Middle Novel Writing Spread

shlomi on February 25, 2017

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 (The internet, oddly enough, seems to have a wealth of incorrect, outdated, and ludicrous information on just about every topic imaginable; who woulda thunk???)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

shlomi on February 22, 2017

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

shlomi on February 20, 2017

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

shlomi on February 19, 2017

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

Midnight Writing

shlomi on February 15, 2017

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.

On Putting My Babies to Sleep

shlomi on May 15, 2016

I started writing pieces on in the Thippah’n universe since 2005. First a science fiction NaNoWriMo novel. Then a few really neat long scenes — expandable into shorts. Then another novel and another and another which needed shredding after I published the first online.

I’ve been sitting on editing the second novel for years. Light passes. Blocking and language passes. Rearranging for plot and twists. This last one is a back-to-front, word-by-word edit. And I want to stop.

Writing is about being ruthless. It’s about ripping out what’s not working. For non-writers, it’s like finding a knit where there should be a purl and yanking out six inches of knitting to make it right.

What I’m thinking of doing is like unraveling five sweaters because one doesn’t like the design. After they’re already up on hangars. But they’ve become my albatross, leaching energy from other projects I’d like to do. But it’s such a great universe! But its far more inchoate than almost every other project I’ve got on the drawing boards, in my drawers, under the table, and stuffed into cracks on my shelves.

So is stopping and not scheduling work on them cryosleep? Or euthanasia? I won’t be the same author if I return to them in a few years. Would that be better for them?

A post with many questions and no answers that I can see. Suggestions, however, are always entertained.

Generative Activities

shlomi on April 16, 2016

Short post here.

I write, but I also bake and cook. Bringing food to people is, for me, very similar to giving the literary nourishment of poetry of fiction. After a drought of creativity in the kitchen I’ve been (financially) kickstarted into the kitchen. Here’s something that’s slipping out of culinary favor this time of year: cholent.

It’s a simple recipe, that folks tweak for every different village and family. Orthodox Jewish law doesn’t allow for cooking on Shabbat (the sabbath), and it’s hard to keep, for example, a nice steak on hold for eighteen hours until it’s Saturday lunchtime.

Enter cholent. Take ingredients, toss ’em into a pot, cook it until it’s mostly done before Shabbat begins (a little before sundown on Friday), then go to the baker and stuff it into the bread oven. Overnight. And most of the morning. When it’s pulled out, it’s a heavenly, creamy, yummy thing. Below is the one my mom made, which pegs it to Sosnowiec in pre-WWII Poland.

Ingredients:

  • 3-4 oxtail bones
  • 1-2 lbs. Flanken. Well, my mother would say ‘flanken,’ but I think we’re talking about a skirt steak kind of beef. Given my mom knew 9 languages and my dad 10, I think fuzzy would be a good way to describe her recipe ingredients. At any rate, a fatty piece, in one piece.
  • 5-6 kartofel. That one’s easy: use huge Idaho baking potatoes with thick skins. My mom skinned some, but kept others unskinned. In either case, cut in half.
  • 2-3 medium onions, whole and peeled.
  • Garlic. At least a 1/2 bulb. Peeled but whole.

That’s it. Put it in a crock pot until there’s no more room. Put the lid on, then leave it be on low heat for about eighteen hours. When you open it up, the potatoes are brown and buttery, the beef fat and oxtail marrow is everywhere, and basically it’s salted and then a feeding frenzy ensues until it’s all gone.

Some folks put whole eggs, in shell, into the mix. Or (shudder) red or garbanzo beans. Or bulgar. Or other travesties upon the pure Holiness of the recipe above. They shall be purged when the Truth is Known. 🙂

Okay. I feel better now…

On to writing.

The Vagaries of Vagueness

shlomi on April 7, 2016

GMOs are the red dye #2 of the decade. Vilified as poison, sanctified as nothing but yield increasing. As with everything outside the soundbite universe, it’s a bit more complicated.

The basics: A “genetically modified organism” includes every food plant and animal, and all the service animals humans have touched in the past 14,000 or so thousand years. GMOs in the protested context are ones where scientists have diddled with the genes to create changes in a single generation, tinkering in ways nature couldn’t. The unintended consequences of these changes are what’s at debate, not the initial intent. After all, it’s not as if we’re trying to invent a carnivorous plant.

It’s what you add. There’s a tomato, one of the first GMOs, that’s had a salmon gene added so that the tomato’s flesh is firmer and less likely to go soft in transit. Aside from the weirdness of having different kingdoms’ genes muddled, there’s not too much of an issue.And there are a lot of fish for which modification is in their future.

The most popular GMO to hate are the Roundup Ready™ soybean and corn and crops. Economics aside, adding pesticide resistance to the genome is a question of the unknown: there have never been any long-term very large scale, double-blind studies of any side effects. It looks good, but that’s as far as it goes.

The other kind of modified food is exemplified by adding not a gene to change the food’s taste or portability, but defenses. While organic crops are sprayed with microbial agents that produce the Bt insecticide, they can be washed off. The GMO versions cannot, as the active chemical in Bt is part and parcel of the plant.

 

The bottom line (and this is a post on writing, not organic farming), is that lumping a huge swath of anything under a single banner muddies the waters for all and creates a monolithic concept from which it’s harder, as a writer, to finesse nuances that give a scene, character, or even a more interesting reality.

Oh, and check out a mythbusting blog post on GMOs in Scientific American, as well as a whole raft of responses.

Stale Writing and Technology

shlomi on April 4, 2016

The novel I mostly wrote back in 1985 can’t be finished now. Technological advances and political events have overtaken major story points so unless I want it to be an alternate universe fiction, it’s dead.

And that’s a good thing, I think. Writing the ten-year novel should be about the things that are unchanging: the nature of people, of personal growth. Wanna write science fiction? Write it and get it out there: dawdle and the po’on (POH-ohn, a Hebrew word literally meaning “‘here’ device”) is leapfrogged by the smartphone. And the Israeli-Palestinian stupidity has surpassed even the blackest of my noir fantasies. At least I got Syria and Jordan right.

I’ve been re-reading a slew of science fiction novels (latest: the Barrayan Saga books), and, as Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that most of the novels were written to stand alone, it’s been eye-opening to see how she avoids infodump in pursuit of establishing character and milieu when readers attempt to peruse them in order. Learn from all that’s been written, not just the latest.

Yearly Writing Prompt

shlomi on March 31, 2016

CaptureSeeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.

The former invites reflective meditation. Frequently the subject is personal, based on my experiences that year. The latter is a poem, with the number of syllables equal to my age that year, and functions as a sort of momento mori for my life to that point. I’ve some really good ones and many that stretch and strain to syllable count instead of content.

But there they are: days for reflection based on a habit of {shudder} decades at this point.

Have you prompts? Please share!