ArmadilloCon ’39 Critiques

There are five writers per group at the ArmadilloCon writer’s workshop. Four manuscripts to critique. Along with life, job, and one’s own writing. Most folks do the 5k max, but I’ve got one (shown) that clocks in at around 3k.

There are some folks that can do a critique and still get their 2k/day words in. I… am not one of them.

In SlugTribe it’s a 5k word limit, but only about 20-30 minutes to read it. In reading feedback from them it’s clear that the edits go away towards the end (see previous post). But for the workshop, it’s every page. Well, almost every page. I say almost because between pointing out the passive voice a dozen times previously, and a typed analysis as well, sometimes the need to torture deceased equines is obviated by the need to get another story done!

The image at the top of this post is an example of a short story mid-critique. In addition to my (possibly unreadable) edits, in the background you can see a written critique that gets above the fray.

I hope I get as good as I’m giving, but, for me at least, the critiquing is at least as educational as a good first draft.

Critiquing and Paper Cuts

I’m lucky to live in a city where there are overlapping supporting circles of writers in every possible genre. I’m involved in a few writing groups, including an invite-only one, the venerable and awesome Slug Tribe (that just got a great write-up in the Austin Chronicle), as well as occasionally hitting a Meet-Up group every now and again. Plus the Writers’ League of Texas is based here, with its annual Editors and Agents conference and the cozier, and perhaps more “incestuous” ArmadilloCon (and I mean that in the least creepiest way!). And the Austin NaNoWriMo group, a once and future way to spend November.

Three of the above perform critiques on pieces. The most paper-prolific by far—and I say this with two bandaged fingers—is Slug Tribe. Probably best to bring at least fifteen copies of a piece. With a 5,000 upper limit, that’s approximately twenty sides of writing (more if there’s a lot of dialog). On average sixty percent of Sluggers write comments on the pieces, which I dutifully reel back and bring to my editing operating theater. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 300-400 pages single-sided. Which I try never to do, what with the lack of available earthworms at my place.

So here’s the evening’s tidbit: collate them by page, putting them in reverse page order (so you’re working from the back of the piece forwards). Take the “global” written comments (thank you, thank you all for the thought put into them!) and put them at the back of the pack. Why?

  1. People tend to comment less towards the end of the piece. On-the-spot editing is tiring, and once a reader has made their point, why flog the expired equine?
  2. Going backwards makes it harder to skip something because the mind forms the logical construct of the paragraph, and not the backwards verbs of the placement.
  3. Those pesky page numbers mean very little when going through the tenth set of edits. What was on page one, with an easily spotted paragraph shape is no longer there. That means wasting brain and time trying to find something that there. Going backwards en masse means never having to figure out where you were before you carved up two paragraphs and inserted four clauses.
  4. It’s hard to know who commented on a page, until you get the the end (first pages). This means addressing each suggested edit on its own merit, and not on the merit of the author making the comment. Just because they’re a great writer doesn’t mean their edits have a greater weight than a sharp-eyed newcomer.

Enjoy a slightly less painful time editing your next critiqued work!

On Research, and the Need for Brain Bleach

I’m careful, when doing story research, not to trip up and set DHS, the USSS, or EIEIO on my tail. I recently moved to a private VPN connection because my damn Internet provider isn’t paying me enough to get access to my search history (neither is Google, but I’ve got other ways around that).

I also try not to click on sites that get me, um… to places I hadn’t intended on visiting. So I was surprised, when working on a bit of research on rosaries for a short story (novella? novel?) in my Upline universe. I was trying to see if there were any specific numbers of beads in a rosary. Interesting stuff, for an atheist Jew. What I didn’t expect is exhibit(ionist) A, to the left. Seriously, this site was selling rosaries. Lots of detail about the beads, and prayers, and everything. And then I kept looking (masochism knows no bounds) and found the incredibly apt ad for a rosary belt!

