Editing has been on my mind lately - specifically, ways people edit and what information is useful to them. The little”learning” project I mentioned last week is software to help developmental editing, you see, and I’m a firm believer that any tool designed for artists should never constrain how the artist has to work in order to be useful.

One thing I’ve come across is a great idea for people who aren’t sure which of their plot elements have to be there. It can also work equally well if you haven’t written the book yet, and are trying to plan it out.

Start at the end - what ending do you want to see? What do you want to leave your reader with? What is the emotional finish note (and why. If we’re feeling triumphant, what are we feeling triumphant about?). Is this moment the actual climax, or a few moments after, or many moments after? What just happened?

Now, work backwards to the scene just before. What setup do you need for this payoff? What has to happen here? Where should the emotion be, and the tension?

Go to the scene before that, and ask again - work your way backwards until you reach the start of the story.

Reversing the cause and effect order (that is, taking the effect and then creating the cause) can make it much easier to work out what the bones are of the story - what has to happen, and what’s just in there because you liked it. 

There’s no reason that you have to go scene by scene, either - if you have a big sheet of paper, then just start at the end with one arc (for example, put the solving of the murder at the end or the bottom of the page) and then write the necessary elements (eg the clues) on the page in roughly where you think they’ll fall in the book. Repeat for the character arsc, the subplot, etc. Then go back and see if any of the elements on the page can be grouped into the same scene. This can work well if you know what has to happen, but you're not sure about when.

I was all geared up to do Nano this year - of sorts. I was going to write a novel, but it probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 words. I didn’t know how many words it was going to be, and I wasn’t going to track it. Because that number, when you come down to it, is a nonsense way of judging whether you’re “done” yet.

I read this post by Jason Black on Plot to Punctuation who gave a great argument against using word count as a daily goal. The little number at the bottom of the screen (or wherever) takes far more of your focus than the words you’re churning out to increase it, and tempts you to stop when you’re on a roll, just because you’ve reached today’s number, or keep pushing when all you’re doing is padding or waffling because you still have another 200 words to go.

I find when I give myself wordcount goals, that rapidly becomes the case. And because my first drafts of anything tend to be absolute-bare-bones, super-condensed story, I fight the urge to pad out my story when the wordcount’s a little low despite my being halfway through already.

When you consider that, especially for self-publishing, story-length really doesn’t even matter anymore, it seems fairly idiotic for me to focus so much on wordcount when it hinders me in so many ways. 

Black has a great solution that I really wish I’d thought of earlier. He’s ignoring wordcount, and focussing instead on scenes.

It makes so much sense. Instead of having some fairly arbitrary counter distracting you, you judge your progress by how much of the story you’ve completed. You know instinctively how far through the scene you are. Scenes invite you to finish them, it’s a much more natural, unobtrusive goal. You’re not tracking a number while you write, you’re just writing this scene.

Scenes in my novels range from 2000 to 5000 words. I can write a scene - or most of one, if it’s a long one - in a day’s writing, before and after work. And serendipitously enough, my novel broke down into exactly thirty scenes. So my great plan was: one scene a day (accepting that they’d be bare-bones scenes. I go back on a second pass and fill in the description and detail and everything else before I consider the draft ‘finished’).

I was due back from Paris the morning of the 1st (oh, yeah, I went to Paris. Again. Did I mention that? Pics in later posts. Luxembourg is beautiful.). That gave me, somewhat optimistically, a full day to write a scene. Allowing for jetlag, I still had several full free days before I had to go back to work. If I missed the first day, I could make up for it later.

I didn’t account for Qantas. I didn’t account for a three-hour delay on the euro-star. I didn’t account for jetlag to be coupled with illness, sunburn and my fridge breaking down, so that my brain was too scattered to even think about story until possibly last night. Well, Friday night. Because I write these in advance. Sorry.

So, a week late, I could still start and make the ‘spirit’ of Nano. I looked at my story-plot, all neat and organised in Scrivener. Then I realised that, while I’d plotted out my story, I’d skimped on the worldbuilding. Again.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that spending time ‘worldbuilding’ outside of actually writing the novel or just daydreaming was a form of procrastination. Actually writing down the story bible was procrastination, and should be avoided.

