Month: July 2010

Thoughts on the convolutions of discovery writing

It’s been forever since I posted, so I figured I’d put something up and let you guys know what I’ve been up to.

I’m happy to say that Worlds Away From Home is going well; I wrote just under 20k this week, which is more than I’ve written in a long time.  I hope to keep a steady 15k to 20k for the next three weeks as I finish this draft.

I think I’m through the roughest parts (famous last words, right?), and I’ve got a fairly clear idea where I want to take this.  That is, I have a target ending that’s both specific enough to give me direction and vague enough to give me some flexibility.  If I’m doing things right, I expect these characters will surprise me before the end.

When I first started this novel almost two years ago, I hit a bad rough patch right around my current spot and had to put it on hold for a while.  At the time, I thought it was because of a particularly difficult scene (which I just rewrote), but now I see that the problem was much bigger.

I thought that I was telling a story about a guy who nearly falls for the wrong girl and ends up with the right one in the end, when really the first girl was the right one.  Once again, I found myself telling a very different story than the one I set out to tell.

Interestingly, in order to see what I needed to do to fix the problem, I had to write a completely unrelated novel in the same world about the same overarching world events.  My problem, I think, was that I spent so much time world building that I stopped paying attention to what the characters were doing.

With the current draft, I’ve discovered that this story is very solidly a science fiction romance.  There’s plenty of sf action, but it’s the romance that drives the plot.

While this discovery comes as a pleasant surprise, it also worries me because the potential audience may be very small.  Traditionally, science fiction has been anathema to romance, and while that may be changing (as evidenced by this interesting post at tor.com), I wonder how well this book will sell, especially because it’s not your typical romance.  In some ways, it’s actually a critique of our typical ideas of romance.

Oh well.  I suppose there isn’t anything I can do about it except finish the damn thing and worry about selling it later.  These types of thoughts tend to be counterproductive to the creative process, especially when you’re more thank 50k into the draft.

Overall, though, I’m optimistic.  I like this story that I’m telling, and while I may cringe at the mistakes I make as I go along, I know that I need to resist the urge to fix them until the rough draft is complete.

Writing for me is like wandering around blindfolded with a Polaroid camera and taking a picture of something that sounds cool.  When I take off the blindfold and check the picture, it takes a while before I can see the coherent whole.  Usually, though I have some idea what to expect, the end result surprises me.

I love it, though.  That element of surprise and spontaneity is well worth the lack of control, because usually (if I handle things right) it helps to give the story depth, meaning, and honesty that my conscious mind simply could not give it.

I’m very optimistic about this novel.  Now that the world is solidly built, I can focus everything on the characters, and that’s where the true story lies.  I’m currently having a lot of fun torturing them, but I know where their headed with their growth arcs and how all of this ties together (well, most of it, anyway).  If I can pull it off, it should be quite satisfying.  In the meantime, I’m excited to seeing where it takes me.

The Madness Season by C. S. Friedman

In the 21st century, Earth was conquered by an alien collective consciousness known as the Tyr.  Now, five hundred years later, humankind has been scattered across the Tyr-occupied worlds as slaves.  It is a dark and uncertain existence, under the rule of masters who do not care whether their charges live or die.

For the last five hundred years, Daetrin has been a survivor.  An anomaly among humans–a man with the power to live indefinitely–Daetrin is used to keeping his true nature hidden.  But when the Tyr learn of his strange abilities and take him away for further study, he finds himself on the run, out in the open.

In order to survive, however, he must face his greatest fear–the fear that he isn’t entirely human.

This book was interesting.  C. S. Friedman’s prose is quite good, and her main character has a very unique and engaging voice.  For some reason, she wrote all of Daetrin’s stuff in first person, while the other characters in third person.  I think that the main reason for this was to preserve the sense of surprise and horror when he made certain discoveries while at the same time revealing certain critical aspects of her world that the reader absolutely needed to know in order for the story to make sense.  It didn’t bother me–in fact, I think she did it quite well–but it might not work for you.

In terms of story, this book was interesting but a little confusing.  It lagged at times, especially towards the beginning, and towards the end so many things came together at once that it was difficult for me to keep track of them.  I’m not entirely sure why that was, but I think it’s related to the fact that I never felt a very clear sense of progression.  Plotwise, things happened, but I didn’t see how one led necessarily to the next, or where things were going overall.

