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.

Writing Checklists

Tags

checklist, editing, scene, sequel, Writing

Sometimes, or maybe often, we get caught up in our writing and lose track of all the aspects that make up good writing. Sometimes we run down these bunny trails or get stuck in a rat hole, and we don’t know how to get back on track. Personally I often find myself mesmerized by what I’ve written. I like the main message, but the delivery is just all over the place. There’s too much of some things, not enough of others, the writing is brutish, there’s no tension or all tension, I’m telling everything, and there is either almost zero detail or it’s bogged down in crap.

This morning I worked on a scene. I’d told the outcome. It was thin, uninteresting, and unbelievable. It bothered me, but I don’t think I wanted to admit it was wrong. It had been there in my story since November, had been edited many times, and the over all sentiment belonged. When I addressed it today, I felt the emptiness, the void. I revamped it. I re-wrote the empty parts.

I’m happy with my result, but we know that will likely change. But the story moved forward and became a little deeper. I straightened out the emotional imbalance that had bothered me, resolved it really. I think I feared resolution before; because, well, resolving anything at page 100 is not usually a good sign for a story. As I wrote it, though, I realized this wasn’t the final resolution. I wrote the main theme of the story in one word, and that word told me this resolution was only a prelude to the plot’s resolution. Make sense? Too bad. I’m writing for me today 😉

After I finished I decided to jot down all the questions I asked about this scene, all the decisions I made. I realize I need to make such decisions all the time. Would it hurt to draft a checklist? Would it hurt to formally ask such questions of all my writing?

Editing yes, but writing? I haven’t sold myself on that point. I’m not writing this blog to a checklist.

I have used checklists before. I often refer to a copy of C.J.Cherryh’s Writerisms and Other Sins: A Writer’s Shortcut to Stronger Writing. This document has helped many a writer with their work. I’ll sometimes go through each item one by one and search my document for items: “was,” “ing,” and “ly for example.

Today’s new checklist, the questions I asked about my writing, look like this.

Are you following the scene or sequel outlines; do they satisfy all requirements of a good scene?
Does the writing flow; is it consistent?
Are you showing or telling?
Is there appropriate tension?
Are you saying too much or not enough?
Would details hurt or help?
Do I need more or fewer events?

I suggest you first write your story creatively. We need to let our juices flow freely. Such lists can hinder creativity. But when it comes down to polishing your work, that creative gem you wrote needs some serious attention to make it really shine.

Try a check list.

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.