Now, this is nonsense - I’ve even written about how important your story bible is, especially for series. But there was a little opinion in my head telling me I should just be writing the novel, not wasting time faffing about the edges making decisions on what plant to include near the desert. I’m a very impatient person, and I wanted the book done now now now. I wanted to be selling it already, and moving onto the next ones. I have way too many ideas, and not enough brains to channel them.

But there are no shortcuts, here. So - no Nano for me this year, not even to try out my snazzy new notion (though I will be trying it, once my planning’s done. Just not in Nano.). But for anyone else who tends to write their first drafts in ‘story shorthand’ - try aiming for scenes instead of numbers, and see how well those goals work for you.

 

 

Music often makes stories in my head. Pop music less so; the lyrics are too distracting, and the melody often too repetitive and (dare we say it) not particularly evocative. Which isn't to say I don't like pop, just that I rarely find it inspirational.

Instrumental works, however often inspire a world of stories in my head based on whatever I happened to be thinking about before they came on. I'm particularly partial to the works of Vangelis, Enigma, Jean Michel Jarre and the instrumental works of the Alan Parsons Project for these purposes. Not all that surprising, I guess: those were the artist my father used to blast through the house from his massive stereo system when I was growing up. I have to be careful what I listen to at my techwriting job, lest I get lost imagining some story with the music instead of getting my work done.

I find this can be useful when faced with a scene that I'm either finding difficult, or not really in the mood for -  writing a frantic escape scene when I'm absolutely knackered, or aloving reunion scene when I'm feeling curmudgeonly. They're also great defence against distractions - external or internal - that want to tear me from my precious writing time. Just put the music on, set my fingers on the keyboard, and forget about the world outside my little bubble.

 I'm in the process of setting up "writing mood playlists" for different types of scenes, filtering through the Gigs of music to find the songs that inspire this or that particular emotion. If you haven't tried writing to a soundtrack, I suggest you give it a go - though it takes some prep work to get it right. Make sure the songs you choose are ones that won't distract you from the writing or push you towards an emotion that doesn't work in the scene. Make sure the music goes for longer than you're planning to write - the sudden silence is very disconcerting if you run out of music partway.

 

No writing games this week - too frantic preparing for Paris. But I do have two great posts for you (okay, one's a podcast, but it's still a "post".)

One - on your author-voice(s) and your character's voice(s): what they are, how to find it (or cheat at it, if you're struggling), how to know you've got one, and how to protect it once you have one.

Two - a podcast on "the Hollywood Formula" over at Writing Excuses (a great running series about all manner of writing, especially spec. fic). Don't cring at the word "formula", this is actually a great breakdown of how the major emotional arc works between characters in a story, and it's a great tool for getting to the crux of creating an emotionally satisfying arc.

 

On Friday I went to the opening of an interesting gallery exhibition. Titled 'Off the Wall', it's a showcase of prose and poems from writers at the Waverley Community Learning Centre, and corresponding artworks created by artists inspired by the pieces.

There were some fantastic pieces on display, both written and visual - a perfect demonstration of the myriad results you'll gain from asking disparate people to create art from a central idea. Some artists created a representation of the imagery already present within a story or poem, others went for metaphor or even further abstractions. Some were realist, surrealist, post-modern or aesthetic, some in paint, some glass, textile or thre-dimensional.

When we, as writers, concentrate so much on ensuring a reader an visualise our worlds and stories, it's a fascinating glimpse into the alternate possibilities presented by a more "direct" medium for such a thing.

I wonder what we'd create if we cycled the process once again - if writers took inspiration from the artist's creations, created new stories and poems?

THe exhibit's on until October 6th at the Highway Gallery - highly recommended.

 

I had a post, but Joomla decided to eat it, as it does every so often. And rewriting posts always strikes me like I'm repeating myself, I get impatient and stroppy. More than usual, I mean. I can't believe there's no "undo" function on the internet. But here goes.

The rundown is: I've been tweaking the plot of my novel for months, trying to get it to work. It kept feeling contrived and forced. Sometimes those 'tweaks' seemed to be major revisions, as in they'd require substantial rewriting of a lot of scenes. But I realised the other day, while thinking about le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, that I'd missed something major.

