Novel Finished!

Tags

Canada 150, editing, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

As if novels are ever finished.

I have finished draft number 6 of novel 2011. A review: I start a novel every year during NaNoWriMo and have won that contest six years in a row. I spend the rest of the year re-writing these novels or working on other projects. Here’s a list of my novel WIPs:

Year – My Ranking of Potential (1 to 5) – Draft – Words – Status – Plan

2010 – 4 Stars – Draft 3, a complete story – 80,000 – not touched since 2012. Needs a setting overhaul and a major rewrite. – Indefinite revisit.

2011 – 5 Stars! – Draft #6 – 129,000 words – Ready for pitching – About to undertake a major submission agenda.

2012 – 4 Stars – Draft #4 – 130,000 words – Needs a story trim; much too much happening; needs a writing overhaul, a killing of bad habits. – Indefinite revisit.

2013 – 2 Stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – Need to find the tension. I have characters and ending but the plot falls down in the mud. – Indefinite revisit.

2014 – 4 stars – Draft #1 – 51,000 words – A Sequel to 2012; I really like this story and it could become 5 star – Indefinite revisit.

2015 – 1 Star – Draft #1 – 50,000 words – an attempt at writing in an additive style; I cannot function in this style, not solely – XXX

Undecided Upon

2016 – 5 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A story with social implications I am not sure I am qualified to pull off, but if I do …
2016 – 4 Star! – Concept – 0 words – A less defined story with social implications I feel more comfortable attacking, but the story itself is mostly undefined.

I’ve had to overcome some major writing issues since I undertook this journey, and I don’t claim to be finished. My writing has been a rebellious child.

I tend to write weak conversational sentences which overuse stage-management verbs: she looked, she saw, she felt, etc.. I also tend to generalize. I know the story, so I don’t need to write all the details. I don’t need them. And putting myself in my readers’ shoes has been a struggle. Even when I try hard, I tend to slip into the internal know-it-all mode. Yet whenever I read others’ writings, their generalizations jump out at me. It is a pattern I have yet to resolve.

I think I have figured out the tension and drama of sentences, paragraphs, sections, scenes, chapters, and stories. I have a series of blogs in progress where I elucidate my understanding of pattern in prose: the general narrative arc we so easily apply to story also applies at each sub-level. My daily reading and analysis of narrative prose has been a tremendous help as has my attacking of several writing craft books.

I think it is all coming together, finally, but of course it seems held together by fine threads.

This 2012 novel feels really good. At least it does to me. I have concerns how others will take it, and I have been mindful of the differences between my own thinking and the common person’s. I am an INFP who lives in his diffuse-thinking half of his mind and who easily visits all angles of an argument but has difficulty taking sides. He hates run-on sentences but sometimes uses them to demonstrate how he thinks. This novel has political implications, and I fear staunch wingers, left or right, may view this story as wishy-washy. Yet our world is full of wishy-washy people, and I might argue these people should run the world.

2012 is also uber-Canadian. You can’t get more Canadian than my story, and I mean that in every conceivable sense. I cant see the rest of the world reading it (especially Americans) and saying, “Wha?” Yet they will never find a better guide of our country 😉

2017 is Canada’s 150th birthday. It’s going to be a hell of a party. My guts say this story needs to be out there for much of next year, and there’s only one sure way I know of doing that, and that’s not really the route I want to take. I’d rather a major publisher take it on and pump it out in six months rather than the twenty four they a lot new authors.

If they’d only read it!

Anyway, wish me luck on this journey.

 

 

 

 

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Novel Progress [2012]

Tags

literary agent, nanowrimo, novel, publishing

I’ve been busy this summer, writing-wise. Otherwise it has been pretty slow and laid back. I am unemployed and off of EI, so we are living off my wife’s salary only. We have also moved into an apartment in the city, and our daughter, who began her first full-time job in May, and her boyfriend are renting our house from us. The housing market sucks around here, and we have some foundation work to complete before we are ready to sell. Call it an experiment. So far, all tests are positive.

I decided to use this downtime to focus on a novel. Every day that passes I feel more comfortable with my abilities as a writer, more confident in my abilities to write a readable novel. Hell, let’s cut to the chase. I think I can write a best selling novel, and I think I have two in my portfolio, maybe even four.

