Writing Novels is like Playing Chess

Tags

chess, competitive, editing, novels, Writing

I used to play competitive chess. I gave it up about fifteen years ago; because it just took up too much of my time and energy.

Chess is a very demanding hobby. It takes a lot of resources to prepare: books [instruction], time [read and solve problems], and practice. I’d attend our local chess club every Monday night for four or five hours of constant playing; study ending, middle game, and opening theory every night, work on problems either from these books, my games, or master games, and I’d play in correspondence matches. It was intense, and I logged over twenty hours a week trying to improve my game. I achieved a 1900+ CFC rating and was considered a weak A class or strong B class player. I have a master notch on my gun stock.

Today I met one of my old chess buddies at McDonald’s. It’s the nearest coffee shop [definitely not my idea of a café], and he was there eating a late breakfast. He’s in his 80’s. We chatted about chess and my life and my story writing. I told him sitting down to write was a lot like sitting down to play a tournament chess game, and that’s why it’s been so hard to get this thing edited. It’s difficult to get in the mood every night after working all day, and I have all that preparation I need to work on.

A Tournament chess game was typically 40 moves in two hours, a total of four. Subsequent time controls were 20 in one hour. If your flag fell before you’ve made all your moves, you lost immediately. There was lots of pressure and it was intense. I’ve played several six-hour games, and I think my longest was eight hours. I’ve played about three hundred rated games.

There is a lot of mental preparation for a five-hour match. If you don’t go in ready to play, you get rolled and sent home with a goose egg. You need to be one hundred percent focused on your game. Every move you need to thoroughly understand your position, and if possible, relevant theory. It’s not all calculation; though there certainly is much. Your brain works flat-out for those hours, and you don’t let it take a break. A tournament chess game is one of the most competitive experiences, and your brain uses as much energy as a body does in a set of tennis.

Tonight I begin three weeks of vacation. When I get home this evening, I am going to take a nap. When I wake I will make a nice, small dinner for myself. I will then go out into my vegetable garden and pluck weeds until the skeeters and black flies drive me inside. My story will have been on my mind this whole time. I will have pictured the words I plan to write. I’ll make a half pot of coffee. As the coffee brews, I will sit at my computer and respond to any comments you make, I will read my tweets, and I will fiddle with Facebook. My mind during this time will not be on my story. I will then prepare a cup of coffee with coconut oil and whipping cream, open my story, and go to work. I will work for four hours. Somewhere in there, I will refill my coffee cup and kiss my wife. A bottle of wine might get opened.

Game number two starts about thirty minutes after I wake up tomorrow morning. My alarm is set for 5AM, but that will likely change.

These next two weeks is a 40 game chess tournament.

Writing Is Hard Work

Tags

consulting, editing, reading, work, Writing

There’s no way around it; writing is hard work.

I think back to my few years in management consulting in Ottawa from late 1989 to early 1992. I worked on some twenty projects and wrote those twenty reports. They were not fluffy little recommendations: “oh, I think you should do this. Yup, that might work.” No, these were 50 to 100 pages of fact, observation, discussion, and recommendation. They were followed by presentation and round table discussion with the clients. One of them was published in the 1991 Auditor General of Canada’s Annual Report. A man was fired over that one — good for him as he landed a nice position with a large IT company for his creativity. A report like this needed to be bullet proof. It needed to be close to perfect.

We did not write these reports alone. I did most of the work on my projects, so I did most of the writing. Others did the same for their projects. The firm of 25 consultants then helped me finish it off. A group of four to six volunteers — people with not much on their plate — would meet for a day in a board room. We’d read through every line and they would question me on every fact. If there was something they didn’t like about my story, they’d question it. “This sentence is weak” or “the facts don’t support your conclusion” or some other issue was to be expected, always. I needed to go into these sessions prepared, and there was always a partner or senior manager participating which added to the pressure.

We did excellent work, but let me tell you: it was hard work. I put in a lot of hours. I learned a lot about writing and editing.

My writing now is also hard work. Words that engage peoples’ minds are just as important as words that get people fired.

We had a saying at that firm: “the written word is called a medium; because that is what it is.”