I wrote a while ago about keeping one thing sacred in your novel, and everything else being mutable. I'd forgotten that. There were aspects of my plot that I wrote in months ago as filler - they were "Until I think of something better" stand-ins. Trouble was, when I redesigned the story again and again, they hung on, until they'd worked their way into the central conceit. And I could no longer see that they didn't need to be there at all.

They were lame. They didn't work. And I couldn't make them work, because the novel didn't need to be 'tweaked'. It needed for me to burn the plot down to the ground and start again.

So I did. I threw out those aspects of the plot with a certain amount of glee. I thought about what it was about Earthsea that worked for me so much as a novel, and while i was looking and the shredded remains of my plot ideas, I saw it - the emotional centre of the novel. It felt right.

I still don't have much of a plotline. There are some major gaps and holes and things to wrangle out. But I feel like now I have the heart of what this story is.

It can be hard to see the rules we make for ourselves of what our stories are about. They turn into assumptions, like gravity and oxygene - invisible. We just walk on the ground and breathe air and don't even think about it. But they can kill a novel, if you don't look out for them.

 

I have a book that became a trilogy that became a series. Or a trilogy-of-trilogies. Though probably more a series, because I'll be switching protagonists. All of which is difficult and perhaps a little laughable, given I haven't actually written the first one yet. (Well, not a lot of it. I've had to pause to reinvent some world that I hadn't painted in because I didn't think I'd be using that bit. But I digress). Though if J. K. can have seven books in her head before her train reaches the station and she's penned a word, I don't see why I can't have nine before I've finished writing the first.

The thing is, the plotlines of a book, a trilogy and a series are different. Or not different per se - they still follow the same principles. The difficulty is in the layers. (Obligatory Shrek reference here.) Plot are like onions. Or like onions would be if they grew with layers twisted over on themselves so that the outside layer was also the third layer from the center, and if you peeled it then you'd also peel all the other layers because they were all connected, and if you dye one green, another one goes purple. So not really like onions. But I'll explain:

 

I have a book that I've been working on for about three years now. Probably closer to four. I wasn't really keeping track of drafts or versions, but best I can tell, it's on about version 7 or 8. Possibly twelve, if you count the attempts that were aborted before the end of chapter 1.

None of those versions ever made it to the end of draft 1. Many were written with completely different processes, but in each I could tell there was something fundamentally wrong with the book - not the writing, which is fixable, but the story, which is not.

I was getting rather discouraged with this - I had a plan, you see, to be writing full time. I'm a touch-typist and a trained student*: I can write quickly. When in the habit of it, I can write several thousand words a day, with time for exercise, general life and my day job. Put that into a routine and you have a draft in a few months. Add another few months for editing and polishing, and you have a book in four to six months. Combine that with the fact that these processes can be overlaid - I can plan one story while writing another and editing a third (I know this because I do it now), and I can have several books a year. 

That was The Plan. Roughly: self-publish several books a year, average not-very-many sales across all of them a month, and be able to write full time in five or six years at the current salary I get from my day job.

Taking three years for one book was throwing not just spanners, but hammers, screwdrivers, allen keys and a disgruntled plumber in the works. But this week, three important things happened for me and my plan - or rather, my disappointment in my plan.

 

 

"Process" is sadly a much-abused word. Typically, by people who are more interested in seeming artistic than actually creating art, who presume that the more wacky and incomprehensible demands one makes in the name of one's "process", the more arteeeeestic one is seen to be. They insist on writing only on the top half of the left side of a leather-bound hand-stitched notepad with a MontBlanc dip-style fountain pen, the ink of which they have carefully blended with gold dust, saffron and probably the blood of a unicorn. Or something like that.

I'm not talking about that kind of Process, here. I mean the lower-case kind. How do you build a story? Where do you start, what comes to you first (usually)? How do you tease that idea out, build conflict, build an arc, some change, a premise? Do you block things out in scenes, write a whole lot of creative-plop that you then shape, work backwards, jump all over the place?

Look back at how you've created things in the past. Stories you've written. What are the common things you have done that have worked for you? What are the things that didn't work?

