Joe Vasicek

question on novel length

So, I’m coming up to about 25,000 words, and I’m starting to get worried that I’m not as far in the storyline as I should be for this time. I’m not all that sure what to do. How long is a normal novel? Is there a length in particular that I should aim for? How do I know if the story is progressing as it should?

I figure (as with everything) that I’ll just write it and cut out all the unecessary stuff after I’m finished. But I do want to know what I’m aiming for right now. There is SO much stuff that I want to have happen in this story, and I hope I’m not at page 150 or something by now.

And I fell asleep like five times trying to write this. Good freaking night!

only 278 words

Yeah, I know it’s not a lot. I was going to write more, but I’ve been falling asleep while typing this. Although, I must admit, it’s funny to read what I’ve half written in my sleep.

This week was crazy. Next week probably won’t be quite as bad. I’ve got a test I need to take tomorrow, and another one on Monday. Plus a paper on Monday. I don’t think it will be too hard, though, and if I don’t wait until 1am (like tonight) to completely finish all of my homework, I think I’ll be good.

I was going to write a couple thousand words, but everything in the world (including my own procrastination) is conspiring against me. Wah!!!

All I really want to do is write in my novel

It’s true. Unfortunately, the universe is conspiring against me. The homework alert level has been raised to orange and a half. Fortunately, it should die down by the weekend.

I’m still sticking by the 500 words per day goal that I had before. I just decided to modify it so that if I write more than 500 words on a particular day, it will count for missed words from the day before. I’ve noticed that when I sit down to write 500 words, I usually write 1,000. Since, with papers and tests throwing things out of whack, I can’t always make 500 words each individual day, at least I can write 500 words FOR every day. I’ll probably have some time to catch up on Wednesday.

1,066 words and I don’t think I’ll be doing nanowrimo this year

I put in about a thousand words. I’m at a point in the story right now where a lot of stuff starts happening. There are about three or four new characters that I want to introduce, and I have all these great ideas about how to do it, about who they really are, what ideas really move them, what they really believe and stand for, what they will struggle with, and how they’re going to play into the story, but I’ve been stuck at this one scene for the whole week–not because I don’t know how to write it, but because I haven’t had the time to just sit down and finish it. It’s the scene where Leila finally gets back, and she talks with her father the King about Ian and Aaron and what happened in the desert. It’s basically the kingdom’s first contact experience with the “aliens”–the rest of humanity. There are going to be a lot of first contact experiences in this story.

So, the problem is basically that I’ve got a TON of ideas, I know where I want the story to go, I keep running the story through my head over and over during my free time…but I never have the time to write it. It doesn’t help that I write really long blog entries, either. 🙂 Or have tons and tons of homework. It’s honestly a huge incentive to learn how to use my time efficiently. I think by the end of this semester, I’ll be doing my homework first thing after my classes (GASP!!!! I’ve NEVER done that before!) and setting more goals and stuff.

One thing, though: since I’ve got so many ideas for this story, I don’t think I”ll be doing nanowrimo. I just don’t want to pull myself out of this universe and stop working on my ideas for this story. It would be too big of a break in what I’m doing right now. I will, however, be doing a lot of writing during November! We’ll probably be having some Quark get togethers for nanowrimo participants, and it’ll be a good opportunity to get some writing in.

Another awesome writing meeting!

So, we had a writing meeting last Tuesday! There were quite a few people there! Gamila, Jakeson, Danke, Travis, Drek, Kaci, Ben (his board name is the same as his real name, believe it or not!), Tom, and Patrick (I think that’s it, but I’m not sure. If I forgot your name, please forgive me!), so altogether there were about ten people! We definitely filled up the small library room, and the discussion was very lively!

We had some excellent stories, and I don’t think there were any stories that were boring or turned everyone off. One story was a little bit edgy, but not unacceptable, and it didn’t cause any schisms or anything. In fact, some of the more conservative members of the group complimented me personally afterwards for how I handled the situation. Quark has been shaken up by some trouble stirrers in the past (you’re welcome for the compliment, Joel), and I’ve been a little bit worried about how to handle controversies in the group on my watch. I’ve been chatting up with Aneeka and Reigheena, two former Quark writing vp’s, on this subject, and I think people from all the different perspectives appreciated how this situation was handled. And really, I did like the story that was submitted. Even though it was edgy for a squeaky clean BYU club, it wasn’t unacceptable at all, and I thought it added to the story rather than weakening it.

A lot of people liked how the meetings went, and found the feedback to be helpful but one of the old timers contacted me on g-chat a couple days later with some possible areas that we need to improve. The areas he suggested had more to do with us as a group than me as a leader, though I’ve definitely got a role to play. Basically, we need to learn some better etiquette, both as writers and as critiquers. His suggestions have spawned off a thread on the Quark forums, so I’ll refer all you quarkies to that for the full discussion on this topic, but I’ll briefly summarize it here. Basically, we need to remember three things:

1) Try to avoid tangents (like anime and star trek)

2) If you’re the writer, don’t argue with the feedback you receive

3) Try to adhere to a sense of order in the way we give feedback: let people with comments on page one go first, on page two second, etc.

