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.

 

 

A while ago I was downloading the remaining sondtrack for Portal 2, a game that's still on my list for game of the year. (The fact that I actually wanted the soundtrack to a game should tell you something of the production values and creativity of the team involved). I thought about the story, trying to determine what made it so much better than the typical video game fare. This was shortly after I'd listened to Writing Excuses' podcast on the Hollywood Formula, and approaching the issue from this angle showed something interesting

I should note that if you haven't already played Portal or Portal 2, this post assumes you know how the story goes, and there are major plot spoilers ahead. I'd strongly suggest that if you have any intention of playing it (and you should), play it before reading any further. It's well worth it, and one of the few games where experiencing the story is a vital component to the game.

 

 

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.

 

I've always found Campbell's Hero has One Thousand Faces somewhat inaccessible. The information's buried so far down in metaphor that I found it very difficult to apply, as a novelist. And Vogler's Hero's Journey's not much better. I did, however, come across this piece online the other day, which explores the same material but makes it somehow more digestable. It's a lengthy read, but worth it, if you're looking at story structure and character arcs and trying to make sense of your gut feelings about things.

The writing game's pretty simple, really. Take a story, either one that you've written, or a book you've read recently, and find the points of the journey, if you can. Now, not all stories follow the journey (though they can usually be shoehorned in if you try hard enough, just as any literature student). The point is to get practise at seeing the structures so you can internalise them.

 

This game is actually some paraphrased advice my mother (also a writer) gave me about a draft I was summarising for her. I'd written what should probably be a 5-10,000 word story inside of 2000 words, and achieved this largely through 'telling' most of the story instead of showing.

Now, telling isn't always evil. Sometimes it's necessary to summarize information that might be tedious to show, or show a long transition of time, etc. There are many (valid) reasons for telling, and some solely-told stories can still be entertaining if the character's voice is strong and interesting. That (probably) isn't the case, here. It was just me being impatient to get the story 'out'. As a result, entire subplots are largely lost, and the viewpoint character (it's in first person) is essentially a set of reader-goggles, with no discernable personality of his own. Not good.

The game is two-fold: take a piece of text and separate all the sentences. Basically, open it up in Word / Open Office and insert a page break after every full stop. I'll explain why in a moment.

Now, take each sentence and flesh it out - turn it into entire paragraphs, explore it thoroughly. Take a page or so per sentence. Don't try to join it up wo thte preceding sentence, or segue into the next; treat each as an individual piece of writing (that's why you put page breaks, so you can't necessarily see what the next sentence is). When you're done, you'll end up with story-swamp, a giant mess of 'stuff' about the story that you're trying to write.

After a fortnight or so, you can come back to it, read through your swamp and pull together what you want out of it - but the important part is to let your brain fill in all the possible nooks and crannies of the story - you may find that the story you're trying to tell isnt the one that that idea needs. Or even that you're trying to fit two mutually exclusive stories in one (or that you only have half a story there). 

 

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:

 

Inspired by an ex-colleague, I started up a GoodReads challenge not long ago. My goal is 40 books for the year - 30 seemed a paltry number, and 50 too high. It wasn't until later I realised that leaves me little over a week per book, and I have some Ayn Rand's sitting on my To Be Read list, not to mention several door-stop fantasy novels. 40 will definitely be pushing it. At any rate, the latest on the list was something I picked up in a first-book-in-trilogy-super-cheap book sale.

The Eleven Domains were forged in blood a thousand years ago. The blood is about to flow again.

Bramble is as wild as the animals she follows deep into the forest near her village. Her dark eyes betray her heritage - she's a Traveller, one of the despised original people of the Domains. And for as long as she can remember, she has wanted to take to the Road.

In Turvite, where ghosts drift along dark cobbled streets, Ash must leave his parents, and the Road, to begin an apprenticeship with the only person who will accept a Traveller - the scheming Doronit. But the gods who linger in the gloomy square have other plans for him...

From different ends of the Eleven Domains, death casts Bramble and Ash on journeys across valleys and mountains, and into the dark history of their ancestors.

