Excavating the story

"Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

-Stephen King

So, November brings two things that are, to me, inextricably intertwined. The first is, as you probably know, NaNoWriMo. The second is, what is fast becoming, my yearly reading of Stephen King's On Writing. 

Now, for anyone reading this who has not read King's "memoir of te craft", I can not encourage you enough to do so. The book is a swift read, but it's literally packed with sage advice on the craft of writing. This goes from simple common sense things, like that you need to read to be a writer, to more abstract things, like the above quote.

This year, however the section featuring the above quote really stood out to me. Let me explain why.

My entry in this years NaNoWriMo competition, was quite literally an idea slapped together a week before the 'competition' began. I had no time to plan it out, no time to outline as I'd done previously, and no time to even develop my characters.

Unlike prior years, I didn't fall in love with the idea before I committed to it. I don't, at this point, intend the piece for any sort of publication. I frankly have no stake in it other than I want to just write the damn thing up until the words 'The End'.

Because I'm much more removed from it, I'm less compelled to be a perfectionist as I'm writing. This has resulted in being stuck less, and generally just listening to what the characters are telling me. Finding out who they are and what they'd do as we go along. 

My common tendency to want a 'perfect' first draft has lead to a routine of how I do things that I'm breaking for, what may be, the first time ever. 

While before I'd worry about the details, whether a line worked to set up a later event or whether a scene had the proper impact as I was writing it, this story is much more me simply pounding away at a block of idea and seeing what form it takes.

Imagine a wood carver. He starts out with a chunk of tree and he might start off taking a chainsaw to it to cut away the excess that simply doesn't belong. If he's cutting out a human figure, you might get a shape of arms, legs and head. Certainly nothing like fingers or eyes.

What I'm writing now feels very much like working with a chainsaw. I care less about whether a particular line works and just want to follow to see where the characters I have lead, and who else shows up.

Once I get the initial form, in this case the first draft, then I can go back and use more precise tools to refine the shape. I might refine this bit, or reshape that bit. I may realize that I've cut one arm longer than the other and really have to excise large chunks and take things in new directions. But eventually from the rough sculpt, details will start to emerge and, hopefully, in the end I'll get something that resembles what I saw in my head.

I realized this over the weekend, and came to the above section in King today, and suddenly I realized that maybe I'd been going about it wrong. I don't think I'd ever really connected Kings metaphor with something workable to me before (hence my own metaphor), and maybe that was because I was too invested in the piece I was writing to simply let it be.

The long and short of it is simply that, if nothing else, this NaNoWriMo project has given me a new look at what I've probably been doing wrong all the time. I've been too concerned with the, as King calls it, "jackhammer of plot" and getting the details out right away that I ended up with bizarre shapes that didn't fit what I'd intended. Perhaps this time we'll see different results and I can go back to those pieces with a new perspective, and achieve better results.

Until next time, you know the drill

Another year, another story

So, it's 2013.

That means it's been almost a year since I last posted.

Yeah, honestly I'm shit at blogs. Life rises up and I forget about them.

If you're wondering, Eastgate is not finished. While I managed to push through NaNoWriMo, and meet the word count, I did so at the cost of the story. The tone was wrong, the characters went in weird directions, and I ended up realizing that a lot of the decisions I'd made in developing the story were actually wrong and went against things that I wanted as core facets of the story.

I sort of cracked the nut of what was wrong in the spring, but then a very good friend of mine took ill and was in the hospital for 2 months, and it just frankly began a series of things that have sort of fucked me over for writing for the better part of the year.

However, it's almost November, and that means a fresh chance to tell a new story.

Unlike last year, this year's story isn't the product of a lot of planning. It isn't a story that I see being the first of a series. It frankly isn't a story I feel a lot of myself invested in.

And that's not a bad thing.

This year's story is the subject of what I refer to as the "Jim Butcher challenge". You see, several years ago Jim Butcher (author of the Dresden Files) was talking to some fans about hot you could make a story out of anything, and it was purely the execution that would determine if it was a good story. Someone didn't agree with Jim. Jim said to give him two random items and he would make a story about them. The man, whose name no one seems to remember, offered the items of Pokemon and The Lost Roman Legion.

From these suggestions, Jim gave the world Codex Alera.

So, not wanting to try to delve back into Eastgate, which still needs some thinking and needs, I think, a slower pace than NaNoWriMo affords, I decided to take up Jim's gauntlet and make a story out of two unrelated items.

Yesterday, almost as a joke, my wife gave me the two items to make the story from. Those things were:

1) Robocop
and
2) Dungeons & Dragons

The general story sort of unfolded in my head pretty quickly once I had a chance to sit down and think about it, and I decided "what the hell".

Like I said, this isn't a story that I'm holding extremely dear, or one that I'm thinking could be the basis for a series or anything. It could be a total mess, and it could crash and burn completely. I don't know. But, honestly for the first time in NaNo, I'm not really concerned. I'm just writing this one to see where it goes.

So, I have a week, and I need to figure out the characters a bit between now and then. I have general character ideas, but I'm lacking things as basic as names.

I'll update as often as I can between now and the end.

And hopefully I'll remember that this blog exists afterward.

Until then..

And the winner is....

Me.

But you deserve more than that dear reader.

So since I last posted, there's been some ups and downs. Last Thursday I only got about 1,000 words written. Yeah, it was a holiday, but I had intended to go to the Turkeyday dinner, and come back early enough to crunch out another thousand or so words.

That so didn't happen. Not that I'm complaining. There was a lot of wine, a lot of good conversation and a cute 1 year old, so I obviously don't regret it.

Then Friday I managed to get about 2,500 words done. So, that was good.

