Spoiler warning: Skin Game (Jim Butcher), Inferno and The Lost Symbol (Dan Brown)
A while back, I posted an angst about point of view and the pacing of information reveals in my novel. My novel is, at its core, a mystery. The answers to the mystery gradually unfold for the reader as the protagonists investigate and make discoveries. In the first draft, I set a major “reveal” towards the end of the novel. The challenge was setting up that reveal without giving it away.
Now here is a lesson I need to take to heart:
I think I spent more time during the writing of the first draft of my novel explaining what was going on to my beta reader verbally after the fact of her reading a chapter than I spent writing the chapter.
In my defense, I thought I was writing an entirely different kind of book than I was. I thought I was writing a book in which the true nature of one of the heroes, several of the villains (including one who really isn’t a villain, but must act like one), and a few other characters is revealed very gradually and is only explained outright around chapter 16 or 17 of 23. What I wanted was for the reader to uncover the answer to a mystery, gradually, with the heroes, as the clues unfolded.
I imagined my book was something like my childhood favorite, Alexander Key’s Escape to Witch Mountain, where you’d have a perfectly comprehensible adventure about two magically-gifted orphans even if you never got the “big reveal” the book/film was unfolding towards (that the children are in fact aliens, not witches). The book would still make sense without that ending, but that ending makes better sense of the events and clues scattered through the story than what you assume through much of the story.
Based on that model, however, I struggled for 17 or 18 of the 23 chapters hiding every thought, every word, every action my more “unusual” characters had that would give the answer away too soon, until I had a cast of characters who were doing incomprehensible things for incomprehensible reasons, or who had to be made ignorant of things I had fully planned for them to know upfront so they wouldn’t “give it away” to the reader until the characters who didn’t know found out, too.
So now I know I am writing a story in which I need to tell the reader much more upfront, and in which I have to figure out the delicate art of knowing when, and if, I can hold back details to maintain the sense of mystery.
And that’s… harder.
I got the first season of OUAT on DVD for Xmas and have been doing a rewatch. Simultaneously, I’ve been plotting the second draft of my novel using the hero’s journey as a rough template, so I had the concept of the Guide archetype in my head while watching.
Assuming Emma Swan is the Hero of OUAT, the first Guide she encounters, at least in season one, is her son, Henry. He has the “Once Upon A Time” book, and he is constantly interpreting events and people for Emma (also, for Mary-Margaret/Snow White, and Graham/the Huntsman) in terms of the book so that she can see herself in the larger picture of what she is supposed to accomplish as the “savior.”
Spoilers through the end of season 1, with some unspoiled speculation
I suppose I didn’t have an actual recorded New Year’s resolution to report about my writing to the webosphere, but I nevertheless thought that might be something I’d do for accountability purposes, now that I don’t have a reader waiting for new material as I did in my first draft. Somehow, though, the first two weeks of January passed before it occurred to me to do so. It is now mid-January. Mid-January! How did *that* happen?
Well, at least it feels like mid-January ought to feel. Brrr.
So, on the novel-writing front: there has been no writing. Which is not to say there has been no work on the novel. I have been doing plot-reinvisioning (work left over from PlotWriMo last month), and this past week, I have been doing research to feed the world-building muse I “played by ear” or something in the first draft. Short story long, I was not happy with the story-world rules I had going in that draft. They were not well thought out, and now they need to be before I spill another pixel on plotting.
I may, at some point, do some free writing just to stretch the writing muscles a bit, since I haven’t done much “writing” writing since the end of October.
Why is it I feel guilty–like I’m not “working on my novel” if I am not writing the text of the story?
The problem I’m having with setting a writing goal for the coming year is that there is no one task I do everyday when I’m writing. Not even putting words on a page. Which is why a daily word count goal is meaningless. Jeez, if my goal was word count alone, I could do that with a manuscript like that creepo was typing up in The Shining. Writing is also not (for me) a linear process of going from page one to page 341 (or whatever). I don’t write start to finish. Sometimes, the end has to come first, or the middle, because those sections help determine the beginning. So setting a goal of “one chapter a week” or every two weeks or every month is also not workable.
I hop between composing, editing, plotting, and research depending on where the energy of my creative focus is that day and what my story currently needs. Yeah, I edit while composing. Bad me, no cookie. I go back and rewrite previously-written stuff when I’ve changed my mind about how it should go because sometimes FIXING old stuff is psychologically necessary for moving forward with newer stuff that contradicts it.
So I think the best daily goal is a time chunk. Two and a half hours a day, six days a week. Which comes out to only 15 hours a week.
My main goal in January is re-visioning my MacGuffins. The “obscure, powerful” archeological artifacts that are at the center of a story that is really science fiction, not fantasy. They can’t be supernatural–they need to be Clarkesque technology, but they can’t be ridiculously complicated Clarkesque technology, either. So much of January will be taken up by research and contemplation, and very little of the writing I do on this task will end up in the 100,000 final words of the story.
And yet, my goal is to have a draft worthy of beta-reading and possible publication by the end of the calendar year. Onward.
It’s Monday morning, December 31st, 2012. Do you know what your writing plan for 2013 is? I recently read an article by Dean Wesley Smith on the topic, and his take(s) on it were (1) clearly for full-time writers, and, also, (2) insane.
The New World of Publishing: How To Keep Production Going All Year
But I am not here to be his poster girl for failure, making excuses why I can’t follow any of his suggested plans (words per hour? Seriously? How can anyone even have a ballpark figure of “how many new words they can write per hour” when no hour is ever equal to any other in (a) state of mind (b) state of life (c) level of distractions (d) level of carpal tunnels syndrome… Um, what?)
Word count goals, at any rate, never functioned for me. I can set a goal of say, 250 words a day, but quality and quantity are not the same thing–I mean how many of us have writtenshit during NaNo just to “win” and come out of that with only a few scraps we can actually use?