There’s oh so much I don’t understand about the Mysteries of some religions…

“Last Run” Topped Out

By Leif Ørnelund – Oslo Museum: image no. OB.Ø59/2680 (Byhistorisk samling), via oslobilder.no., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23247983

When a building’s top floor is in place, especially for tall buiildings, they’re “topped out.” Usually a tree, sometimes a flag.

Authors should have something analogous for a novel. Even if we’re not trying to appease the tree gods.

Sunday I pitched two projects to an agent at the Writers League of Texas Agents & Editors conference. A win for me, at my first pitching, would be “sure, I’d like to see the first ten pages and a query letter via email.” The agent with whom I chatted wanted to hear about two of my projects: my current novel, Last Run, a post-apocalyptic tale, and my Induction series, a “hot” SF set of novels. She wanted the first three chapters and a synopsis of the first, and then maybe the second. Yoiks.

Yesterday I “topped out” the novel, tearing up at the last scene. Last Run currently stands at around 173k words, and the sweet spot for novels in that category is closer to 85k words.

So… behold the mighty editor’s pen, out and primed in red.

 

Character infodump

My current WIP has a cast of characters, a bunch of whom are all first seen by my POV character in a room together. My first draft of this was, upon re-reading, a flood of details that made the narrative not only drag, but flounder.

imagine you’re walking into a waiting room. You look down and see a tortoise. Sorry, attack of literary drift. Seriously: what do you notice when you look around? I went through this exercise going into a radiology office recently. For my PTSDness I first spotted exits, including windows. Then there was the arrangement of the chairs. Then people, starting with only the basic observations: hair color, bags, canes, or other visually interesting bits. Shoes, the floor. Then back to the people, actually noting the ones who caught my eye, or the tableaus in progress (two people helping an older relative sit down from standing at a walker, a young girl, maybe eight or nine, looking scared next to her dad, with short-cropped hair). Then actually checking people out. A woman wearing a 60’s-style, felted, dark blue coat with big buttons in two rows—and apparently nothing but leggings below. The mom with a toddler and a baby in a stroller, valiantly trying to keep them from hitting their boredom wall.

If I described all that it’d be interesting for that one paragraph. But characters deserve attention, to fix them in a reader’s mind. I resolve that (in the book) by interleaving my character’s action. In the above example, he’d walk across to the clerk’s desk and do business while idly puzzling about the woman in the coat. Then turn around, walk past the walker and people, maybe catch a snippet of conversation triggering a background thought. Then try and dodge the mom and her kids, and end up next to the close-shaved girl. Each stop gives the opportunity to really look, and describe, the character. It also is a way for you to go deeper with the POV person: how they react, what memories are triggered, comparisons with other people in the character’s past.

Today’s takeaway: describe characters the way your POV would, starting with details interesting to her or him, and use action to break up the internal monolog.

Writing and Fancy Keyboards

I splurged yesterday and got myself a gaming keyboard. Not that I game, mind you, but I miss the clickety-clack of keys, and the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard that I use at home is a pain in the tush to lug around to coffee shops all the time. So I went a bit wild, and ended up with something that’s smaller, clickety, and has glowing keys in every color and pattern.

Why someone would want to have a keyboard that swirls in every color of the rainbow is beyond me. Or flashes, strobe-like. But, used wisely, the keyboard color scheme can be helpful. Between disabling unused keys and creating a few nifty shortcuts I’ve made my Scrivener‘s experiment a bit more livable (still not too happy with a lot of it’s kludgy design), but that’s for another post.

And… back early in town

My field research trip for my current novel made it as far as Big Spring — and barely, at that. Dunno what I picked up, but it was an arduous, stop-filled trip. And after a terrible night in a great hotel, I drove back to Austin rather than head out for the more adventurous destinations: the MacDonald Observatory, Alpine, Balmorhea, Fort Stockton and the Agate Ranch.

Well, it’ll have to be a short trip with more preparation as work for me starts this coming Monday. When I come up for air I’ll contact UT: they might have some folks to help save on some of my sneaker traffic…

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.