Freeman has a richly imagined world - the book is impregnanted with a deep history and culture that, while romanticised and idealised rather than realistic, lends weight to an otherwise non-existent story. Unfortunately, her timescale errs on the dramatic-and-unrealistic side -  not only has the civilisation not developed at all in a thousand years (no science, no change in religion, politics or social values) they're still hanging on to the prejudice and wrongdoing that was engendered thirty generations ago. A thousand years is a long time for a people to sit stagnant on things like this, but these people act like the wars happened last Winter. It's an odd blend that just doesn't ring true, to me.

Her writing is clean, clear and evocative, and certainly the strongest element in her work. Despite the books other flaws, which would normally have resulted in a dog-eared bookmakr hanging out from one-third-in for the rest of eternity, her writing kept me interested enough to finish it to the end, even when I could clearly see there'd be no significant plot development for the rest of the book.

And there's one of the main problems - this isn't a trilogy, it's a novel in three parts. After the first plot-points, which occur a little later than you'd expect in a novel, nothing much happens but the following of those plot points. At least, nothing that coherently fits together to make an emotional arc or a story. It's interesting - things happen to people, they make decisions, and other things happen, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point. There's no answer to the character's starting states - nothing that shows how they've grown, their development, and the closure at the end seems shoehorned in at best.

There's no resolution at the end of this book. Their quests aren't remotely answered - in the case of some characters, it's not even clear what their journey will be yet. Which makes the book fundamentally unsatisfying, to me. I wanted a story, something that would finish what it began, at least in part. 

And while the characters themselves feel dimensional, they're difficult to tell apart. Bramble was the only character I could keep track of - all the male characters blended into one another in short order. This was not helped by the fact that Freeman would stop the whole story to give us the point of view of another, inconsequential character. For example - one character killed a would-be-pick-pocket in self-defence, and spent a good deal thinking about the consequences of that. We then jump to a three-page POV of the death scene from said pick-pocket's point of view, a tangent which does not serve the story and does not give us any information we needed to know - it doesn't even give us anything unexpected. This happens several times throughout the book, and I'm at a loss as to why these interludes are there. There is no useful information in there. These characters are not important - we can see they're not important, and seeing things from their viewpoint doesn't add anything. They distract, confuse and slow down the book.

To me, those are big flaws, things that run right to the bones of the book and should have been addressed in the first or second draft where they could have been fixed relatively easily. So it is, I think, a testament to the quality of Freeman's writing that I still finished the book with a reasonable sense of enjoyment. While I won't be purchasing the remainder - I've no wish to slog through another lot of not-much-happening before the plot reveals itself - I will have a look at any other series or books she brings out.

 

Pitches are generally seen as a necessary evil. They're what we need to sell others on a story they don't have time to read themselves. A pitch has to do everything a story does - grab attention, inform the reader and move their emotions - in a fraction of the wordage. Most newbie authors fall hard at the querying stage, simply because they haven't practised pitching - it's a format, just like poetry, novels and short stories, and requires the same level of care. But we rarely practise them. So:

Pitch me your story. You have ten sentences (I don't care how long your story is, you have ten sentences) to summarise your story in a way to grab me, move me, and make me want to read the real thing...

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.

 

So, we have swathes of information in hand, now. Treatments, loglines, plot and character arc flaws, and tension and pacing problems. All (hopefully) nicely organised so you can pull together all the aspects and problems of a particular chapter, arc, act, character or storyline with ease.  The whole time, I've been reiterating "don't fix it yet", "don't touch", and "just note what's wrong". Hopefully it's become clear why you don't dive in a fix the first problem you see - a lot of those problems are iceburg tips, or perhaps smoke signals from a problem much further away, or surrounded by other problems that aren't as apparent. Fixing things right off the bat is like sweeping the ice chunks off the titanic - it does nothing to fix the big problems, and you're going to wind up doing it over and over.

So, are we up to fixing it yet? Well, no. As you might have guessed from the title - we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, all this analysis will hopefully mean when we do come to the actual rewriting, you'll be itching to get your fingers back to the keyboard. But I digress - we've one more vital thing to look at before we start finding solutions. 

So, we have a treatment for our novel - a one-page-per-chapter breakdown - and an act structure, synopsis and logline. Now comes the part where we start looking at all these things, deciding what isn't working and - more importantly - why.

