Business Trip — For a Novel

Okay, rented the car. Packing tonight, off tomorrow for a book research road trip at the crack of dark. I’ll be hitting various places in West Texas over the next few days.

This will be the first time I’ll be tracking all expenses for tax purposes. It’s a grown-up feeling—kind of like the first time a kid does their taxes. Feels impressive yet doesn’t amount to much.

Seriously, though, it is something that I think of as a milestone from “someone who writes” to “writer.”

And then I read up on how that works for a guy who’s also a computer guy with a job. In short, there’s plenty of things I can do that are tax deductible, but so long as I’ve got a “regular” job (and I’m guessing that’s at the IRS’ discretion), I can’t deduct writing expenses from anything other than writing revenue. I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect.

And that means I’ve got a goal for 2017: make more money than anything I can deduct! Which will be a bunch, since I’m in the process of converting a bedroom into a tax-compliant writer’s office.

Middle Novel Writing Spread

I’m somewhere at the 95k mark in my current novel in progress. I’d assessed it at 130k-150k for the first draft, and I still think that’s a good target number. (Of course, given how I’ve been glaring at previously written chunks, inane dialog, scenes that go nowhere, and broken stuff I need to go back and fix, I’m hoping I end up with 90k of solid second draft.)

What is interesting is that this novel, which I’d started on a tear with 5k and even a 7k writing day, now struggles to get to 2k. And that doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the plot hasn’t progressed anywhere nearly as far or fast as I’d expected. My experience is that this is normal: there’s more to remember about characters, more to fact-check against what’s already happened and, when dealing with “real world” fiction (instead of SF/FF) ensuring that real history matches what characters know, remember, and experience. Of course, given that this is a post-apocalyptic hero quest, there’s a boatload of science that needs to work out correctly: everything from heavy metal contaminant levels in volcanic ash to which grasses would be growing in a colder, wetter Permian Basin to me hitting up oil field workers and equine rehabilitators for their expertise in various archana I’d not be able to suss out on my own. (The internet, oddly enough, seems to have a wealth of incorrect, outdated, and ludicrous information on just about every topic imaginable; who woulda thunk???)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m trying out Scrivener for this novel, a departure from my usual and long-trusted package of MS Word/Excel and a tab or five of web links in my browser. It’s forcing me to look at everything from a scene/chapter point of view, and a lot of the handy things (like, for example, editing shortcuts such as switch case and autocomplete) are different, and more cumbersome, in Scrivener than in Word. One shouldn’t have to need a tutorial to use a package like this. Ugh.

My main cause for my slowing down is, however, my outlining skills. I’ve got a 100- and 5000-word synopsis of the novel, so I know what goes on. How the characters get to these waypoints is the issue. When I outline (or even sketch out) several scenes or chapters ahead, I can roll along merrily. And then I get to the end of that piece, and I find that all the minutiae of the writing in getting through the outlined areas has brought me to where I dont want to continue from there. A character has had an epiphany, a place I’d imagined in my outline as abandoned isn’t, or vice versa. The weather. The horses. My main characters’ moods. So then there’s a period of Great Restructuring so I can get things lined up before I can continue outlining.

Sure, I could just slip a note in at the end and then continue writing as if the Great Restructuring had already happened. But there are dialog and scene changes that would be written, and by the time I’d get around, after the first draft is finished, to revisit them, I’d have a lot of remembering to do, with multiple discontinuities to be addressed. I’m shuddering just thinking about it.

The alternative, I’m told by smug parts of my apparently-not-sub-enough parts of my consciousness, would be just to outline everything and stick to the plan. For so many reasons I rebel against this. I tried writing a novel based on this idea and I had to put it down after about five thousand words of writing (not including the outline, summaries, etc.). Maybe one day I’ll pick it up again and try it without using the dang outline as a poured-concrete kind of framework.

With fully outlining a piece before starting comes the ability to do all the necessary research for the novel. All the science and pack train questions I’m asking or looking up could be done in one fell swoop instead of being salted into my writing time. (Of course, then what productive thing would I do when pausing in the writing?)

I’ll be all right this time, because the story is tied to a very specific geographic trek, one that I can map out using Google Earth in advance, and then I can tie events to literal markers on the map. That’s meant that I can turn around and tie days of the trek to chapters in the novel, even if I may move the delineators around after I’m done with the draft for plot development reasons.

Bottom line: I think there’s a lot more thrashing and extra writing time when not working with a fully-developed outline. And its faster from a research perspective as well. But “pantsing” the story gives my characters the freedom to develop and make the novel theirs, instead of being a careful construct of an author.

As always, YMMV on this.

