NaNoWriMo Day 23

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 12 Comments

New words: 1,670
Total words: 38,730
Goal: 50,000

38730 / 50000
(77.46%)

As my story fleshes itself out, I see myself taking an approach that I can only call the fantasy equivalent of “hard science fiction.” Hard science fiction attempts to bring scientific accuracy to the speculative elements of a story, either by basing them in actual contemporary scientific fact, or extrapolating from that fact to theoretical ideas that are likely to be confirmed in the near future based on what we know now.

The “fantasy equivalent” of this, for me, is to have the fantasy elements in my story–whether it is strange beings, their powers, or the “magic” humans do to interact with/effect these beings–be, not supernatural, but natural phenomena. I am only straying from the “hard” line by saying these fantastical elements are natural phenomenon that scientists at present just don’t have the theoretical concepts or observational techniques to deal with yet.

I sort of can’t help this naturalistic approach. Although I am perfectly comfortable with the supernatural in fiction, there is something I want to say with this story that makes taking this approach important to me.

But as a result, it is feeling a bit like I’ve sucked all the sense of wonder out of my novel. I did a Harry Potter marathon this past week since I got the final movie on DVD/Blu ray, and the thing that makes HP appeal to so many people, I think, is you can see and do so many fascinating things in his world, whether it is turning a loathed relative into a human balloon, or riding over a lake on the back of a half-bird, half-horse, or visiting someone else’s memories inside a sink full of mist. Magic is afoot in his world, and there is so much more to his world than an ordinary muggle ever suspects.

Similar case with Buffy, or the Dresden Files, or Star Trek, or anything like that. There is an element of each of these story worlds that is beyond escapist and actually transcendent, because, for a short time, these stories allow you feel as if you are touching something beyond the mundane. They do this by starting very much in the mundane, and taking you on a gradual journey to fantastical places where you can do and see these amazing things.

I have to figure out how to do that, to make my world more interesting, without turning it into a cartoon version of itself.

I don’t want to write “just another fantasy novel” with elves and magic and evil sorcerers and whatnot. I need to find a way to take my more “serious/rationalistic” approach and imbue it with a sense of magic.

NaNoWriMo Day 12

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

New words: 2,762
Total words: 19,524
Goal: 50,000

19524 / 50000
(39.05%)

I finally made it through the entire draft doing the dialog. Of course, I haven’t written all the dialogue. If I wasn’t sure of something, I skipped it. Now I plan to go back through and figure out the parts I like best, and make sure those get supported and expanded before I really dig into adding action and blocking bits.

I am starting to have an image of the ending of the story, one that is both interesting and wraps up the immediate conflict, but leaves enough hanging for there to be plenty of material for the next novel.

I have also been experimenting a bit with writing from an omniscient point of view. Something that would allow me to get in the heads of characters as I choose, or not. It’s REALLY hard.

I’ve always preferred Alternating Third Person Subjective, with a clear delineation in the text (marked by a paragraph change and a symbol, like a centered – or ***) when the point of view changes. Point of view has always been a conscious element of my stories, in which I could show different characters reflecting on the same thing and explore their totally different perspectives on that thing . It is one of the more Artistic elements in my writing.

And my third person has always been as close to first person as you can get without actually writing in the first person. The “voice” in the narrative is the point of view character’s, I write the way they talk when I’m in their head.

Changing that style to a more omniscient POV is going to be a challenge, especially if I want to keep the intimacy of third person subjective.

There is a form of the omniscient view point that is kind of like a screenplay, where you never get into any character’s head. Everything is the “camera-eye” view, but you have the freedom to go anywhere, show any character doing anything.

While I found writing in screenplay format rather freeing while working on the Destroyer, doing it in a regular narrative format lacks intimacy. I think readers want to be with the character, living the story through them, not just observers, and for that, a story needs introspection.

Another form of omniscient viewpoint switches between character’s heads within a single scene, sometimes within a single paragraph. There are so many ways to screw that up and confuse the reader. But I think that’s what I need to figure out how to do.

Eep.

We interrupt this NaNo…

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 15 Comments

Agh, this is driving me crazy. I have a story that is essentially an unfolding mystery where clues must dropped, and certain characters must speak and act cryptically so as not to give the answer away to the reader. But I am writing a novel from a third-person subjective point of view, which means every scene is written from inside one character’s head or another.

There are some scenes I need to write to give clues to the reader in which the participants in the scene just know too much.

It makes no sense that you, the reader, are in their head, and they are just conveniently not thinking about certain things I don’t want the reader to know yet. But I either have to write elliptically like that, or I have to write the scene from the POV of some random nobody who is also present. But if I do that, the reader might think this random character and their trivialities are important when they aren’t. The third option is to just leave the scene out, in which case part of the story just isn’t getting told.