The point here is not to be prescriptive - ironing out a method that must be adhered to is unlikely to be helpful. Art is unpredictable, and flexibility is a must, even with the way that you work. But it's beneficial to be able to recognise things that often help you, steps you may forget you need, things that generally lead you down a goose chase or actually help procrastinate.

So - how do you write a story?

    Disclaimer: this post involves colloquial expressions of excrement. Persons adverse to such four letter combinations may be advised to return next week.

Yesterday's post on alpha readers was inspired by a conversation I had with a writer-friend of mine. I had just finished proofing some poetry and prose that she was sending off to a competition, and in the midst of some disappointment, she said: 

"Everything I write, it's brilliant, and then I give it to you and it's a piece of shit."

I can relate to that. I had a scriptwriting teacher in university who would start each workshop session with everyone repeating the mantra "My work is a piece of shit, my work is a piece of shit" in tones reserved for reverential supplication. After that, no one was allowed to mention how bad they felt their work was. We'd all already said it; yours wasn't allowed to be worse than anyone else's. Luckily, that particular class was pretty cluey to the practise of fishing for writerly compliments by protesting the tragic terribleness of the work. That sort of thing didn't fly, though it was fun to see a few hopefuls trying. That wonderful teacher simply looked at them, and asked

"Well, if you think it's so irredeemable, why are we wasting our time on it?"

Nobody else dared fish again in that class. It was refreshingly honest. 

 

I've blogged about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) quite a bit before. Dan Wells, author of I Am Not A Serial Killer, has adapted it to his own challenge, which I think is ideal.

He's termed it NaShoStoMo - National Short Story Month. And it's not particularly national - as far as I know, it's just him - but it's great practise for a writer. It's very simple: every day of the month, he writes a complete short story. They're tiny - a minimum of 200 words, but they can be longer. They must be complete, with a beginning, middle and end. Like NaNoWriMo, they don't necessarily have to be any good. The point is to practise the art of storytelling, rather than writing. They're different disciplines - one is about constructing sentences, the other is about constructing emotion and story - and you need both.

Now I'll admit, this isn't something that fits into my life right now - I have several projects on the go that need to take precedence. But I'll definitely be saving this idea for the future (probably in an adulterated form - 200 is a little short for me, I'd rather have at least 500 words.). I think it would be especially good if you're feeling blocked on unsure of what to write.

It doesn't have to be one story a day - if you're interested, but not a prolific writer or have a very busy schedule, make it two a week for ten weeks or something similar. Just like Nano, it's entire what you make out of it.

 

 

Several months ago, I splurged on a new Macbook Air. I am fundamentally a PC person, but I wanted something that I could fit into my bags, carry around easily and - given my travel plans - would open comfortably on a plane tray table when the person in front of me had their seat reclined.

I must admit, I love my little mac - it's sleek, it's silent (solid state hard drive and no optical drive means it's a ninja laptop. There's not even a fan, it discharges its heat via tiny space monkeys. Quite literally the only sound it makes is the soft 'thap' of the keys as you type, or the click of the track-pad-button if you press it.) and it was so excited the first time I powered it up that it spent ten minutes singing me a welcome song in forty languages. 

I used it during that-November-thing-I-said-I-wouldn't-mention, whipping it out for a quick ten-minute writing session whenever I had a chance. I used it on the train, in bed, everywhere. And I noticed something really interesting.

 

The final days of Nano draw to a close, and I'm spectacularly behind. I've even forgotten to update the Nano counter on the page (though a quick glance reveals I was only remembering to do that once a week anyway.) As so often happens (in November especially, it seems) life intervened. But that's okay - as I said last week, focus on what you have achieved. I have an extra seventeen thousand words that otherwise I mayn't have written for several more months, a good notion for where the novel is actually going, and I enjoyed feeling part of the community of people who were attempting this. The many tweets from Nano-ites all over the world were great to read - this was the first year I'd tried Nano as a tweeter.

Congratulations to those of you (I've heard there are quite a few) who made it over the line, and equal congratulations to those who didn't - you still wrote something that you mightn't have otherwise, and that is, after all, the whole point.

A quick review of Nano's wordcount scoreboard puts Melbourne at #19, with a total of  20 million words, well ahead of many US and European cities (and countries!) with a much greater population than ours. Not that it's a competition. But hah! Fantasy has also clocked 471 million, more than twice the wordage of the next highest genres (Young Adult, at 227 million, with SciFi not far behind at 210 million).