That said, the ending was satisfying, and I enjoyed reading this book.  You don’t realize it until the end, but the whole book is basically Friedman’s sf take on a certain type of well known, very popular mythical monster.  I won’t spoil the book by telling you which one, but when I saw it, it made me smile.

In terms of science fiction, there are a lot of old tropes with very few new ideas, except for the shapeshifting alien species known as the Marra.  Their culture was interesting, and I thought Friedman did a very good job conveying both the familiarity and the alien-ness of that species.  The Tyr weren’t quite as interesting, because they were basically just the Borg with scales and spikes, but the Hraas and the Tekk (who are a type of human) were also well done.

This is definitely the kind of book you’d want to sit down and read, rather than take everywhere with you and read whenever you get a spare moment.  Without sitting down and dedicating some time to it, it’s very difficult to really get into the story or feel immersed in the world.  I made that mistake, and it took me nearly a month to finish it.  That said, it was a good book; I’ll definitely be reading some Friedman again.

Falling back into the groove

Today I surprised myself and wrote nearly 4k words, some of which might actually be good enough to keep.  Huzzah!

The novel is coming along very nicely, and I’m starting to get really excited with where it’s going.  That’s huge, because up to this point, the nagging “this is crap, what are you doing with your life?” voices have been getting me down.  Yeah, the draft I’m writing will need a lot of work, but the story’s got potential, and I can see it.  That’s the most important part.

The interesting thing was that after pounding out the first thousand words, the writing started to really flow.  The right words and phrases started coming quite naturally, almost on their own, instead of waiting for me to mercilessly hunt them down.

An example:

The weather was perfect–sunny, clear, and neither too hot nor too cold. Upset by the sound of their engines, flocks of pretty white birds took to the air, filling the sky around the green banks like noisy, low-flying clouds. Down in the cabin, Kariym began to sing a lilting ballad about a young boy in love with his brother’s betrothed. His deep bass voice bellowed over the roar of the engine, lifting Jalil’s spirits. It was a very good day to be alive.

They rode upstream over the river for the next hour. Almost immediately they left the main body of the convoy far behind, taking the reconnaissance position for the advance guard. Occasionally, they passed a town or a bridge–magnificent works of steel and stone that soared over their heads, spanning the entire vast width of the river. Mostly, however, the banks were empty and unsettled–nothing but long, straight stretches of thick green bush, with the occasionally rocky outcropping to break the monotony.

Of course, the writing’s not perfect–I’ll be the first to say that it needs considerable work–but at least it’s decent.  Decent for a rough draft.

One of the most annoying things about writing is when I unconsciously break into alliteration.  I’ll write a sentence, only to realize that I can’t let it stand as it is because every noun, verb, and adjective starts with the same sound.  Like that last phrase: “starts with the same sound.” Augh!

I’m finding, though, that when used in moderation, that tendency towards alliteration can be somewhat helpful.  There’s nothing quite as pleasurable as reading a good story with delicious, flowing prose, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Excellent books.  I’d be more than happy if I could write as beautifully as them someday.

In the meantime, though, I’m just plugging away, trying to make the next chapter, scene, paragraph, and sentence better than the last.  Fortunately, now that I’m excited about the story again, things are going very nicely.

Oh, and happy fourth on the fifth.  I spent most of the day with family (not writing), bouncing around Provo and doing various stuff.  I’ve got a ton of chores to do tomorrow, though, so I’d better get to bed.  Night!

Second Quarter 2010 report

As you may or may not know, I keep a spreadsheet of my daily word counts.  Nerdy, I know, but you’d be surprised how helpful it can be with keeping goals and staying motivated.  As part of that, I’ve decided to do a quarterly report here on my blog.  Here’s my report for April 2010 through June 2010:

The red line shows my daily word count, and the blue line shows a running 7-day total.

At the beginning of April, I was somewhere in the middle of writing Mercenary Savior 3.0. I was also in the middle of a long and strenuous debacle with BYU’s Washington Seminar.  Long story short, I got kicked out under disputed circumstances.

Anyway, that explains the sharp dip in the first couple of weeks.  I returned to my parents’ house in Massachusetts on April 6th and spent a week there before moving out to Utah; that explains the short lived bump from April 6 to April 12.