Now am I wrong to think it’s the sign of an amateur to write elliptically, scene after scene of characters “just not thinking” things I don’t want the reader to know?

If this were TV, where everything is pretty much done from an external POV, you can have multiple scenes with cryptic characters with secrets. X-Files, for example, thrived on those “mysterious Deep Throat/Mr. X is mysterious” scenes, or the darkened hotel room where the stone-faced Consortium sat around talking about the Conspiracy.

Those sorts of scenes are frustrating for viewers, but they also make them want to piece together the clues and anticipate revelation of the answers.

My Trickster/Guide character has just fizzled into nothing, for example, because I’ve had to chop away at the things he knows one by one until he doesn’t know enough to be a guide at all, just because he is one of the central characters and we have to be in his head once in a while. There was a whole scene that was to take place from his POV where you learned of many of his feelings for the other characters, and I had to rewrite the whole thing from someone else’s POV instead because it made no sense for him to act certain ways and not have the reader privy to why he was acting that way because he was acting on knowledge I don’t want the reader to have yet.

I can’t think of a solution to this, but it is starting to seriously compound, the further I get into the story.

InsaNoWriMo Day 1

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

New words: 1,749
Total words: 1,749
Goal: 50,000

1749 / 50000
(3.5%)

InsaNo because work is nuts, and has been nuts for over a month, and I work weekends as well (both days! Uphill! In the snow!) and there’s family events to attend (stop having birthdays, people! This instant!) and a girlfriend to pay attention to, and when am I going to write?

And yet just by starting to do that writing today, I know NaNo is going to give my story a kick in the pants it needs. I have been working pretty steadily on it this year, having just finished chapter 7 in mid-October. And handing each chapter off to the Sculptor for her unwaveringly supportive feedback is helping a lot. But working in such a linear fashion, each chapter in sequence, has its drawbacks.

It’s hard to establish things in current chapters you’ll need for future chapters if you’re not sure how those future chapters are going to play out themselves. And outlining doesn’t help, because invariably when I’m writing the actual chapter, I think of something better. So NaNo is my chance to write ahead. To flesh out future chapters without the Sculptor chomping at the bit about when the next installment is coming out. And to flesh them out without commitment. I am not handing *them* off to the Sculptor in December, they will just go on the hard drive to wait their turn. If I decide they’re dreg or that details need to be changed, no harm, no foul.

There will be some cheating. Specifically, if I have a place to put a blurb I’ve already written in the actual text of the story, I will put it there and count it. I did a smidgen of that today, and honestly, such blurbs end up being revised to fit the spot I’ve designated for them. So.

So, on InsaNoWriMo!

Original fiction project – week of 10/02/2011

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Dis/inhibition: I finished my proofreading on Tuesday and uploaded the manuscript to Lulu on Wednesday. Funny how seeing the novel in something that resembles “published” form suddenly makes you notice all sorts of flaws in your word choice, font choice, etc, even though I spent an entire day prepping it for Trade Paperback layout in Word before uploading it. I am studying the general format of some books I think are well laid out before finalizing the manuscript and moving on to the cover layouts.

New story: Chapter 7 continues to be a challenge, but I’m still shooting for the 15th to finish it. I have been tackling each chapter of this new story in “layers.” I start with a broad outline (a few sentences) of what will happen in the chapter, then I write the first layer, which is the dialogue. Dialogue is the easiest thing for me to write, and tackling it first helps me transform an intuitive idea of what happens in the chapter into the beginnings of an actual narrative. Dialogue, for me is like the “back bone” of a story.

The next layer is blocking, including action, facial expressions, and where the characters are in physical space. Next, I add in descriptive material–the details in what the setting and characters look, smell, or sound like. The final layer is introspection. I generally already have a good idea of what characters are thinking as write the dialogue and action, but I don’t include it until I have the “what you’d see/hear if this was on TV” part done first.

That’s my usual process, but I must admit, it hasn’t really worked for me this time. As I was writing the dialogue and blocking, I kept being dissatisfied with it, and realized I needed to get in the character’s heads simultaneously. Which makes sense, I guess, I still don’t know the characters that well, and as I enter the crucial middle chapters of the story, I need to know how their inner worlds are changing.

So for this chapter, I am doing layering of a different kind. I have three point of view characters, four characters total, and I am layering in each character one at a time. The other characters are still there, but they are vaguely written as I concentrate on just the one character’s actions, words, and thoughts. I may have to go back and change that up a bit once I layer in the next character’s details, but that’s art for you.

This story is proving very challenging to construct, which makes me wonder how I’m going to pound out 50,000 words next month without having to stop and think and plan for five days at a stretch between writing bouts.