To that, I’d add a very helpful fourth guideline that Jakeson suggested:

4) If you’re submitting an excerpt from the novel, give a short synopsis at the beginning of the piece, so we know whether the excerpt is from the beginning, middle, or end, and can give relevant criticism.

Gamila also suggested to me on g-chat that writers should also describe what part of the writing process they’re in; whether this is a rough draft, one of the first revisions, or whether the author is trying to polish up a final draft. That sounds like a good idea to me, though I haven’t yet brought it up with the others. I plan on doing that soon.

There have been some suggestions that we break up the group, since it’s becoming so large. In general, though, I think it’s best to wait that out. I had the idea while g-chatting with Drek of splitting the group into a fantasy section and a sci fi section, where we’d meet every Saturday at the same time and place and alternate between the sections. Under this idea, people would still be free to come to every meeting, but we’d lower the submissions-per-meeting to about four and get someone to moderate the fantasy section (since I already have way too much free time as it is).

Of course, this depends on how many people we retain. I think we should keep things as they are for now, then wait and see how many people are still coming regularly in November and December.

It was a good meeting this week, but I was surprised because it really did leave me exhausted. The closest parallel I can think of is when you’re a missionary and you come out of an intense-but-disorganized lesson with an excited investigator who loves to talk. It left me exhausted like that. It was a good meeting, and I hope that in the future we’ll learn to build off of each other and find our “groove.”

Thoughts on the universe of my story

I’ve been thinking in the last couple of days (it hurts, but I’ve found that it generally pays off well). Specifically, about the culture of this world that I’m creating for my novel.

It takes place in the far future, after a 300-or-so year war with hostile AI. Kind of like Battlestar Galactica, with the Cylons. But really, the story has nothing to do with that war. It has to do with what happens after the war is over.

Just so you know, world building is one of the things I love to do when I write. I don’t get as into it as some epic fantasy writers, with inventing new languages and naming every landform on the face of their world, but I really do get into it. I think that sci fi world building differs from fantasy world building in that sci fi focuses more on how some sort of technology, historical event, or other thing would alter basic humanity as we generally know it, whereas fantasy tends to be about building a world from the ground up. Sometimes I have a hard time getting into fantasy for that reason–I’m more interested in what it is that’s causing the fictional reality than in the fictional reality itself. And it can also be annoying to have to remember more than a couple dozen proper names full of multiple apostrophes.

<spoiler alert> So, in this world, just as the war was starting out, a group of refugees (like in BSG) got stranded from the rest of humanity, and fled out into unexplored space. They ended up landing on this planet that had just been discovered and explored a few years earlier by a group of scientists. The planet was uninhabited, but in all ways it was able to support unassisted human life. Basically, it was like a second earth, with its own biosphere, seasons, and everything else. This is significant because all of the hundred or so other planets that humans have colonized up until this point have basically needed to be terraformed before they could be inhabited by large numbers of people.

The refugees land on the planet and set up a sort of EMP field in orbit that basically fries a certain type of futuristic computer circuitry when it enters the field. This is to defend the refugee colony from the hostile AI, which they believe has completely wiped out humanity by this time. They land in the fertile areas of the continent, near the ocean and river deltas, but almost as soon as they touch down they find remnants of an ancient civilization (is it human? is it alien? how did it get there? bwahaha!) and are violently chased off of the land into a desert by these strange robotic things that shoot anything that comes near the ancient ruins.

So now, completely deprived of everything and poor and starving on a strange planet, the society is in turmoil, loses its history, its technology, most of its accumulated knowledge from the outside world, and exists in a state of starving chaos on the edge of a desert. After about a generation or two, it reaches a tenuous equilibrium, with the development of some basic agriculture and a rudimentary economy, but the political system is very authoritarian and the rule of law is thrown out when it’s convenient. Social justice is a distant dream of only the most optimistic, and there really is no moral code that everyone abides by. The strong do what they wish, with the weak at their mercy.

After a couple of generations, a new prophet comes out of the wilderness with a revolutionary religion. It spreads quickly until it becomes universal throughout the community. This revolution teaches the principles of social justice, establishes a new theology and cosmology, exhorts its adherents to live a moral lifestyle, and creates a new culture that, in many ways, washes away the negative effects of the years of chaos in the generations before. It establishes a stable social order in which the civilization can finally start to grow and progress.