T.C. Boyle Interview

T.C. Boyle

I caught the “Overheard with Evan Smith” interview of T.C. Boyle last night, driving back after writing for several hours at a couple of good spots. (Where to write: another conundrum for me, at least.) One interesting point the author made was that when he wrote he listened to music, but only instrumentals or lyrics in languages he didn’t understand. That’s entirely been my experience: I might rock with PostModern Jukebox when writing code, but it’s Lindsay Stirling, Aaron Copeland, and my old companion Frédéric Chopin when the words need to flow.

My only caveat, given that I’m a parallel play writer, is that writing among a quiet hubbub really helps; the physical movement of people, the cadence of their voices, and the little physical interplay help me better visualize what my characters are doing. If the coffee shop music is too loud, or the hubbub goes above a susurrus of voices, earmuff-style headphones work. I don’t usually put music on: the muffling of the voices, making them mostly unintelligible, helps a lot. Silence burdens my writing spirit.

Boyle also mentions not reading novels while he’s writing them, because he feels that the characters and personalities in the book taint the one he’s writing. Not having his vast writing experience I hesitate to disagree, but my characters have always very firmly sprung from my own imagination and amalgams of people I know or have met. All while devouring novels. But, to be fair, they’re usually a very different genre from what’s on my computer.

All writers, (financially) successful, striving, and beginning, have their own styles. What works for one won’t for anyone else. And, in my search for wisdom in how to best write intensely, I’m appropriating and modifying writing role model methods to better my own.

On Span of Memory and Tools

Last week a fellow writer was discussing the trouble with editing a document that had been laid down for a while. Keeping the entire novel in one’s head, the writer said, was important when making edits with large blocks of text (e.g., changing scenes and chapters around). This was said in the context of using Microsoft Word vs. something like Scrivener, which I’m currently test-driving.

Word maintains a single document. And while one may use heading levels to delineate parts, chapters, and scenes, a large manuscript can get unwieldy. Scrivener and other scene-compartmentalized software tools make it relatively easy to shuffle around the various scenes or chapters, but if a writer wants, for example, to move parts of three scenes into two other scenes elsewhere, there’s a lot of cutting and pasting and remembering what scene is where that’s involved. Add to the text being edited ‘cold,’ it seems to me that the specialized tools would almost require quite a bit of cold reading and flipping around to scenes.

I’m still making my mind up about the Scrivener software, but I’ve got two strategies for writing large texts using word: multiple documents, and headings. I’ve written 130k+ word documents with no more than having a Heading 1 reserved for manuscript, characters, locations, objects, kipple, and research. Then chapters are at the Heading 2-level and Heading is for scenes. Having an automatically generated table of contents at the beginning makes hopping around easy. Outline mode views and automatic outlining can also help, but I don’t use the latter two.

A variant is to put each novel component into its own file (e.g., a folder with the novel, characters, research, and locations).

The important thing isn’t the tool, is comfort with it. Every new keystroke combination that requires learning is time not spent writing. And that means writers will usually be most comfortable with the general document editor (e.g., MS Word) rather than a specialty software package. My $0.02, so far.

On Characters with PTSD

One should write what one knows, goes the hoary advice. And it’s true: stories are vibrant, clear, more memorable and more interesting when the writer really knows their subject matter, whether it’s a location, a type of character, or an event.

One of the characters in my current novel in progress has fairly severe PTSD. Enough to function (mostly) in society, but not in great shape. He as flashbacks, hypervigilance, almost paranoid worries… and is living in a post-apocalyptic world where being paranoid was a useful trait. Read More about On Characters with PTSD

Rogue One

Finally got around to seeing the movie Rogue One. (Fair warning: spoilers below the ‘more’ link.)

I heard a lot of the hype before, and many of my writing friends saw it and most raved. Or at least, didn’t rant much. I found the hype around the movie mendacious, the acting mediocre, the plot so bracketed by the “real” Star Wars movies that it was difficult not to expect many of the dramatic moments.

Read More about Rogue One

Midnight Writing

Its been getting ugly in my neighborhood these past few weeks: the new complex owners installed a kiddie playground directly outside my bedroom/living rooms, where I sleep/write. And in the mornings, when I used to sleep in after writing late, are now taken up by teams of people digging post holes and pounding lumber into the ground then sawing and drilling dozens of new “porches” in front of apartments (+$75/mo. for renters). So I’ve been sleeping  badly, and eventually I’ve gotten to the point where three out of four nights I’m up and raring to go around midnight.

There’s a certain peace and calm, for me, stepping out of the house to start my day. I go to a local 24-hour place to write, and can bang out six hours of writing, up to 7,500 words, cranked beup on coffee and the parallel play of other humans. I don’t know if it’s  being out of the normal time stream, or that quiet that settles over the area when the traffic lights blink suggestions to the odd car instead of blazing out orders to traffic. If it weren’t so hard to find sleep during the day, I might take up vampiric English composition.