finding what was never lost

Today (instead of working) I read a fantastic article about writing. I won't pontificate further, the author makes his case far more eloquently that I could.

In the space between my last novel and my current one, I went through a lot of words. Many worlds were built, peopled, imperiled, and thrown aside in fits of ennui. I was bored with it all, bored with endless world building and complicated histories, bored with the vital, core practices of writing.

This terrified me, and I spent most of the first part of this year ignoring it. After all, I was doing everything right. I got up every morning at 7 and diligently wrote until it was time to go work, where I would make maps and fill in my wiki until I went home and wrote some more. Such is the process, I thought, by which every novel is built. Only I was failing. My writing was horrid, painful, and, worst of all, dull. This sparked more terror. If I was bored with writing, I was bored with life. "You are failing our Great Ambition," my inner teenager screamed constantly, "How can you go on?!" And the secret was, I couldn't. Not as I was. And that was more frightening than the boredom.

Then, one morning a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the stupidly simple answer. I would just write something else. Something fun. And I wouldn't worry about if the writing was good or if I knew where I was going. I had a book series I'd been half planning for months, but hadn't really written anything down for, so I decided to try that. I didn't have a map, and only one character actually had a name when I opened the new file, but I knew how it began, and that was enough for one morning's worth of work.

I loved it, I was giggling and writing faster than ever before. I ended up being late to work because I had to finish off the scene. It took me six months to lose my joy of writing, but only 2 hours to find it again.

I'm 10,000 words into my new book, and it hasn't always been as easy or fun as that first day. Right now, for example, I've written my way into a corner that would not have been here if I'd planned this novel like I did my others. Free fall writing is not without its disadvantages. But I haven't been bored. Sometimes, I can feel the boredom creeping when I'm working my way through some particularly weighty square peg that needs to go in a round hole. When that happens, I just pick it up and move on. Perfection is a moot point at this stage, so is worrying and pace. All that matters is flying free with the story.

Writing is fun again. Sweeter words were never written.

number love

It's my big secret, I love numbers when they're about my novel!

Please note the new progress bar on the left. It tracks my progress towards my weekly wordcount goal. Hopefully, swift movement on the smaller bar will stimulate the growth of the larger, meaning more happy for everyone.

It's all about breaking this huge, overwhelming project into bite sized chunks. I can finish this novel by September if I can make my weekly goals. I can make my weekly goals if I write 6250 words every week. That's only 1200 words a day if I want to take weekends off, or 800 words a day if I write every day. And suddenly, the novel's not so scary.

Of course, writing words doesn't finish the novel, telling the story finishes the novel. But it's a good way to make me sit down and pound the keys every morning, and that's how you walk the path.

banging rocks together

I’m having a large dramasode with the end of my first chapter. I’ve been more and more unhappy with the way things are going. Or, rather, I know where the story is supposed to go, I just can’t get it there. Every time I sit down to write, I’m overwhelmed with angry apathy. I feel like I can’t do it, that I’d rather be doing anything else, that I’m failing my great dream. And always, there’s the clock. I’m not writing enough words per hour, I’m not writing enough words per day, OMG I’M NEVER GOING TO FINISH.

As I said, major deeeeerama.

But this morning, after a lot of flopping around in bed and being unhappy, angry driving while being unhappy, and desperate unhappy internet searching, I began to figure it out.

It’s no secret that I suck at grammar. I can’t explain why a sentence is the way it is, or why a phrase is incorrect, but I’ve read well enough and extensively enough that I can feel my way along 95% of the time. The trouble is, I’ve extended this to the actual writing part of writing. I don’t know why things happen, or why characters make decisions, I just know that it feels like they should. Every scene I write is like banging rocks together in the dark and hoping for a spark to see by, yet not knowing WHY the fire sparks the way it does.

Sticking to the outline and muddling through isn’t good enough anymore.

I have to get inside each scene. I have to know why it has to be written that way, and what I’m going to get out of it. I have to remember that my characters AREN’T ME, I can’t look at their situations and then have them do what I would do. Who’s the POV for the scene? Who’s head am I in? Why should I do it this way?

This means I have to know my world, my story, my plot, and my characters better than I know them now. I have to be able to ask a character WHY they acted as they did, and expect a response. I laid the ground work, created the world, but now I have to let the people who live in it tell me the story of what happens. I can’t worry about “will it sell” or “who will like it.” I have to write for the story, and edit for the reader.

It’s time for writing to be fun again.

day jobs vs. real jobs

I have a job that pays the bills pretty well doing work I generally enjoy. There’s good potential for promotion, and the company is growing. Since I have no plans to leave any time soon, I guess this could be called my career.

I don’t think of it like that. I work a day job. My REAL job is what I do on the lap top in the mornings, at night, and on the weekends. I work for money, I write because it’s what I want to do.

I could work a lot more hours than I do and make a lot more money. It’s a well documented fact that more money = more better, but I refuse to cut into my writing time.

This is a very stupid thing to do. I’ve been writing at least 5-10 hours per week for the better part of three years now. Now, I have yet to see one red cent from any creative writing I’ve done, so that’s well over 1000 hours of unpaid work. If my writing were an actual business, I’d be so far in the red by this point I’d never get out.

This is why you don’t get into writing for the money.

But this is the career I was born to, and even if I never manage not to suck at it, even if I never make enough money to support myself, I’ll keep doing it. There’s just no way I could stop.

still alive...

Getting over some major sickitude, but I also did a little bit of writing.

So, after trying my bold new plan of trying to write to plot points, I discovered a few things.