We also used a Gunning-Fog index type of score. We wanted a grade (level) 8 score. I remember one time a first draft was a grade 12, and I didn’t know how to get it down. I decided to do what we did in our meetings: I went through every sentence and made sure it was simple and to the point. I got my grade (level) 8 through hard work. My writing up to this point in my blog is 5.1 per an online tool I found. http://textalyser.net/index.php?lang=en#analysis

I analyzed the first chapter of my current novel. My score is 6.3, and the tool suggests 6 is easy to read. I agree with that score, and one of the things I struggle with in writing fiction is not writing too simply. Most writers break up compound sentences; while I often need to combine simple sentences into compunded versions, and of course I don’t want it to sound forced.

I love showing rather than telling. *smirk*

I test my writing once a month at my writing club. Six to eight of us amateur writers get together for a Saturday brunch, and we share our work. This is a great test. When something doesn’t work, it stands out in my ear. I’ve actually stopped and said “blagh” when I’ve written something poorly, something I was sure was bullet-proof, and sometimes I’ll re-word things on the fly. Reading out loud and listening to the words is a great exercise for flushing out problems.

But it’s hard work. I currently have 100,518 words to read to myself out loud. Good luck with that, John.

Usually what I do is once I’m happy with a scene, I’ll set it aside for a day or many, then read it for enjoyment. I sit back, sip my coffee, and even mouth the words. It’s not easy to read out loud at five in the morning in a sleeping house, especially for an introvert. But you need to test the rythms and flow.  Almost always there’s at least one sentence that was garbled by too much editing. My brain knew what I wanted, but my fingers didn’t. Or all those reconstructions just didn’t work. Or an important point wasn’t made. Or timing was wrong. Or that just doesn’t belong in the story. Or it adds no value.

And that leads us back into grinding out prose which later won’t read well. It’s a never ending circle.

It’s hard work!

*only 56,220 words left to edit. Then I will read it through. Then I will let some readers at it..

Afraid Of Heights

Tags

afraid of heights, bridge, Halifax, honeymoon, novel, painting, PEI, vacation

Halifax Bridge

Jesus Bill, you could have warned me about those bridges you know. You know I’m deathly afraid of heights. You knew I would never fly. That’s why we drove. You knew all of this. But Jesus Bill, you could have warned me about the bridges.

The Halifax one was bad. If you knew I might have the big one on it, would you have driven around? Would you have believed me? Do you think this is all a simple fault of my simple brain? Do you think it’s something you can just brush off and it will pass? All I can say about Halifax is that you’re lucky the view up there looked like the view from Signal Hill. Jesus b’y, you’re damned lucky it felt like home up there, just enough anyway to calm me enough to breath.

Signal Hill

Don’t think our time together made that big of a difference. I think you know I really enjoyed my three days with you in Nova Scotia, and I had just about forgotten about that bridge too. Halifax was fine; another St. John’s really. Nothing special as far as I was concerned. But that Fundy trip. Wow.

I really doubted your judgment leading us down that road, that narrow, tree-lined, back-woods highway along that bay with no view whatsoever, not in all that rain. That bottle of wine that night at the campground was nice, and I slept well, until we had to get up at 4am.

That day on that deck painting that bay was possibly the best day of my life so far. The vision of those cliffs so close in front of me glowing in the morning sun , and that bay, that channel of ocean squeezing through those rocks with such fury. I got lost in my painting that day, Bill. I’ve never been lost like that before, ever. I hope Tom likes it. He was a gracious host, and I really liked him.

Fundy Cliffs

God dammit Bill, why didn’t you tell me about that bridge to PEI? Did you think because I crossed Halifax Harbour alive that I’d survive this one? Christ Bill, that wasn’t a bridge; that was a monster. Only eight miles across, you said. Only 40 meters high, except where it’s 60 meters. Jesus H. Christ, Bill. I screamed the whole way across. Bill? How the hell am I going to get off this island? Tell me Bill!

PEI Bridge

Editing Is Hard Work

I’ve worked on the same section of scenes, mostly two, all weekend; though the amount of time at the keyboard was only around four or five hours total. I spent a lot of time thinking and rethinking, writing, then rethinking some more. I had my greatest thoughts this morning in the shower, decided to skip church, went to the Magnolia Café instead, and wrote for an hour.

I couldn’t believe how badly I had written these scenes. It was last November for NaNoWriMo, so the poor quality is exucible, but I remember one paragraph as my favorite of the story. I read it again nd it barely made any sense.