Writing wise, Saturday was amazing. A friend and I staged our own write in. We put in Game of Thrones and just wrote, occasionally reading small pieces we thought came out well. Yeah, I know I said I wasn't letting anyone read what I was writing until I'd finished and gave it a second pass.... but I only read small snippets, so it doesn't count.

Anyway, that put me within 4k of the finish line. 

Sunday I had wanted to bang out all four thousand word. However, I got into holiday shopping and it just didn't happen. I got about 1,500 words done. Monday I ended up having more holiday shopping issues and so only got about a thousand done.

That left me to finish it today.

Which I did.

That's it for the numbers.....

The fact of the matter is that I sort of ran out of plot last week. As I've mentioned earlier, I had made up an outline for the first chunk of the book, but I wrote to the end of that last week, which just kind of left me spinning my wheels. I wrote a lot of character scenes and just kept going... which means there's a good chance that what I wrote in the last few days will never see the light of day.

The important thing is... I got 50k.

Back from the pseudo-dead

No, I didn't die.

No, get kidnapped.

No I (sadly) didn't get abducted by mercurial aliens from beyond the fifth dimension.

I knew when I started this blog that it was gonna be a challenge to update it every day. It's been a but more of a challenge than I thought. During the first week of so of NaNoWriMo, I'd finish my wordcount by something like 10pm, and be able to pop in and tell you how everything went.

During week two, it pushed later, and the updates became more sparingly spaced. things got harder. The story looked at my outline and said "to hell with you, I'll do what I want".

Week three has been the story rebelling against the author, so to speak. Characters decide to do things I hadn't intended, people who I thought were a dirty shade of white became steel gray. Characters who were initially supposed to dominate the story are now sitting on deaths door step, having been pulled back before they could walk through.

They always say that the second week in the hardest, but I disagree, I think the third week is the hardest. I find myself still plunking the keys during Jon Stewart, which I haven't had to do up unto this point. I'm ahead of my wordcount, but I want to stay there. I want to be able to finish early and take a day off on my birthday (since I'm not doing anything else on it, just taking a day off of NaNo would be nice).

I have that chance this coming week with Thursday and Friday available for me to to do double sessions or sessions and a half. Plunk down a thousand words in the morning, then another thousand and a half at night. Saturday I could do this too... that's a potential 7500 words in 3 days. Dump that on top of my current 33405 (probably closer to 37000 by the time thursday hits) and I'm within 5k of my goal. I dump another one of those on Sunday and I've got almost 47k by the end of the weekend.

My problem is now that I've just ended the big opening sequence. I'm 80 pages in and I've just completed the first sequence and inciting incident. This piece is a god damned monster. Bigger than I intended. I'm not even out of Act I yet. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, Marcus would have just now told him about the Ark of the Covenant.

So much to go, and I just kind of want a day to step back and reassess. I need a game plan because I'm swiftly running out of outline, and what I do have doesn't quite fit anymore.

Current word count: 33,405
Days left: 10

Hemingway had the right idea.

The two week mark!

So, yesterday was the two week mark.

I'm currently on Chapter 3, after finishing Chapter 2 on Monday. Things are currently building to my inciting incidents nicely, but not easily.

Tuesday I didn't get to 1,667, petering out at around 1,500 words. The scene was just spinning in circles, and it hit a couple of points I needed it to, but it just wasn't working. So, I called it a night and decided to let the little bits of extra from preceeding days soak it up.

I was content to let the bad scene alone until, laying in bed, I realized I had missed a major event that needed to happen in that scene. A character who needed to be instructed to do something wasn't even present.

So yesterday I went back and tweeked the scene, adding the missing character and making it work more toward what it needed to do. It gained words instead of losing them, so it's a win in my book.

Then I had a nice scene with one of the protagonists stuck in a car with the antagonist. Ended up being pretty interesting, and hints of crossing backstory reared their head.

Total word count: 24,202
Suggested word count for 14 days: 23,338

Today is the middle of the road. 25k by the end of the night or bust. Realistically, hopefully we can be at 26k.

How about a little intimidation this time:

A Message from Neil Gaiman

Taken from NaNoWriMo.org

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That’s how novels get written.

You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the downward slide, and it’s not impossible that soon you’ll be at the end. Good luck…

Neil Gaiman

And thats why Neil Gaiman is awesome.... well, that and Sandman, and Coraline, and Good Omens, and American Gods, and that guest appearance on the Simpsons, and his Doctor Who episode, and...

Twelfth Night

So, yesterday started out rough.

Remember the scene from Friday that I realized was now outlined to come to a head with an event that no longer fit the world? Remember how I just kind of rewrote a few lines and then worked to put a button on the scene?

Yeah, last night I had to work on the scene that followed.

The problem now is that, without the strong motivating force of the original version of the preceding scene, the character no longer had a strong motivation for being in that scene. She just kind of sits at the place she's supposed to be waiting to see something.

Then the scene the way it was intended kind kicks in and everything is okay. Once the actual problem enters the scene, people start functioning properly. In fact, in this scene the two characters who jumped out the window (who meet up with the character from the outlined scene) suddenly become stronger in terms of saying and doing what they should.

There's a bit of fire in them that everyone was lacking in the two prior scenes.

I'm hoping that the fire carries though, and everyone feels urgent. I already know that it's something I need to go back and fix in what I've got so far. In fact, chances are very good that the scenes involving all three of these character up until this scene will need to be completely rewritten.

The stakes for the window pair have technically been high, but I feel like there's been no real danger and tension there. Things have happened, and one of them is on the road to death... but nothing feels like it's got weight.

The other character... yeah she needs a real purpose in the scenes before this one. She needs something that matters to actually do. She's setting up an important group of plot points, but that's not enough. There have to be stakes in her scenes.

Anyway, enough prattling on.

Daily count: 1,710
Total words: 20,848

And remember, the great words of Richard Castle...