Okay, pop the balloon head.

Seriously, I do think I am approaching take-off, that point where one of my novels can be pitched to an agent. And I’ll get this off my plate right now: I have zero interest in self publishing. None! I believe a novel placed in front of readers needs a large amount of care. Novels not only need a great amount of effort by the author, but also a great deal of editing, story and copy. As an avid reader, I want a quality book in my hands. I do not read trash. At least not often. And when I do, I give the book the review it deserves. I think my worst rating this year is two stars, but blame that on my prejudice against werewolves.

So when my school term ended in late June — I’ve been teaching part time at our community college — I began to stick my head back into my 2012 NaNoWriMo effort. I cannot accurately describe all the work I have done on this story, but I know it is a lot. 50,000 plus words were originally written in November 2012, and in the time since, it has grown to 115,000 words, give or take, as of July 1, 2014. *If you are an agent and are turned off by seeing NaNoWriMo, please do not be. I treat Novembers seriously. It is a convenient time to write, and the group support very helpful. We — me and a few other keeners who hope to get, err, plan to get published — are actively planning our 2014 novels now. Brainstorming mostly. I have almost nothing concrete in my notebook, and frankly, I didn’t in 2014 either. But that’s not my point. The point is I write seriously, and NaNoWriMo for me is a serious project kick-off. How many times have I heard authors say “I wrote this story quickly, in a couple of months?” And the audience says “ooh.” It’s impressive to write 50,000 words in a month if you are a published author but not if you are a hack writer? *end of rant*

I began by writing about my story. It is a complex tale with many subplots and themes interacting. I created a page for each and cross-linked them all. Funky graphs. Various colors of fountain pen ink. Stabbing, paring, dodging, and reconciling. Two weeks later I was still happy with my story but with notes. Gaps and danglings. Dead ends and stupid wtfs. No darlings though. I’m that good 😉

I am now deep into editing. I just finished off 90,369 words of 120,000. Yes, I have added 5k since July 1. And I am learning a lot about my writing. I think too much and direct the stage too much — he feels, he watches, he thinks, he looks. He edits with a heavy pen and a light heart.

I have a big stickler of an issue though. I introduce a main character late in the story and another after her. It pains me to leave them so late, but it kills the story to bring them in earlier. I think. I did manage to bring him, the second character, in much earlier, and I am real happy with the scene and placement. But I cannot bring either in sooner. Let me describe it another way that might make sense. I have two stories. I have the internal transformation — let’s call it becoming a wasp from an egg — and I have an external story, an in your face, dramatic story — the wasp saves the nest. These two characters belong more in the second story, and if look at the second, external story on its own, they are introduced early. But if you look at the lead up, the egg-to-wasp story, they play more minor roles, so they come in late. They cannot show up until the threats to the nest appear, really. I think. Anyway, that’s where it stands, at 90.4k of 120k words and less than three weeks left to my self-imposed deadline.

Then it’s beta reader time. They are lining up to read it!

I only wish the agents and publishers were lining up.

*** If you are local, I think I am going to read a short scene at Bernie’s open mic night in September at the Arts Centre. It’s a head twister 😉 ***

NaNoWriMo 2012 Mid-Month

Tags

dragon, nanowrimo, novel writing, scene

Day 12 isn’t quite over, and I’ve written over 23,000 words. It’s not hard for me to write this much. I can spit out large volumes of crap pretty fast.  The thing is, I have a strong vision of where this story is going. I have three major events in my head that conclude it. I’m not sure the order, exactly, but I can picture them. That’s important. Everything has to support my ending, and so far it does.

Oh, I am rambling here. It will not become clearer, so if that bothers you, go read someone’s blog about writing short stories or limericks. Novels are long, complicated, beasts without form. They are not easy to set your sights on and take down with a  single bullet. It’s like trying to beat a fog with a tennis racket.

I like to think my story contains literary elements and that it’s character based. But I’m also male, so I tend to write stronger plots than the ladies. Take my use of strong for what it is: male plots tend to be more concrete and linear. They contain more stuff that happens rather than stuff our characters make happen. I can draw the plot, the narrative graph, with a pencil. Not always, but often women write stories based on character actions and choices.  I write this because I think my novel is sterotypically male but also contains strong female elements. I’m now trying to save my butt from criticism.