I realize my mind fills in words that aren’t there sometimes, and I suspect Microsoft changes words on me. Today for example a snetence was supposed to use the word ‘even’ such as ‘We went to the beach even though it was cold and rainy.’ The word ‘every’ cannot be a typing mistake. The Y is two keys north of the N. How do these mistakes happen? They happen a lot.

My writing this weekend first focused on the big picture of the scene. I revalidated facts and timelines and actions. I re-constructed them somewhat to make more sense. Then I put them away but thought about them in quiet moments.

The next time I read through it, I couldn’t believe how bad it was. Some of the senetences didn’t even make sense. So I re-wrote much of it again.

I repeated again, but got a little deeper. I’d left questions and gaps, so I filled them in. I tried to add dialogue where I could, but I also ended up with a lot of internal thought.

I repeated this last step a couple of times with half-day breaks.

The lousy writing really bothered me, and I think it made me focus harder at each attempt. This morning’s, this afternoon’s, and my just finished evening sessions felt tight: pain then strain then gain.

I also fleshed out some thoughts on my next scenes: the whys. Why am I writing them and what do I want to show?

I feel good about the quality I wrote this weekend. I feel I accomplished something. I also feel good about what I will write this week, assuming I get the chance. I know I will, though. I will make the time and find my zone, my focus. I feel it.

I’m 115 words shy of 100,000.

Reality Catches Up With You

Tags

cape split, fundy, Marin, novel, Writing

Knowing my novel might take forever to finish and longer to get published, I wrote it in the future so that it wouldn’t become outdated as fast. Sensical, right? But eventually, given enough time, real time catches up to fictional time. This is that weekend. The scene I finished this morning during my first-draft editing process happens tomorrow.

An interesting fact: in my story, today is a rainy day. In real life: today is a rainy day. Tomorrow in my story the sun comes out in Nova Scotia. It might yet do that.

But it’s a rather cool experience. It’s motivating to see and feel world-paths cross like this.

My main character is an artist, a painter. Tomorrow morning she will paint Cape Split, the Canadian version, from accross the bay. It’s allegorical. Politics. Enough.

Here’s some links to the real life image:


Google Maps
Cape Split – John Marin in Maine

My Diabetes is Out of Control: Part 1 – Take Control of Your Ship!

Tags

blogger, control, diabetes, diabetes educator, diabetic online community, dietitian, DOC, doctor, forum, health care team, insulin

I’ve seen a number of posts on forums lately from people who have recognized their diabetes is not in the best control, but they don’t know what to do about it. They are following their health care team’s (HCT) orders, but it’s not working.

Of course without exception whenever such people try to shift blame back on their HCT: what you are telling me to do isn’t working; those HCT members almost always shift blame back to the patient: you aren’t doing it right.

How many of us have experienced this? How many of us have ranted about it? How many blog about it?

Links:
Diabetes Daily
The Bad Diabetic

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Manageing diabetes is a personal effort. I, the diabetic, am in charge of my own care. I make my own decisions. I stear the ship.

This idea may seem self-evident, but it’s suprising how many of us defer our responsibility, and it’s even more surprising how so many in our HCT refuse to acknowledge it.

I’ve talked with many diabetics who have never even considered making their own decisions: Linda (the Diabetic Educator or DE) says I have to do it this way. I could never do what you’re talking about. The lady was obese, uncontrolled, and slowly sliding downhill. She might be dead now, or worse. It’s been a couple of years. And there are things worse than death. I have no desire to lose my legs, my eyesight, and be hooked to a kidney machine three days a week. The bottom line is this woman would not take control of her own condition. Everything she did had to be vetted by Linda. Linda deals with 5,000 diabetics. She has no time to provide day-to-day or hour-by-hour care for diabetics. The best she can do is train them and ship them out into their own hells. Should she do differently? Definately. Part of the problem is our HCT does not want us to assume control. It’s too dangerous. Everything major should be approved. Don’t make medication changes. Don’t make dietary changes. And whatever you do, don’t ask other diabetics. Stay away from those dangerous bloggers!

