Novel Status – July 2013

Tags

hero's journey, joseph campbell, monomyth, novel, novel writing

Here’s the situation. My current novel is a completed rough draft. I penned it during NaNoWrimo in November 2012, totally off the cuff. It started from a seemingly innocent personal experience. I took that experience, replaced me and the other person involved with blank characters. I kept the location and its character template. I then asked some questions:

–          What sort of person would react like I did?
–          Is there an alternative reason for this situation that the reason I was given might mask it?
–          Given the disparity between the people-template and my new main character, what circumstances would keep him engaged?

My answers came like explosions, wham, wham, wham. I developed a story and presented it to my writing group.

“Well, that seem sort of goofy.”
“Hmmm, yeah, I suppose it is.”

Question number three, the engagement glue, didn’t work. I came up with a new idea and presented it the next week, the Wednesday before November, crunch time.

“Ah, no, that doesn’t work either.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, we’re sure.”
“Damn.”

I realized I also needed an initial reason for him to be there. My protagonist just didn’t belong in the location, and I doubted my whole idea. Looking back, I now realize this is the ideal situation, and the tension I felt translated into tension I wrote. As I began writing, I quickly learned about my character. I quickly discovered his major character flaw that opened several doors. This flaw was not only the engagement glue but also formed the basis of his transformation, of the story. Literary gold! Writing flowed like motor oil out of my 2002 Accord’s leaky oil pan.

My initial idea still held, the masked situation, but I had no conclusion. I worked on the story, his flaw, and realized the symbolism matched perfectly the symbolism of the masked situation. Really? Yes. When I later I added a snippet to scene three, it all came home. Wham!

So I’ve been working on this thing since November. I have about fifty scenes and eighty thousand words. But it feels wrong. It feels like my lawn (an acre plot with gardens, trees, and hills) after my son mows it – patchy, inconsistent, with mangled shrubs and gardens. A big mess. I have been happy with my scene editing. I make three passes on them. After a few days of attention and revisiting, my writing fleshes out. When I read it, I think wow, did I write this? Let’s not kid ourselves though; my first view versions are pretty amateur. My initial writes are pretty meager . My son’s blog puts them to shame. My son’s writing puts most of ours to shame. Too bad he can’t mow like he writes. *Sorry, I’ve lost track of it. I don’t like following my kids online.

I’ve been running into dead ends, not within my scenes but tying my story together. So I’ve been spending time reading up on story. I read stuff, read through my own story board, try to match, get a big headache, and go play a computer game.  I did realize I had gaps. I couldn’t articulate them, but I felt them. I had timeline, plot-point, and motivation inconsistencies. This whole narrative arc thing has been an abstract mess. I found myself in bed at night playing through scenes, standing in the shower trying to link the falling drops of water to plot lines, and reading novels and thinking “this person got it, why can’t I?”

During these activities I’ve done other things. I taught a couple of courses for seven weeks as a substitute instructor at the local community college. Out of that I got a Microsoft DreamSpark subscription. Cool. I have installed ultimate versions of Video Studio and SQL Server. Yes, I can code. I’ve been trying c# Winforms and have built some business classes and a database class. I can’t explain it here, but I know loose coupling and interfacing. These are important elements of software architecture, and they relate very much to novel arc or story architecture. I am finding my ability to sort out my story arc improving. Then a few days ago I watched a cool video on the Hero’s Journey.  Not only did it help clarify Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, but I learned that screenwriters purposely write the key scenes first then fill in the blanks. It’s very much how I’ve been coding – code the key elements first [with tight coupling] then fill in the interfacing later [abstract, loose coupling]. Wham!

I tried it with my already written scenes, and it didn’t work. What? I must really have a mess here. I decided to approach the problem from a linear perspective. I sat down and went through each step of the hero’s journey and wrote how I accomplished each. I also wrote the gaps, either the missing scenes or linkages to tie the journey (story) together. It worked. Wham! I discovered that my story pretty much covers the whole hero’s journey arc with some exceptions.  I summarized and jotted down four scenes I need to write and five elements I need to tie down. I also have a timeline issue I need to unravel, and that may have to wait until a more macro-level edit.