Moving on.

I’m following a couple of broad guidelines as I write:  this is a word painting and an iterative project.

I recently read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. This is a right-brained read, so be careful. It’s not the type of plot I just woefully described. It is messy and sticky, and it is not easy to discern, even at the end. It is largely a character painting set over a Hamlet template. Yes there’s the Hamlet tragedy plot, but the character painting of Edgar Sawtelle is deep and grabbing. It is not easy to let go of him in the end, and many reviewers cannot handle this conflict.

I don’t build such structural conflict in my story. I want my character painting to lead to a transformation. I wanted to move from the tragedy to the victory, through a bit of deep sacrifice, of course. It can’t all be fun and games or a bed of roses. If a story doesn’t include pain and suffereing on the part of the reader, then it’s not much of a story. Yeah, I’m sure that’s always true. I still have no idea what The Sun Also Rises is about.

But this idea of a story as a painting has intrigued me. The plan of course is to make a series of seemingly unconnected brush strokes, and slowly show the shape of your character and story. I’ve freely zoomed into flashbacks and into the mind of my protagonist. At the risk of losing the reader through head-hopping, I jump around quite a bit. I try to mitigate the concern my making such things vivid and important and keeping the same POV. I try not to fly to Bermuda for trivial reasons.

I write following the ideas and structures laid out in the article Writing The Perfect Scene. It works for me; though I’m trying a few things differently. Again, in Edgar Sawtelle, I noticed that the author didn’t follow a simple alternation of scene and sequel. It felt more like many little scenes culminating in big sequels. This makes sense to me: build up tension in small bits by showing several points of conflict, then let it stew, let all of these partial scenes fail in one big failure and let the character react in one big sequel. I’m calling this the umbrella pattern. Of course I haven’t followed it completely. My writing has been more linear with scenes followed by sequels. So far I’ve had strong actions where important stuff happens. It’s grabbed me and pulled me along. But now I’m starting the middle phase. A middlegame in chess can be slow and tedious as players battle slowly for position. I’m just now employing my embrella pattern more fully. I think I am successfully building both tension and empathy, and that’s the bottom line.

I can’t sit down and write a complete scene of say 1500 to 2500 words. Maybe they could even be longer. I like to get my ideas down quickly. I’ll write my entire scene covering objective, conflict, and failure, and I’ll think it done. I’ll scroll from top to bottom and discover I have only written a page or two. 500 words is not enough for a scene or sequel, especially not important ones. I’ve discovered I focus on action, motivation, and reaction when I write. It’s powerful but shallow, poignant but not sensory. I set it down, make some coffee or watch politics on TV or read, then I come back. My sole purpose of this revisit it to fill in the gaps. “Dan drove to the west side of the city” became three pages of details covering feelings, choices, descriptions, details, etc. My intial three pages that felt good but at the same time gnawed at me turned into seven. Yeah. But was I finsihed? No. I revisited again and added another page. I needed appropriate transitions and some of the motivations and reactions were lost, out of synch. It needed more words. Those 1000 initial words turned into 2500, and the sequel that felt alright, felt like it had potential, now felt fleshed out more completely. I know it still needs work, probably lots, but it feels complete enough for draft #1.

I now visit each scene and sequel three times on three different sessions. My morning’s 400 words turned into 1450 tonight. I think I might add a thousand or more tomorrow or later tonight after blogging.

I don’t think I can write any other way. I don’t seem able to write plot, character, setting, conflict, description, theme, or whatever aspect I want in one sitting. My mind needs to focus on one aspect at a time: write the plot and conflict, then add description, then character reactions, then add some thematic attributes I missed, then …  the point of marginal return hits and I move to the next scene. During NaNoWriMo or any intial dump of ideas, at some point it requires too much effort per word. You need to move on. There will be multiple rounds of edit to make it tidy.

I guess what I’m saying my interative sessions are different from editing. While I do edit during these sessions, I’m adding a lot of prose. The point my editing becomes greater than prose-addition is the point of needing to move on. Or a count of three, whichever comes first.