1. The plot points are always farther away than you think.
2. It's very hard to start and very easy to become distracted when you don't have a concrete daily goal.
3. Only writing 200-300 words in 2 hours is not the way to write a novel in any realistic ammount of time.

SO, I'm back to daily word counts. Will this cause bloat? Oh sure, but at least I'm getting something done.

Maybe what I REALLY need to do is become a better editor. I know I can write, if I can learn to edit, then maybe I can become a novelist for real this time.

blah

The problem: Been sick, been writing nothing. Already off schedule.

The solution: Stay late and get some writing done. Trust my voice and stop double guessing. Just tell the story, it's that simple.

God help us

In 9th grade, I was introduced to the concept that, within the world of the story, the write is all powerful and omnipotent. This is may be true, but it does not stop the characters from talking back, sulking, and sometimes digging their heels in and refusing to move until you agree to do it their way.

Of course, considering their god is easily distracted from weaving the fabric of creation by videogames and snarky blogs, it's probably good that SOMEONE around here is keeping things on track...

I hope someday someone writes a review like this about me

Link!

One quote that really got me was

It's rare to find an author who dares to put so much humanity in a fictional character. Fantasy authors in particular tend to follow a nasty trend of distancing themselves from their protagonists in order to focus on developing a world, or to avoid developing their characters via realistic (and thus, horrifying complex) emotions and relationships.

I always have this problem with distance. My characters are just players in the world I have. But with Nathan and the Periana, it HAS to be more human. This is all about bucking authority and the right way of doing things in order to save what you didn't know you loved until you lost it. Nathan has to be as proud as he is genius, and his love for Lira and the Periana has to be real and startling.

I have to get Nathan to talk to me before I can begin.

today was not my best day

I'm angry and tired and hungry and I haven't written anything of value. But, even so, I learned something interesting today.

While spacing out on my drive to work, I try to let my brain jump from story to story, filling in the gaps. It isn’t serious world building by any stretch, but it's where I get some of my best ideas - the ones that make me forget that it's 30 minutes to the office and I'm already 20 minutes late.

But today I thought to myself "what will you do if Novel 2 doesn't sell?" The answer came right on top of the question, "I'll write another one."

And if that one doesn't sell?

I'll write another one.

Why? I asked myself, why put so much of yourself into this? Why not give up and play some videogames, read great books, see more movies, clean your house, spend time with your family and friends? Writing makes you so angry sometimes, sometimes it makes you cry with frustration. Why the hell would you want to keep giving your time to something that may never pay off? Even worse, why the hell would you KEEP DOING IT, even after you've failed?

Because I can't not write. As soon as I ask "what will you do?" the answer is definite and instantaneous, "keep writing, keep trying something new."

I just keep thinking up great stories. In all the world, nothing gets me as excited as a great story. And seeing other people's great stories just adds fuel to the fire to get my own down somehow. But I can't draw, and I don't want to share the creation of my story with the multitudes required to make a movie. So I write, because it's all I can do to get the stories out.

And if I never get published I'll be devastated. I'll be crushed and depressed and defeated.

But I'll still keep writing.

The clever rat, once zapped, doesn't touch the electrified panel again.

I guess I am a very stupid rat.

Thus, by knowing my weaknesses, I overcome them

I slashed the surface tension quite well last night, but still only got a few hundred words. This wasn't because I was distracted, focus was good. I attribute the low numbers to my new writing style which focuses on story goals rather than word count goals, and on weekly achievement rather than daily.

On novel 1, I set my goal at 1500 words per day. At first it was hard, but eventually I was able to get 1500 reliably, then I started getting 2k, then 3k, etc. I was exultant, I was a REAL writer! My word count was off the charts!

And that was the problem.

Novel 1 weighed in at 206,000 words. Yeah, she was a porker. But I reassured myself with the promise that I would cut while I did my big edit, so that big count didn't REALLY matter. So I set to cutting, and got the sucker down to 180,000 words...

Yeah, this is when I learned that I SUCK at editing.

See, I'm an extreme case of "can't see the forest for the trees." I couldn't make the big cuts I needed to because I LIKED all the parts of the novel. I'd put so much WORK into them, I couldn't just abandon them. But, like a chronically obese beauty queen, the novel suffered from the extra weight, and I just couldn't get it into shape.

Looking back, I'm convinced this happened because of the goals I set down when I was writing. Now, there were other problems, don't get me wrong. But the most rejectable element of the novel was the flabby writing. This happened because I used a daily wordcount as my benchmark, with no upper ceiling. I'm a verbose person by nature, and I like to exceed expectations. So, when faced with a daily wordcount, it was only natural that I do my best to meet it everyday, even if the words I used to meet it didn't necessarily need to be there. I exceeded my daily goals but failed to meet my ultimate goal of writing a publishable manuscript.

Now, this would have been OK if I was a good editor. Lots of writers follow the “get it all down then chop out the crap” school of novel production. But I’m not a good editor, especially for my own work. It was lose-lose all around.

But, despite my other flaws, I’m too lazy to go repeating the same mistakes over and over. So this time, I’m setting new goals. Instead of daily wordcounts, I’m doing weekly story goals with fixed wordcounts – one chapter a week, 5000 words per chapter, 20 chapters for the book. This shifts the goal from so-many-words-per-day to “I have to get this much story into this small space, how do I do it?”

Of course, this method is starting slowly, it’s a lot harder than my other way of writing. But the results are already better. I’m focusing on tight, precise story telling – fitting the most story into the smallest space – for a taunt, exciting book. Thus, by setting the challenges to work against my flaws rather than accommodating them, I can focus on the real point of this whole adventure: writing a publishable novel. (Because, really, if I wanted to write just for myself, I’d write fanfic and be done.)