So that’s where I am. I have a clear plan of action:

–          four new scenes
–          five tie-downs
–          a complete read-through and copy-edit with some attention to time-line
–          reassess

I want to complete these four objectives by August 24^th. That’s beach party weekend, and I’d love to bring a readable manuscript to share with a couple of people. I won’t likely share it there, not during party time. It is a time to celebrate long friendships, and I want to be fully engaged, not struggling with any balls and chains. It will be a mind-freeing weekend, so I better get it done by then. I may not have much of a mind left afterwards.

The Writing Zone

Like most people who claim to be writers, I struggle finding the focus I need to write well with, at least my fiction. Every day I write something in social media about diabetes and nutrition. Very often I reply to controversial blogs and news stories with my insight. I do not seem to have a problem with sitting down and writing five hundred words telling an author of a weight loss article how wrong they are and why. Yet I have this great novel that currently sucks, and most days I struggle with sitting down and trying to make it work. I struggle with finding my writing zone in my creative writing pursuits.

Sound familiar?

We claim it’s distractions, you know, computer games, Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, or whatever else draws your attention. I think it is more than that. I think it is more our inability to tune into that writing passion when we need to, to create our writing zone on demand. Press the button, find your story and character, and then do it for two hours. You know when you’ve found it. Your coffee gets cold.

I run an informal writing group once a week at the library. It’s completely unofficial. Somehow the library thinks it’s their program, though, and has directed a couple of people our way. Fine. The last thing I want is administrative structure around creativity. Can there be anything more stifling?

We had a discussion last week. We often discuss our writing issues. I claimed I do not write well at these things. I do not get into my writing zone and the results are typically frivolous, shallow, and uninspired. Others disagreed, but their opinions don’t count when it comes to me.</facetiousness> I went on to say that I need to become emotionally attached to my writing. I need to become my character, feel like I am him, feel like I am where he is and doing what he is doing. I need to be able to see the location, touch it, smell it, hear it. Only then can I truly write well.

Such claims should be taken with a grain of salt. There are no writing silver bullets.

So these last couple of months have been stressful on my writing. I took a term teaching position at our local community college. I am not sure what the equivalent American school might be, a junior college maybe. The instructor took ill suddenly, and they had no replacement. The stint was two weeks but they remained out, and it turned into a seven week gig. I taught two complete courses — PL/SQL with Oracle and Project Management. Find people who can teach both of these. I dare you! Anyway, I’d never taught before, so it was rather stressful. Not a lot of creative writing got done in my world. Not a lot of any writing got done. Now I’m sitting at my desk, unemployed, trying to make this best selling novel work so I don’t ever have to worry about money. It’s a story that now seems very distant, and I feel very removed.

Two things have brought me back into the fold — my fountain pen and my monthly writing group. My pen is my cue to write. Recent Sunday mornings I’ve sat in coffee shops — a new Second Cup! — and written about my story. My previous theme blog post came from one of them. I’m writing about macro-story level issues. My story follows the hero’s journey, like any good story should *ha*, and I’ve been mapping it out, re-learning it. Very stressful. I now have major changes facing me. My other impetus is my monthly writing group. I’ve been reading a scene to them once a month, sometimes a short story gets in the way, or poetry, but right now I’m reading scenes from my future bestselling novel. This is pressure. This is a deadline. I need a good scene written for it, or I will look like a moron. Right? We meet for breakfast in two hours from now.

So last night I made the decision to find my writing zone. I first took a nap. It is crazy hot here, 34 c or low 90’s f. Hot you ask? When it’s extremely humid, you are not used to it — we saw a day of 57 f last week — and you don’t have AC, then yes, it’s bloody hot. It’s not often John sleeps completely exposed. Anyway, expunge that image and picture John sitting in his office, mind empty after a power nap, cooking in the heat, drinking an iced coconut rum and pineapple juice, and forcing himself into his character and scene. He becomes Dan. He sees and smells Jen. He feels the sexual tension. He feels Dan’s fears about revealing to her that he is completely illiterate. He feels the hope he feels that this little coffee shop he was in the previous day might open a new world to him. He cannot articulate these feelings; they are too subtle for him; but John can feel them. He was there the day before and he watched Jen teach an older man the word dirt. Can she teach him anything? Is there any hope for Dan?

Trust me when I say I was in the zone …