one I’m particularly fond of. Some of the names are currently reserved by future projects; others are bound up in old projects, and I face the question of whether I think I’ll ever resurrect them, or whether I should just go ahead, cut The Kestori Hawks loose as unusable, and free up half a dozen names for other people to have. (Assuming I can. Assuming my subconscious will let go of the idea that “Leonard” means that guy, the one over there, with all the angst.)

Oh yeah. And then, because I’m not having issues enough, there’s the problem that if I name a character in the Elizabethan period Gabriel, most of you will roll your eyes at the slightly flashy name, and a few will run screaming and waving your copies of the Lymond Chronicles. My own work isn’t the only association I have to watch out for.

I should name the guy John and be done with it, but it just doesn’t work. And I’m not yet to the point where my subconscious is ready to reuse things. For secondary characters, sure. But not the main ones.

Which is how I end up with ideas like Peregrine Thorne. But that isn’t his name — though whoever’s name it is, he looks interesting — so I keep working.

Marie Brennan’s Patented Three-Step Process for Finishing Stories That Aren’t Working:

  1. Realize that you’ve been doing it entirely wrong.
  2. Start doing it right instead.
  3. Finish the story.

It’s really quite simple, when you look at it that way.

And it means that I am not starting off the new year by immediately failing at my goal to write one short story a month. I may fail next month, but let’s not gallop to meet future difficulties, shall we? I have “The Last Wendy” finished, and this is a Good Thing.

goal anxiety

I’ve come to realize I have a moderately dysfunctional relationship with goals.

(This applies to more than just writing, but writing offers a good, clear-cut illustration of what I mean.)

Let’s say I’m working on a novel and my goal is 1000 words a day. One evening, out of laziness, I write only 800. Or — more likely — I just don’t write at all. (If I put my butt in the chair, I tend not to leave until I have quota.) I treat that as a deficit I need to make up; I write 1200 words or 1500 words until I’m back where I would have been had I not been short one day.

This is moderately okay. Especially since I usually manage to cut myself some slack for occasions when something (like travel) takes me out of commission for several days at a stretch.

The dysfunctionality comes in when I write above quota. Take a recent example: I’m working on something where my weekly goal is 10K. Which means, in general, 1500 a day, with one day where I can cut back a bit and just do 1000. This past week, I wrote 1500 (and change) for a couple of days, and then 2K one day. I built up a surplus.

This does not get treated the way a deficit does — as slippage that should get averaged out.

No, instead my obsessive, goal-driven self tends to ignore all surpluses. Who cares that I’m more than 500 ahead; I should still write 1500 every day. Including that day that was supposed to be an easy 1000. Then I’d be a thousand ahead of where I meant to be! But don’t let that fool you into thinking I could do just 9K the next week. No, it’ll be 10K or bust, and if I can squeeze out more, than full steam ahead!

From the perspective of finishing books (or whatever else I might be working on), this seems pretty good. I’m beginning to notice, though, that it might be a little hard on me — it means I never earn a break. Any such break would have to be earned in advance, and once I’ve done that, I just keep pushing. More words written, more pages read, more cleaning done, whatever the task at hand is, I keep going. Until it’s done.

And then I look for something else to do.

My fiance is probably beating his head into a wall, having read this far; he’s a big advocate of me relaxing and not being so hard on myself. But he (and the rest of you) can take heart: I’ve made a baby step in mending my ways. Having built up a surplus earlier this writing week (which is, for uninteresting reasons having to do with this project, Thursday through Wednesday), I let myself cut back a bit for the last three days. I wrote over 1K each time, to hit my weekly goal, but didn’t make myself do 1500. Right now I’m sitting pretty at 53 words over target — in the middle of a scene, no less, which I decided to leave as a carrot for tomorrow, rather than finishing it tonight.

Mind you, I’ve got other things I need to get done, which is another argument for not driving myself to oblivion on one project only. But nevermind that.

Goals: they’re to be met, but not always exceeded.