The reality: I make 6 to 10 life and death decisions every day. This is not exaggeration. This morning my BGs were 8.4 mmol/l, rather high. I changed my pump set then bolused 3u. My new set might not have worked at all. Maybe it might send my BGs high and blur my vision while I’m driving to work. I could maybe feel my sugars rising and hurry in so I could correct again, but I’d be putting my life and my wife’s life in danger. Then my meter might have been wrong. It happens. Those 3u might send me hypo on the way to work. I am insensitive to them after my long years of battle, so I’d very likely drift off into shock while driving at speed. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I repeat this several times a day, day after day, year after year. I sometimes think it’s a wonder I’ve only been 911’d nine times.

My HCT cannot be with me when I make my daily life and death decisions, and since I’m the one in danger of dying, I’m the one that needs to take control. And if they don’t like it, tough.

That doesn’t mean I’m flying solo. Taking control of the wheel doesn’t mean I’m firing my HCT. No, a good manager surrounds themself with good people. I want to make the very best decisions I can, so I want the very best information and advice I can find. My HCT sits at my board table and is a key member of my team, but it’s my team.

I include many people at my table. I have bloggers, I have publications, I have scientific studies, I have various forums I visit, I have personal friends with diabetes, and I have my family. The Diabetic Online Community (DOC) is the deputy chairman of my board. The DOC is largely ignored by my HCT — they don’t talk at all — but I listen to them both.

The DOC has a huge strength that my HCT doesn’t have: it’s always at the table. I hold board meetings every day, sometimes several times. MY HCT chair is almost always empty. When I count up the annual attendance, I might come up with three or four meetings they attend each year. But we have decisions to make today. I have a decion to make right now. My two-hour follow-up reads 9.2, higher than this morning. I’ve only eaten a coffee with heavy cream and coconut oil. My body feels even higher. I look around and there is nobody at the table but you and me. I can call the DOC in, and I’ll get different opinions. But I don’t really need their help for this problem  I need immediate oeprational action. I could call my HCT, but they’d question my sanity: this is a day-to-day operational problem. Board memebrs don’t make day-to-day decisons. We’ll discuss the trends during the annual meeting. You’re right, I’ll say to them, what was I thinking?

I need a decion made right now. Waiting an hour for a half dozen opinions will only make things worse. In this situation, I need to take action, and I need to take it right now. I’m assuming my set failed around 5am; though there’s no immediate cut-off. I’ve experienced this before, and I know I need extra insulin. I just bolused four more units. I have sugar tablets at the ready, and I’ll test again in two hours.

Let’s get back to our HCT.

They don’t actually tell me that I’m in control of daily operations. They might assume it, but they don’t like to say it. They are like that retired owner of the business who can’t stay away from his office and can’t resist telling the son what he needs to do to grow the shop. He can’t say “Son, the ball’s in your hands now. Run hard!” He can’t let go. My HCT can’t let go. They can’t be with me, but hey can’t let go: You need to do this, that, and the other things. I’ll make a note and we’ll discuss it next year.

Some of the decisions I make are not so cut and dry. I set my own insulin dosages. I set my basal rates and bolus rates. I decide what diet to follow. My diet looks nothing like my HCT’s plan, and they give me a hard time about it, but they don’t have many patients running a 5.6 A1C with almost no hypos either.

Can you feel the distance between diabetic and doctor? Have you experienced it? Can you see the need to have someone in charge, someone to make those day-to-day and hour-to-hour life and death decisions? Is there anybody better positioned to do this job than you?

Of course you are afraid. You know what a bad decision means. It means at best criticism from your board of directors: you screwed up badly, John. What the hell were you thinking? The company was lucky to survive that one. Yeah, well, how much do you have invested in this company Bob?

Fear is not productive. You will not attain good control if you do not assume control. You cannot make those operational decions that need to be made if you are too afraid to make them. Failure is imminent. 90% of diabetics fail to achieve the desired level of control. I say 90% of diabetics fail to take control of their disease.

Stand up and take control of your diabetes. Take control of your life!

*Part 2 will cover basal insulin
*Part 3 will cover testing
*Part 4 will cover lifestyle changes

My Novel: Challenges

Tags

Literary, nanowrimo, novel, purpose, scene, sequel, snowflake, theme

I began the piece I’m working on last November. It was my 2011 NaNoWriMo project. This novel was much different from my previous one: I had a story, more or less. I initially didn’t like this story as much, and I would have chosen the first as my first novel, but this one seemed like an easier sell, if I could pull it off.