Original fiction project – week of 9/25/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

Dis/inhibition: I decided I just wanted this final proofreading over, so I set a goal of doing one chapter a day (and twice on Sundays!), and today I’m on chapter 40 out of 43. So go, me. Still on the fifth character illustration, though. Those I just get picky about, lol.

New story: I started to make good progress on chapter 7 after spending some extra time on figuring out mythology and backstory, then I hit another snag. My old novel, Dis/inhibition took place in a fictional town quite a bit like my home town, but not actually my home town. I prefer fictional settings, because if you need a particular location, you just invent it. My new story takes place in San Francisco, and while there’s a bit of play possible, if you go naming actual streets and intersections and then claim there’s a building/bridge/park there, or that a building/bridge/park was there a century ago, you can’t do anything too wildly untrue.

Well, I suppose you could, but the further from reality you are, the more you are writing about alterno!San Francisco rather than real San Francisco. And I always had the impression that one of the tools of urban fantasy was to use the accuracy about the real world settings to make the fantasy elements seem more compelling, more as if they could be true as well. And I don’t want to veer from that, not if I don’t have to. So I am having to step back once again and think through every setting I use–do I need it in the story? Really need it? Do I need it to be there?

I want to get this chapter done by mid-month so NaNo prep can start. Back to it.

Pottermore

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

I’ve only dipped my toe into Pottermore, which I finally got access to this morning. Actually, I didn’t find out about it until I got to work this morning. So there I am, overwhelmed with stuff to do and looking at a busy week ahead of me, and now they decide to give me access? Murphy (of Law fame) is obviously their head membership bigwig.

Anyway, the website is down for the moment, so I thought I’d record a few initial impressions. The main one which is, the “new content”? LOL, I will bet all my sickles and knuts the “new content” is coming straight out of Rowling’s old story notes and discarded word count. Any writer (even me of overwriting fame) has a ton of content they wrote way back when that didn’t make it into the final draft, not because it wasn’t good, or relevant, or “the wrong direction for the story”, but just because it was tangential, or background information. Or became tangential/background info as the plot of the story developed.

So how much of this “new” content is new from Rowling’s POV? Probably none of it. But as someone who enjoys deleted scenes on DVD extras, and writer/director voice-over versions of movies/episodes explaining their creative process, I vote this “pretty darned cool.”

ETA: And now that the site’s back up and I’ve read along a little further, I have found the page where she admits to all this. ; )

9-1-1

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

Ten years ago, I was living with my friend Kevin in his apartment in the Haight district of San Francisco. I used to wake up to the classical music channel every morning on the clock radio (I don’t even use an alarm clock these days–no point). I remember waking up to music, but then when the music faded, they broke for a news report about the one of the twin towers in NYC being hit by a plane. No one knew why yet. I think everyone assumed it was a really incompetent pilot.

So I went in to work, and heard about the other planes hitting their targets. I spent the rest of the day glued to streaming video news on my work computer. I watched the towers crumble. The ATPo board was full of anxious posts as we worried over our NYC friends, and waited for each to check in (http://www.atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/archives/sep.html).

At some point, it was revealed that one of the planes, the one that crashed in rural Pennsylvania because the brave passengers took it away from its target, was originally bound for San Francisco. Many SFers were on the plane. None that I knew personally.

I went to New York in July of 2005 along with many ATPoers to hang out with each other and see the city. midnightsjane and I took a double-decker bus ride around lower Manhattan, and saw ground zero, among other sights.

I guess the closest I came to losing anyone I knew in the disaster was wondering if that week was the week my writing coach was supposed to go to NYC to do a writing seminar for some New York executives in the tower. Turns out, it wasn’t.

Original fiction project – week of 9/04/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 5 Comments

Dis/inhibition: Still working on final edits. It’s going slower than I thought it would, and that’s frustrating. Especially after having an editor go through it and clean it up. I’m probably adding in new missing/misused words and awkward sentences after she cleaned up all the old ones. As for the artist doing website artwork, we are halfway done already. Cute little illustrations of my characters come to life.

New story: I love it when you start a chapter intending it to work one way, and it ends up playing out in a way you didn’t plan, but gets the job done all the same. One difficulty I’ve been having with this new story is that I have these spirit being characters who I can’t really show in all their detail, nor feature as point of view characters, because that gives away too much of the unfolding mystery. And yet I still want to “show” their activity behind the scenes in the story. Finding clever ways to manage that has forced me to write each new chapter in creative ways, which is resulting, I think, in chapters that are a lot more interesting than they would have been.

It’s the middle of September now (how?!), which means it’s time to start making NaNoWriMo plans. My plan is to belt out 50,000 words of this story, which is currently in chapter 6. It will be a disjointed mess come December 1st, but then I can clean it all up and be much further along than I would have otherwise been polishing off each chapter one at a time.