Of course, for a lot of the world there's still 48 hours to go, so rankings may change, but I feel a certain pride that my city and genre are so highly represented amongst people writing an arbitrary number of words to see if they can.

 

Nano update: How're you going? Life has well and truly gotten itself in the way for me. Though I have managed to keep noodling along, I'm far behind where I planned to be - my catch-up week didn't really happen, I was too busy being ill and chasing other things up, and with seven days to write 35,000 words, I'm no longer fussed about the deadline. I can write eight thousand words in a day. I've done so before - the last novel I finished I wrote the last two chapters in a flurry of 9000 words in one day. But it took me most of the day to do it, and I have things like work to attend, exams to write, games stories to plan and lectures to prepare. 

I don't consider it as 'failing' Nano, though - and if you're in a similar boat to me, neither should you. The only thing that matters are the words you did write, not the ones you didn't. The important thing is what you have achieved through Nano. Personally, I've filled in the blanks at the beginning of my novel, and worked out what on earth's happening in the first half of the dreaded middle section - to me, that's a pretty solid achievement, I'm happy with that. My goal for the rest of November is to have written those scenes that I've planned out, and plan out the second half of the middle.

Writing tools and tips from other people

I've been sent two LifeHacker posts about writing. One of them's their usual collection of "Top X Blanks, as suggested by our readers", in this case, the Blank being low-distraction writing software. Personally, it's not the software itself that I tend to be distracted with - it's all the other things I could be doing with my computer, or the things on my desk, or in another room, etc. But others may find the ability to fiddle with character profiles or whatever worse than a man with a treetrimmer next door.

Their other article - 10 tips for better writing - I have some disagreements with. First and foremost that it should more aptly be named "10 rather randomly selected suggestions that might work for some people written as if they'll work for everyone". If you're including scheduling, planning, grammar, journalling, motivation and research in the one list, then either you've no idea about your subject matter, or you were really in a hurry.

They do have some good notions - their suggestions for motivation, reading widely, journalling your progress and recognising your own errors is sound advice - although probably more useful if taken a step further than they did. Knowing what mistakes you often make in story and character will save you far more work than common spelling mistakes.

But Numbers 1 and 2 especially I think is a matter of personal taste and opinion. When I'm stuck, I find the best thing is to just write the next bit any old how, in any direction. It usually ends up being not where I wanted to go, but in the process of discovering that, I figure out where I do want to go, and usually some other ideas as well. If I waited until I had it all planned out, all the fun would be gone. I'd know how the story ended. And the key of a real story is in the details, the little twists and turns that you can only discover as you're writing the thing, not planning it. So sure, outline things if you want to, but don't feel that you have to.

As for scheduling, I've never been able to keep a writing schedule. Possibly because my life has never had a regular schedule, but I'm just not a schedule person. If I write down that I'm going to do something at 9am, and something else at 3, you can bet I'll be trying to do them both together at 5pm. Or possibly tomorrow. The closest I can get is to make a list of things to do in the order I'm going to do them, and then I'll stick to it 90% of the time. Well, maybe 75.

I find my best writing times are the times I didn't expect to be writing. When my doctor's appointment's been moved half an hour, or the service guys are going to take an extra hour on my car - whip out my laptop and write. So I find their rule of "you mustn't write outside your scheduled time" to be ludicrous and unrealistic. Life does not run to a schedule, and life is what you have to fit around when you're trying to write. It's hard enough as it is without handing yourself a golden excuse of "oops, I missed my writing time, oh well, no writing for me today". Pah. By all means, make yourself a schedule if you're a schedule person. But don't ever tell yourself that you're not allowed to write. Unless, of course, you're doing so for reverse psychology - that can actually work. But preventing yourself from salvaging otherwise-wasted moments for writing time is not doing yourself any favours.

Yes, another Nano post. Anyone who surfs the blogosphere (terrible word) with any regularity is now sick to death of these, but I don't care. Nano is on my brain, so that's what I'm writing about.