It’s a story about travelling across country. I won’t say anymore than that, for now. My characters travel by vehicle from the farthest east of the country to the farthest west. If you live in countries such as Ireland or Romania, I’m sure this doesn’t seem like much of an adventure. I live in Canada, and it’s a long frickin way from one coast to the other. There’s also one highway, the Trans Canada Highway. There are other highways. There are two ways through the Rockies, and Ontario has options. But basically it’s a coast to coast run.

Challenges!

We know what the story is, basically. It won’t take a genious to figure out the sequence of events as it relates to scenery. My characters can’t take random hops around just to make it interesting. Scenery and timeline are known; they’re static.

Consider one of the most famous coast to coast stories, The Cannonball Run, a 1981 movie starring Burt Reynolds. It’s not an Oscar winning story, but we were entertained. We knew the storyline, a coast-to-coast race, but that didn’t matter. The events along the way were what mattered.

My big challenges have been answering the questions “what?” and “why?” What happens along the way, and why are we on this trip. How to I build tension? How to I add meaning? How do I keep the reader engaged?

I consider this a literary novel.

I can hear your gears ticking: “how do I write a literary version of The Cannonball Run?” I hear a pause followed by “Good luck with that, John.”

The “why” was actually kind of fun to answer. Why would my characters do this? The easy answer is that lots of people do it. Lots of people travel across the country. Every summer I see licence plates from all over the west coast from Alaska to California. They are all fairly common. A vacation type of trip easily fit into my story. If you feel yourself saying “I’d love to do that,” then you should be ables to understand the pull I feel from my story. “Oh, I’d love to do that!”

Never trust John!

There were places along the way I needed to vist to trigger the transformations I was after, and that was a little more difficult, but I think I did it. And writing that story line brought other facets of my characters to life. They were heading down an “artificial” road, a road that didn’t really make sense, but if it was made believable, it would frame some dramatic transformation.

And I didn’t have an ending when I began writing. I did have a general idea, but it was fretty fuzzy. Writing the story revealed a more logical ending, for me, which nicely frames my characters’ transformations. My first version was rather Cavemanish, but as I’ve pondered it at night while trying to fall asleep, I discovered another layer of meaning which I am now writing to.

When I read Miram Toews’ chicken book, A Complicated Kindness, I cursed her for not clearly revealing her mother was having an affair. And I cursed myself for not picking up the fat that in The Sun Also Rises Buddy was impotent. Picking up on such small but important facts would have changed my experiences with these books. I hope that if Ms. Toews ever reads my story she will be sucked into the wrong conclusions like I was with her book. Revenge will be sweet!

The “what” question answered itself as I wrote. I think my strength is becoming empathetic with my characters and finding their flaws. I had planned themes, and I follow them, but early on another theme worked its way in. I didn’t plan it, but it needed to happen, and it did. I brushed it off as sappy, but it kept hanging around very subtely throughout. It only made sense to fulfill this idea at the end: tell them what you are going to say, say it, then tell them what you said, the standard writing and presentation outline.

I really haven’t told you much. Sorry about that. I’m writing this for myself today. I’m trying to justify all the crap I’ve written and motivate myself to finish it. Not a problem at the moment, but I have written a lot of crap in it. Last night I ripped out a whole scene and replaced it completely. There were things that needed to happen and choices that needed to be made, and the previous scene was just goofy, so I ditched the airy NaNo scene and inserted the slower but important scene, a sequel as the Snowflake guy describes it.

I’m finding this guy’s structured scene writing advice very useful in writing my story. As I’ve said, we know chain of events, and it’s challenging bringing them to life and keeping them fresh. These scene writing outlines are very useful, and I think they are working very well. When I finish in another month or so, hopefully, I’ll read it cover to cover and let you know.

Curry: The Magic Spice

Tags

apple, balogna., cayenne, corriander, dill, ginger, green pepper, ham, mystery spice, paprika, raisins, teenage carrots, thyme, tumeric, two brands of curry, zuchinni

I’ve never been a big curry eater. I do love spicy foods, but the opportunities to eat curry around here have been limited to “East Indian” nights at the Shadow Lawn Inn or an Inddia Independance Day dinner held in the basement of a Milledgeville church. This has been partly due to kids who have been put off spices by their spice eating father as well as by parents who are too embarassed to take their stuck up kids anywhere public.

But I digress.