Smith has one suggestion that makes more sense to me–a “production goal.” Instead of counting words, you set a goal of what you want to produce. This, of course, depends on having not just an end-of-the-year goal, but a weekly goal, maybe even a daily goal, that you can stay focused on so your progress towards the big picture doesn’t weigh you down or discourage you.
He apparently writes short stories. One a week (what). I am a novelist, and I want to write the second draft of my novel. This goal does not mean just cleaning up the old draft, though, since as I indicated elsewhere, that draft turned out to really be more a first draft of the second book in a trilogy, rather than the first. So my job is to take the elements from the first draft that belong in the first book and give them their own structure (something I’ve been working on in December), then write that story in full.
And, at the same time, fix the stuff in the first draft I was never happy with, which is the real challenge. Every first draft has a universe-given right to SUCK. Second drafts need to rise above that.
So, fine, I will write my second draft. The next question becomes, do I write it in (1) a month, (2) three months, (3) six months, (4) 9 months, (5) a year? There are different pros and cons to each of these scenarios, but this is really where you have to Know Your Own Brain. And my brain works best when I give it space. This is what I’ve learned in thirty years of creative writing. I work, and work, and work, and work, fingers to the keyboard like a maniac, get frustrated because some story element is eluding me, get up out of my chair and do something else.
Then, days later, when I’m doing something Really Awkward like showering or trying to fall asleep, or lying with a dozen needles poking out of my skin, the answer comes to me. Or an answer to a question I never thought to ask comes to me. And I have to give my brain the space to work this way. Saying “I will write this draft in six months” and setting writing time goals and all the like is all well and good–priming the pump or whatever–but the best ideas will not come on demand.
Still, a year seems too long. I’d like to light the fire under my butt a little. These things drag on too long.
Well, as with all great ideas, I need to give my brain time to think about this. Brain, you have until the end of the week to come up with a great writing plan for 2013. Hop to it.
A lot of people don’t like doing New Years resolutions, and I don’t blame them. Each year of our lives has a particular flow, and the flow we are in in one year is different than the one we veer into in the next, and therefore the expectations we develop from one may not apply to the other at all. We can’t always control the way our lives flow.
But I think those of us privileged enough to have some semblance of control over at least part of our time ought to at least visualize how we’d like to spend that time, even if other stuff comes along to divert us from those visions. 2012 was a case-in-point year for that.
I am in the throes of NaNo-Envy, but I am still happy not to be doing NaNo. Yes, a contradiction, but I love the social energy this month brings in what is often such a solitary activity. OTOH, I am feeling under the weather, and I finished the first draft of my novel last Sunday, so… not great timing for me this year.
But I am in earnest planning mode on the second draft and the general outline for the trilogy of novels that is going to emerge from my first draft. I’ve actually been thinking of turning the novel into a series for a while now, because I see a lot of possibilities and stories in the world I am building (still building. I think my story-world was a bit thin in the first draft).
Back in July, I came across an online writing school, the bill-paying day-job of author Holly Lisle, http://novelwritingschool.com/. Other than a one-on-one writing coach and writer’s workshops, I have not taken any “writing classes” in the sense of instruction since I was a teenager/twenty-something. At that age, I was obsessed with learning “how to write fiction” and so never did any actual writing. Experience is the best teacher, IMO. I learned more from writing my first novel, Dis/inhibition, and The Destroyer series than I could have learned in a hundred writing classes. But I figured Lisle’s “How To Write A Series” course might have a few pointers.
I got through the first two of four lessons in July, then RL got in the way. The lesson videos and exercises guide you through the process of identifying what kind of series you will write, planning how it will unfold, etc (although I must say the video transcripts included are FULL of typos….)
So finishing that course is one goal I have set for my post-novel time. I also plan to work through The Plot Whisperer Workbook. Both of these are merely tools to help me focus on plotting and locating strong and weak story elements for the purpose of revision and expansion.
I reviewed the first two lessons of Lisle’s course this week, and realized quickly that a lot of the course exercises could benefit from me gathering together all the “future draft” notes I tucked away while working on the first draft–changes to plot points and characters I envisioned, ideas for expansion. So that is what I am working on now. I’ve got some good ideas brewing, and a LOT of research work ahead of me in physics, mythology, and random bits.
Woo-f***ing-hoo!!
But yes, alas, that means I am officially not doing NaNo this year, ’cause October has been my NaNoWriMo–a non-stop writing-and-editing spree that began each morning as soon as I woke up , stopped only so I could go to the stress-hell that has been work this month, and resumed the minute I got home until I collapsed in bed.
I think part of the reason I managed to whack out the rest of this story in one month is that work has been so sucky, writing distracted me from dwelling on it. Which, bonus. But I overdid it. I have been sick with the flu for over a week now. Still working at my job from home–blast modern remote login computers.
I crawled into my actual place of employment for meetings twice last week and couldn’t even sit up for the length of them.
Now I am all jealous of my friends prepping for NaNo. Not because I’m dying to spew out 1,667 words a day, but because it’s fun to be part of all that energy. My Nov and Dec will be spent planning the second draft of my novel (and posting on that process, hopefully). And it will need planning–lots and lots of planning, ’cause for Pantsers, the first draft is really the “outline.” It is the raw material out of which the “actual” novel is formed.
And there was so much I wanted to include in this draft I didn’t have room for, I slowly concluded it was three books instead of one. So now I need to plan out three books. And then, hopefully before the new year (but I’m not pushing it), start the “second” draft of the first book.
Writing is not always fun. Sometimes, it’s all you can do just to plunk yourself into your chair and force out the words. It really sort of depends on where you are in the process, and what ideas you have brewing in your mind. Read more
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 