One final point. My narrator is a dragon. This is not a fantasy novel, more a device a I came up with to keep my POV straight. I am writing third person limited, but I want to try to extend the voice to omniscient in certain, rare intances. My story invlolves a dragon tattoo, and the idea that my narrator, typically an it, could be a dragon, came to me out of nowhere. I’ve learned to trust these flashes of idea. The cool factor kicked in a bit, but I intially wanted to try it for the voice as well. As I write, pretend I’m a dragon and it will come out different. Pfft. Anyway, here’s a little snippet where I zoom up to the clouds and write as my Dragon. I even throw in a little reference. In 58 pages I have four paragraphs in this voice. I couldn’t read let alone write an entire novel like this. But this was fun word padding. 🙂

If you asked Dan before that moment if he had willpower, he probably would have laughed at you. If you asked him at that moment whether he had any willpower, if he had a strong mind, you’d likely receive an empty stare, a blank, uncomprehending face, an unbearable fog. If you asked him after he stopped in front of the door, after he looked at that sign full of words with the realization that a strong mind is one that both absorbs and disseminates ideas, one that comprehends love and hate, courage and fear, if you asked him after those women in the high heels and trench coats passed him, if you had asked him after those tears came to his eyes, you might have lost him forever.

What saved him from himself we’ll never know. Maybe he saw a vision of Jill, maybe he heard Jen’s encouraging voice, or maybe a mythical spirit visited him at that moment. Maybe he found a god. Or maybe he even discovered dragons were real. Whatever it was, whatever light bulb went on, whatever revelation he saw, it made him smile.

NaNoWriMo 2012 #1

Tags

change, editing, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

If you’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo, try it at least once. Scratch that item of writing a novel off your life’s bucket list. 2012 is my third attempt. I won my previous tries in 2010 and 2011, and I plan on winning this attempt as well. How do you win? Simple, write 50,000 words of a NEW novel during November. Nobody reads it. Nobody really cares if you really succeeded or not. Nobody cares if it’s any good. It’s all about you writing that story.

Some will argue against this venture, and I suppose they have good points. Who really needs another trashy novel cluttering the shelves? Lord knows we have enough of them already. But NaNo is not about creating masterpieces — tell that to Sara Gruen — it’s about putting words on a page. Everybody who writes knows the benefits of writing. The main purpose of Nano is to get people to write. During November some five billion words might be written that might otherwise not have been. How many good words are in that mess? If ninety percent of a good writer’s are bad, then we can cut this down to at most five hundred million good words. The majority of NaNoers are crappy writers — the majority of writers are crappy. The one thing all writers do well is produce crap. Let’s say we’re so crappy that only one in a thousand of our passages are actually worthy. Five billion divided by a thousand is still five million. NaNoWriMo therefore produces at least five million quality passages every November. Isn’t that worthy?

Don’t you want to make your own contribution? So what if few of these words will ever be read? The writers were affected. Possibly ninety percent of NaNoers are affected by their writing. Possibly as many as a quarter of a million writers are so affected by their own words that they make change in their own lives. Okay, that’s a bit ambitious, but say ten percent are, or maybe one percent are. Say twenty-five hundred writers are so affected that they make a significant change in their lives. Isn’t that worthy? Isn’t that worth the effort of writing two or three hours a day for a month? Isn’t that worth the risk of failure?

NaNo is my time to start a new novel, and I’m deep into my preparations. I turned 2010 into an 80k uncompleted story followed by turning 2011 into a completed 120k story which I’m now seeking feedback on. Both are active projects, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start another. I need to write creatively, and spending 100% of my free time editing and revising doesn’t come close to meeting my creative needs. By the time November rolls around, I have a deep itch to write, something short stories, poetry, blogs, and forum comments can’t come close to scratching. I’ve read several books on writing, several novels, attended many writing and reading club meetings. My muse is well fed and ready to fly. I think I’ve turned NaNo into my annual jump off the literary cliff. I also tend to be competitive, so I enjoy the pressure. Yes, a quickly drafted story can turn into a mess, and my next blog will attempt to cover how I’m approaching this year’s story. Stay tuned.

What are you waiting for? Sign up today.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

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.