This past year I’ve had opportunity to sample curry fare at a couple of local Thai restaurants. Why the insurgance of Thai restaurants, I don’t know. I think maybe Italian, bad steak, and Central American samplings have run their courses.

Thandi’s doesn’t claim to be Thai, and I’ve never seen Thai people there, I don’t think. Being an Atlantic Canadian, I’m not sure what a Thai person even looks like. I think I met the owner’s wife — that’s what we assume around here, that owners are men — the night I was there waiting for our table, at the bar downstairs. It’s in an old brick building downtown on one of the old brick streets. This building seems to be the heartbeat of taste for the city. It used to be home to two different Italian restaurants, but Italians here carry about the same status as Thais do, maybe even worse.

Sorry, stil digressing.

Suwanna’s is on the west side of the river in a residential neighbourhood next door to a funeral parlour. It also seems owned by Atlanatic Canadian WASP males but maybe a bit younger. At least there were no old wrinkly women there that looked like owners’ wives. And again, there were no Thais in sight.

I’ll describe the food: it tastes like curry. They have every type of curry dish imaginable. One place had buttered chicken curry that sounded dreamy, and I tried several dishes at both. Apparently other people at our tables were just as curious as I was to sample this new Thai food.

I wasn’t disappointed with either place, but I wasn’t overwhelmed either, except by curry taste. I don’t mind curry, but well, I’m not Thai or Indian. I’m a Norwegian Irish blend that screams plain olde fish and potatoes. I think I liked the curry giner beef the best, but the buttered chicken was a close second.

I tried some curry dishes at home.

First I had to buy some curry. I went to the spice section of my grocery store, and found it sitting right there lots of it too. I realized right then and there that other people must be eating teh stuff, and I felt a little left behind. I also looked around for those elusive Thai people but no luck. Since I liked ginger the best, I bought some of that too. There were more curry jars than ginger jars. Curious indeed. *groan*

So I’ve made several dishes now. I like a simple dish I call asparagus scrambled eggs. It’s pretty simple: chop some asparagus, sauté it in olive oil, cover it in spice, and when it’s almost done, pour in three mixed eggs. It’s too runny to keep a shape, so you have no choice but to make scrambled eggs. I’ve made this at least a half a dozen times this spring, and it hasn’t turned out bad yet.

But it does stink up the house.

My biggest enlightenment was learning that Curry Asparagus Scrambled Eggs (CASE) tasted almost exactly like Buttered Chicken (BC) and Curry Ginger Beef (CBB). The texture was different; eggs do that. But the dishes tasted pretty much the same to me.

I decided to experiment.

SO last night I threw everything in, and I mean everything. The base was Vermeulen Farms Asparagus. First off I didn’t plan this dish. It just happened. The asparagus was so crisp and so fresh and the stalks so stiff, I think it must have kicked off a testosterone rush. *oops* I realized that eggs weren’t going to sate me. I made mad dashes to the spice cupboard and the fridge and grabbed everything that looked good: zuchinni, green pepper, apple, ham, raisins, teenage carrots, ginger, two brands of curry, corriander, thyme, cayenne, dill, tumeric, paprika, a mystery spice, and some balogna.

I stirred it all into my caste iron pan and slapped a cover on it. Some time later, after a few turns, I poured it on a large plate. I sat down and pondered my questions:
– would it be edibale?
– would it taste any different than CASE, BC, or CBB?

The answers are yes and no with one minor exception. The balogna tasted like Slig. I will not experiment with it anymore. I’ll stick to frying it plain, a good olde Newfoundland Steak.

I did eat it all and I did enjoy it.

Writing Vacation: Update

Tags

craft, job, muse, novel, work, Writing

So my wife agrees with my sentiments: I should spend some time emulating a professional novelist to see if it fits, to help me decide whether I could ever take the plunge/

I can’t spend three weeks at it. She has plans for week three, and I agree: we both need a vacation, some time away. And we need to see her aging parents. It’s been too long. But, I told her, my netbook is coming along and I will likely weave writing time in. Usually the MIL and I sit at the table and make evil eyes at each other all day. Hmmm, a novel idea 😉

This weekend was sort of a dry run, ad I learned a lot. I discovered I can’t just wake up and write. I can, but I need to do it correctly. I actually had difficulty writing both Friday night and all day Saturday. I didn’t get sucked into the internet, but there were barriers, and I think I know what they were:

– mindset
– purpose
– confidence

Mindset is an obvious concept, but finding the writing muse is not so simple. I tried to sit down and write, but several times I opened my novel only to close it again. I followed my instincts and pulled out Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory which I’d been reading much too long. That night and over Saturday, I finished it off. Reading that remarkable story and tying many of his events and symbols together really triggered my muse. Saturday afternoon I was able to write; though I didn’t write particularly well.