I have to say, I take umbrage with a number of authors who've joined a not-so-silent resistence against Nano. There's a great deal of snideness going on, and a general theme of "writing 50,000 words is not a novel, we're just going to get a flood of self-published crap". Which to me, translates into "stop telling people anyone can write a novel, only real writers can write novels. Other people should just not try."

So, it's one week into Nano - how are we all going? Personally, I'm behind - about 5,000 words behind, last I looked. But that's okay - I knew the first two weeks were going to be spotty, as I have a semester to wrap up, which includes a truckload of exams to mark, and hree weeks' worth of student emails to answer. There are also regular days that I don't get any writing done that I need to account for.

And five thousand words (or probably ten, by the end of next week) is less than it sounds - it adds another 700 words to my goal in the last two weeks, or, as is more likely, I'll have two or three days where I write around four thousand words, and catch up that way. At the moment, I'm aiming for 2000 a day to counter for the days I can't write, and the days I didn't get to.

I have a couple of tricks to get me there, though:

I recently watched my way through the sci fi series Andromeda - something of an unbranded Star Trek with a dash of spirituality and a giant Marty Stu front and centre. 

The first three seasons are a good romp - while it's obvious that Marty Knows Best and he'll always triumph, the overarching storyline and the characters are interesting enough to make that forgivable. There's a half-hearted attempt at Real Science, which is more than can be said for most sci fi shows involving aliens, and while there are some giant We Can Never Use This Solution Again, Or We'll Run Out Of Plots Real Fast plot holes, the series as a whole generally hangs together.

I have difficulty writing mid-semester. This is the time when my careful scheduling leaps dramatically off a cliff, and I spent my time frantically playing catch-up with the various things that need my attention. Student queries and assignments, teacher problems and disputes, content development, assignment marking, plus the regular requirements of the other jobs and (this year) creating the editor's accreditation exam in conjunction with other editors.

It's not that I can't find time - I'm writing a blog post, clearly I have time to write. It's finding the mental space in the din of my clamouring ToDo list that's the issue. Finding a moment where I can devote more than (what feels like) surface-level attention to a story.

I had* a problem, where the two main places I write were incompatible. That is, the software I prefer to write with - Dropbox and yWriter, wouldn't run at one of the places I write at, due to the particular system configuration. So I'd resolved to write the novel at home, and write shorts and other things at the incompatible place.

Which was working - this morning, before my colleague's assistance, I wrote the start of what I thought was a short story that had been kicking around. It went pretty well - I liked the voice, I liked the concept, I even liked my opening page, which probably means it was rubbish. It got my attention, it flowed well, it felt lively.

What it didn't feel like was the start of a short story. It was punchy, but took its time. You knew what was going on, where the plot would be going, but nothing was actually happening, so much for that first page or so. And as I was writing, notions crept in - that while the concept was simple, its ramifications weren't, or shouldn't be. That, as a story, it was a bit of a trick-piece, but as a novel it might have more depth. Some character and humanity.

Which is mildly problematic, as I'm already writing a novel, but manageable. I like to multitask. But it posed an interesting question to me - how do you know if the idea you're toying with is novel-sized or short-sized? Obviously we do know, most of the time. But how? What is it about a story that makes you feel there's a whole novel in there, or that there couldn't be? And how implicitly do you trust that initial assessment - how easily will you consider turning a short into a novel, or ripping the heart out of your book to make a short?

*Until about half an hour ago, when a colleague showed me Dropbox's command-line install (thanks, Austin!). Now I'm golden, as soon as I get dropbox up and running under wine.

 

I'm close to the end of something that's been monopolising my time, and along with the light at the end of the tunnel, there've been increasingly persistent thoughts about my novel. Well, novels, but the others are still in the crib, chewing letter blocks. 

I'm not happy with the story as it's written, nor do I feel too sure about the second version I'm looking at writing. Things don't work, don't mesh quite the way I'd like. The end doesn't answer or solve the beginning, exactly, the hooks and turns are slightly sideways. It feels like the beginning and end of two separate realities have been stitched together.

And the reason occurred to me last night - I'm trying to keep too many of the components. Trying to make the story work with X, Y, Z, A, B, and K.  Which would be okay if those things were naturally intertwined or meshed somehow, but they're not. Well, not without a lot of pushing, and I think it's that pushing that's putting the strain in my story.