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.

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.

Modern Grande Clichés: Sex, Profanity, and Writing About Writing Novels

Tags

cliche, drugs, novel writing, profanity, rock and roll, sex, swearing

Clichés are slippery little buggers. They creep into our writing even when we sleep with one eye open and a gun under our pillow. Nasty critters indeed. I’d like to first look at a couple of definitions, then I’d like to examine three topics I consider cliché in modern novels: sex, profanity, and writing about writing novels.

From Dictionary.com

cli·ché

/kliˈʃeɪ, klɪ-/ Show Spelled[klee-shey, kli-] Show IPA

noun

1. a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse, as sadder but wiser, or strong as an ox.

2. (in art, literature, drama, etc.) a trite or hackneyed plot, character development, use of color, musical expression, etc.

3. anything that has become trite or commonplace through overuse.

4. British Printing .

a. a stereotype or electrotype plate.

b. a reproduction made in a like manner.

From Vocabulary.com

cliche

If you’ve heard an expression a million times, chances are it’s a cliche.

Cliche, also spelled cliché, is a 19th century borrowed word from the French which refers to a saying or expression that has been so overused that it has become boring and unoriginal. Think about the expressions “easy as pie,” or “don’t play with fire,” or “beauty is skin deep.” These are all cliches. A plot or action sequence in a film or novel can also be called a cliche if it has become dull and predictable through overuse.

From John

I’m not going to reference any books or authors directly. Some of my favorite books are guilty of my proposed sins, and I don’t want to turn people away.

How many times have we read a book that we’ve really gotten into, the tension has built, we’re wondering what’s going to happen next, then suddenly the platonic male-female partners end up in bed? Too often this is how the subtext plays out.

“Oh my goodness Jenny, how are we going to solve this case?”
“I really don’t know. It’s getting very dangerous; we could be killed at the next plot twist.”
“Do you want a blowjob?”
“Okay.”

The sex is gratuitous, casual, unemotional, and in no way ties into the tension of the story. This stuff doesn’t happen in real life. In real life there is typically a lot of electric activity going on; there’s internal thoughts of I want to, does he or she want to, will we, can we, and lots of social dancing around the issue, drunken singles bars excepted – a cliché. People simply don’t walk down the street and decide to have sex without social foreplay. Authors use the sex scene as filler. It seems to be an expected scene in every mass marketed book today. To me it’s lazy writing, lazy editing, and greedy publishing: it’s cliché.

Profanity also falls into this category of clichéd writing. It’s more subtle than gratuitous sex, but it’s there. We might have our hero who’s out solving a case, meets his contact for dinner and clues, and wham, out of nowhere, we get slammed with the F-word and more. No warnings, no hints. We thought he was a good guy, and now he talks like a street thug. And before we get too wound up, a wand waves, and he’s back to Mr. Clean mode again. It didn’t really create tension, it merely presented tense language. It was a trite magic show. To me it’s lazy writing, lazy editing, and greedy publishing: it’s cliché.

Writing about people writing about novels is a subtle cliché that gets me. I can rattle off some big name authors who have done it. I have done it. It’s easy to understand why too: writing novels is hard. My Jesus it’s hard, she said. Nobody who’s not writing a novel cares about characters who write novels. Only people like me who struggle through the process have any inclination of the difficulty, and it bugs the hell out of me that so many novelists can’t figure out nobody out there in novel reading land really cares how hard it is to write one. A good writer will take those passages and find some other vocation or hobby to write about such as chess, auto mechanics, or BBQ competitions. Get off your butts and research something new for fuck’s sake. To me it’s lazy writing, lazy editing, and greedy publishing: it’s cliché.

Should these three topics be excluded from our novels? Hardly. What we need to do is make them fit. We need to incorporate them with effective narrative technique. We need to build tension around them; foreshadow them; create the expectation and desire within the reader. Or we need to make sure it builds on our readers’ empathy and understanding of character logically and consistently. If we have a novel in an urban setting, make everybody swear profusely. Make it part of the landscape.

In my current story I’m using the expectation of sex as a means to build the relationship. So far the deed hasn’t happened, but it may. If I follow Alfred Hitchcock’s advice, it probably won’t. I also use profanity to illustrate the character’s tension. I built the expectation of a tea totaller, and when she does let loose, it’s timed with frustration and great tension. Hopefully the reader knows something major happened because the value barrier was torn down. And writing about writing novels is very hard for me to write, but I did it. I have a bucket list scene, and I threw it in as one of the minor character’s wishes. I can’t stand it though, so I plan on changing it.

I’ll end with questions. Does your sex, swearing, and novel writing writing work? Do they belong in your story? Is there appropriate buildup and tension? Do they add dimension to your character? Or are they simply lazy cliché?