I use some similar techniques as Greene such as showing vs. telling and using seemingly minor events to drive a theme. On many levels my story is quite complicated, and on others its quite simple. The similarities with Green’s story after I completed it struck a chord, but something was amiss.

I am not a trained writer. I am self-taught and I’ve been writing fiction for less than two years. I know less about writing than your average bear, and I felt a gap. I had ideas, outlines for my scenes that I know should work, and I have a completed novel, but my scenes weren’t cutting it. They belonged in the story, but they weren’t driving anything. There was no plot pull and no building character empathy. The four or five scenes I’ve bundled together to work on just weren’t cutting it.

So I followed my instincts. I opened James Wood. [read yesterday’s blog]

The knowledge was already there, I knew the pieces I needed to fill in and expand on, and I even think I knew how, but I couldn’t, not until I read Wood. I suppose it was a minor epiphany of sorts. All the things I knew came together, and the words I needed to write appeared in front of me.

I wrote another 600 words yesterday, and I was really happy with the results. Really happy. I read the scenes again, and I smiled.

I’ve now edited 36,978 words of my 97,971 word manuscript. I still expect it to jump over 120k. I’ve added about 15k since I began editing it. The second half is much thinner than the first but has less gunk to cut out, I hope.

So what did I learn?

Writing a novel is not linear. I can’t set aside four hours every morning for simply slapping words on pages. I need proper preparation. I need to feed the muse with creativity and knowledge. I need to understand how my scene is supposed to work, what it’s supposed to accomplish, and why. I need to be flexible. I also need to work at filling the holes in my preparation. Facebook was a minor distraction this weekend, but the US Open golf tournament wasn’t. Distractions need to go.

Overall I enjoyed my weekend. Writing good words made me feel good. I feel satisfied. I feel even better about my story, and I think by mid-July, I will have made a lot of progress. I might even have a completed draft.

Now to my real job 😦

Back In The Saddle

I love Clichés. I do as of now, anyway. I didn’t; afterall, we’ve all been taught not to use them.

Today I read the last half of the last chapter of James Wood’s book How Fiction Works. This book is difficult to read, filter, and discuss. It’s as difficult as writing novels. The section was a discussion of realism, more or less, and while I’m not sure I learned all his lessons, it did hit home. He ends it with

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.

Can I get a wow?

Earlier he explained that the metaphor “colder than ice” was once considered original by the caveman that first used it, and too much trope becomes mundane. Yet we cannot throw such techniques or even cliché aside casually. Replacing one obsolete technique with another merely sets up the new technique for obsolenscence.

The overall message I got was prose has to be charged. Such an adjective is not restricted to poetry where it’s expected. Prose is not the poor cousin. It is just a little different. It’s slower, more mundane, and pedestrian [life-like], and I think any writer will agree nobody can read 500 pages of super-charged prose. There is a balance somewhere in the mix of charged words, accepted technique, details, narrative, exposition, dialogue, tension, scene, and theme written with words that capture the reader, creates a vision, and perhaps conveys a lesson or meaning. Words that may be plain but carry a deeper meaning.

I wrote about 400 words today, additions to my novel. I’m currently editing four scenes. I’ve been at them for two weeks trying to make them work. Today I edited three of them. I added realism: real feelings, real emotions, and real thoughts. I slowed it down some but added some real grain to it. I re-read them, and the tension now jumps out, themes are fulfilled even more subtly than I hoped, and my empathy for my character has deepened.

*Sorry, I’m not ready to share any of it.

So what have I learned? When you’re stuck, don’t rush into fixing it. Let it simmer, and focus on fundamentals. Review how to write a scene, the elements of writing [your style], the elements of your piece, and perhaps something new [and maybe related]. Reading Graham Greene also helped. We as writers should read daily, not only stories and poetry but also technique.

Time to watch the US Open!