Note that there's no mention of how to fix things yet. Hold off on that until you've found all the structural things that you think need fixing, otherwise you'll constantly be rebalancing your fixes and your original work while you find new problems. So - for now, we're just isolating the cracks in the plot.

It starts out with pulling together a lot of the things we've just been creating:

Make graphs out of those rating systems so you can see the rise and fall (and progressive build, if you used a cumulative system like I suggested) of themes, character arcs, tension, interest and anything else it occured to you to write. Create a table (or another format, if it makes more sense for you) of plot and character information across each chapter so you can easily access one 'strand' of a story at a time. (This is why excel spreadsheets are awesome - you can code it to pull all those together for you). Take your logline, print it out, and tape it to the wall or somewhere easily accessable. This is now the Divine Commandment of your novel; everything must bow to it. 

So, you've now trawled through your entire, sprawing manuscript, carefully refraining from line edits and rewrites as you went, and pieced together your super-synopsis of what's actually going on in those pages, and when. Those outline-first authors out there: does it match your plan? Is that chapter really as compelling / important / moving as it was in the plan? Did you spend an unexpected amount of time talking about something else entirely?

If the answer's "no", then you either took shortcuts with your synopsis-making or were so unbelievably disciplined with outline-following in your writing that I fear you may've ironed out the creative spark of that novel completely. But I digress.

As I said last time, novels are too big to think about all at once. You can look at the general story or the minutae of a scene, but you can't hold all of them in your head at the same time and think about how they're working together. So, step one - we condensed the novel into who, what, where, why, how, and added some notes and ratings on theme, action, character arcs, etc. But that synopsis is likely stretching at least a page per chapter - useful, for later, but still too big for the moment.

 

You've done it - you've ploughed your way through the terrible first draft, squidged over the soggy middle sections, minced around overwritten dialogue and grinned maniacally at the world after placing that period at the end of the last sentence. It's finished. You have A Novel. Probably not a terribly good novel - we are, after all, being honest with ourselves about the realities of rewriting - but it's A Novel, nonetheless. You are now A Novelist. And now, it's time for big, serious novelist things like Editing, Re-Drafting, Revising.

No it isn't. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. If you dive in now (even after the requisite six weeks (or whatever your pause-preference is) of waiting) you'll be plopping yourself right back in that forest, trying to shape the path when you can only see a few metres ahead. Sure, your subconscious will have had fabulous ideas in the meantime, and you'll have realised exactly what that scene with the eggtimer and the chainsaw needs to make it work, and why it just wasn't feeling right when Billy left Jilly. But you won't have the overall landscape in your head - you can't. It's just not possible to keep an entire novel in your head as one big lump.

So - we need an overview of the structure, the developments, the plot, the arcs, the pacing, the tension. We need these so we can draw up a battleplan for that forest - for where the vicious pruning and careful nuturing will fall. Without this, you're really just writing another first draft. SO how do we get one?

 

The days of the Three Volume Novel are long since past. They were popular last century, when printing and binding were expensive, and novels were often first serialised in periodicals prior to publication. Part 1 was used to whet the reader's appetite for parts 2 and 3, ensuring an otherwise expensive purchase. With books being relatively rare, and life in general slower, readers were prepared to wait for the next installment to be printed - although usually, the books had already been written, edited, serialised and just needed to be bound and printed.

But a three volume novel is not a book series.

A book series is, at the risk of being obvious, a series of stories. Each story in the series is discrete, complete and structurally stands alone. It may rely on information in the previous books, but it has a hook at the beginning, a well-shaped structure, and closes off its end-points in the final chapters. It satisfies the reader with an ending, even if some of that ending leaves room for the rest of the story. Even if there's an overarching plot for the entire series, each book has its own plot that comes to a satisfying resolution.

The three volume novel does not do this. It's the one story chopped into three pieces. And it just doesn't work anymore.

 

When you sit down to Do Some Writing, are you someone who takes a handful of ideas and smears them around the page like cake batter, or do you have your itemised step-plan of scenes, pulses, beats, plot points and snippets? Do you know what you're going to write before it appears on the page, or is every moment a journey of joyful (or frustrating) discovery of (sometimes not-so) wonderful prose?