So three weeks before graduation, I came back to Utah with no job, no apartment, no transportation besides my own feet–nothing.  Fortunately, some friends helped me out, and for the rest of April and most of May I at least had transportation (bike) and a roof over my head.

Without a job, I had lots of writing time, and I used it well, as you can see.  The sharp dip at the end of April corresponds with graduation, when all the family was over and I was spending most of my time with them.

Things dropped off the second half of May, though, and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps it was writing fatigue?  I was coming up on the end of Mercenary Savior, and as I remember, the revision was fairly tough.  Also, I was stressed out about not having a job, and spent much of my free time looking for work.  I found my current part-time job at the end of May, and had a few spikes, but my output never totally recovered.

As an experiment, I took a week off from writing after finishing Mercenary Savior on the first of June.  I thought that this would help me recharge my creative batteries and get off with Worlds Away from Home on a good start.  Instead, I found that taking the time off made it harder to get back into creative writing mode, and so I struggled for the first week or two to really get that project off the ground.

Lately, I’ve been trying to bump up my output above 10k per week, without much success.  For some reason, I seem to have fallen in a rut where I can’t write more than 2k per day.  2k is good, but it’s not the level where I want to be.  I want to finish Worlds Away from Home in the first couple weeks of August, so that I’ll have plenty of time to polish Mercenary Savior for World Fantasy in November.

I think that part of the problem lies in the nature of the work.  Mercenary Savior was all straight up revision, with very little new content.  Worlds Away from Home, however, involves a ton of new content.  Yes, I’ve got all that stuff I wrote back in the fall of 2008, but I’ve also added a new viewpoint character and significantly changed the basic storyline.  Only about half of the old stuff is recyclable, and I’ll run out of it in 100 pages, roughly at the midway point of the novel.

After revising for so long, it’s hard to get used to writing a first draft.  I’m not sure how to describe it, except that it takes a lot more mental energy–a LOT more.  Plus, there’s always the nagging voices that tell you what you’re writing is crap–and when you’re writing your rough draft, the voices are usually right!  Tuning them out is starting to be a challenge.

Overall, though, I’m very optimistic.  My main goal is to produce one solid, polished novel a year, and I’m still on schedule to accomplish that.  Mercenary Savior requires AT LEAST another revision before it’ll be good enough to send out to editors and agents, but I’ve got half a year to do that.  As for 2011, I’ll almost certainly have the first or second draft of Worlds Away from Home before January 1st.  Things are going well.

And on that note, I think I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.  Night.

Writer’s block? Tallyho!

Just a quick post before I go to bed.

Health problems suck when all you’ve got is catastrophic insurance.  I started breaking out in this weird rash last week, and I went into the clinic today.  It was seventy five dollars well spent, but…man, seventy five dollars?

So between taking the bus all over the Provo/Orem area to get to and from the clinic, picking up the antibiotics from Macy’s, and cooking treats for institute, I didn’t get much writing done.  At the same time, though, I feel like I should have gotten a lot more writing done–that really, I was just putting it off with all the other chores.

“Writer’s block” is this generic phrase used to describe a number of writing related maladies–kind of like “consumption” back in the 1800s, I guess.  Right now, I’m suffering from a particularly unusual strain: I’ve got some decent plot and character ideas, I know what I want to write, but I just can’t seem to bring myself down to write it.  Not consistently, anyways.  This past week, I’ve only been hitting 1.4k words per day, when I need to be doing 2.5k in order to make my 15 August deadline.

The irregularity of my schedule certainly isn’t helping, but I think it goes deeper than that.  I’m currently treading new territory, going places where the first draft never went, and I can’t help but feel that the stuff I’ve written prior to this point is just crap.  That’s what’s so debilitating–the recognition of all the mistakes I’ve made thus far.  Some of them are relatively major–level twos, at the very least.

Well, just like the best proscription for the flu is to get rest and drink lots of water (and pop lots of antibiotics when that doesn’t work), the best proscription for writer’s block is to sit down and write! So that’s what I plan to do.  Tallyho!

…except, not right now.  It’s 1:00 am and I’m fighting some kind of bacterial infection.  Gotta sleep, but then…tallyho!

(oh, and in totally unrelated news, an agent requested to see the full manuscript for Genesis Earth! Must not get hopes up…must not get hopes up…too late.  Tallyho!)