Of course, it doesn’t come without negative consequences, since over the next couple of generations religious schisms divide the people, political entities seek to use the religious framework to justify their attempts to conquer each other, and a few short religious wars cause limited trauma and destruction. However, generally speaking, the religion does a tremendous job of bringing about civilization in the midst of barbarous chaos. From this, a unique and exotic culture develops over the next hundred years in isolation from the rest of humanity.

The novel begins as the main character, Ian Steffek, finds himself suddenly thrown out of the world he has known and into this strange and exotic culture. As the remnants of humanity on the other planets slowly start to rebuild after the terrible war, they come increasingly into contact with this unique and–in many ways–alien culture, and a clash of cultures starts to develop, with the main character caught in the middle. <end spoiler alert>

Basically, I need to create a tribal/medieval culture for this civilization on the lost planet. And, since I’m studying Arabic and the Middle East, and because I want to use this novel as a way of sorting out my thoughts on contemporary issues like the allegedly inevitable clash of civilizations and the many terrible conflicts that are causing so much pain and suffering in that troubled region of the world. Apparently, I’ve been doing a fairly good job, because many of the comments at the last writing meeting went along the lines of “I really like how you’ve written about Arab culture here.”

But the thing is, is it really such a good idea to base a fictional culture so much off of a real culture?

Of course, my response is that I really don’t know very much at all about Arab culture–REAL Arab culture–and so the stuff in my novel is going to be different. But is it different enough? If people look at this book and say “basically they land on a planet full of Arabs,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? I tend to believe I should think of some ways to make this culture unique and have it stand on its own, apart from anything else we know. But do I really need to do that?

I don’t know. But I don’t really want people to point at my book and say “look, it’s a bunch of Arabs on another planet.” I want them to point and say “look, it’s a culture that feels as foreign to us as the Arabs.” Because, really, I can’t write about Arab culture. It’s just too foreign to me. I’d butcher it up really bad. I can write about what I think Arab culture is like, but it won’t be an accurate representation of the thing itself.

But really, I don’t want this culture to represent the Arabs. When I started out, I did. I basically started with this vague notion of trying to symbolize different Middle East struggles by the conflict of this society with the rest of humanity. I scrapped that idea really fast–not only because writing fiction with a conscious and clearly defined normative message in mind is generally a very bad idea, but because I actually started to learn something about the Middle East, and realized that there’s no way this civilization could effectively mimic the Middle East as we know it today. There’ s just too much history and too many complications. I’d fall flat on my face with every word.

So, that’s where I’m at now. I need to create a culture that can stand on its own, with a story unique to itself. I’m not here to tell the story of the Arabs or the Middle East, I’m here to tell the story of Nova Salem (I might change that name sometime in the future…) and the Lost Colony that landed there (I’m definitely going to change that title).

How to do this, I don’t really know. But I’m going to do it, because come April, the rough draft WILL be finished!

400 words, but hey

400 words tonight. I tried, really I did, to write more, but after a while I simply became completely incoherent. It seems like my brain shuts down and goes to sleep before my body. Towards the end (as in the moment before I wrote this blog post), my mind was just swimming. I couldn’t think straight or visualize the scnees too mcuh. bleha and typiwing was paingful. As it si now. tomorrow inshallah

640 words and thoughts on momentum

640 words today, in two thirty minute chunks. The first was between classes, and the second was just now, at night. And I need to get some sleep, so this will be short.

We had an awesome quark meeting yesterday, but I’ll write about it tomorrow, inshallah. I’ve got so much stuff to do, and to top it off, one of my good Arab friends called tonight wondering where I’ve been, so I’ll probably end up hanging out with him and his roommates and friends until late tomorrow night. For those of you who don’t know Arab culture, there is an expectation that friends see each other every day. This is a good friend of mine, and I haven’t seen him in about five days or so. I want to keep up these Arab friendships and learn this culture. So, on top of a couple of tests, a hundred plus pages of reading in one class alone, and much more, tomorrow will be VERY busy.

Fortunately, I’ve noticed that setting daily goals has been helping. Or, in other words, I noticed that when I didn’t do it today, I was a lot more lost and squandered a lot more time than I did the days before when I had been planning. So, I figure the best way is to go to the library at around eight in the morning and just do homework all day. It goes fast when you focus on it. Gotta train myself for nanowrimo, after all.

But as far as the story itself goes, I noticed today that because I haven’t been writing in it very regularly, it was hard to figure out what I wanted to do next. By the end of the day, I’ve got it figured out, and the momentum is back again, but it’s much easier to write when you’ve got some daily and weekly momentum. Once I lose the momentum, projects get put off until I forgot what I wanted to do with them, and I’m left with a bunch of half-finished storylines that I have no clue where to go with them.

But momentum is not hard to build. It requires a little bit of focus, and a lot of time spent just thinking about the story when you don’t have to think about anything–walking to and from classes, driving here and there, walking to the creamery on ninth, etc. Just thinking about the story does a lot to build momentum again, and renew the excitement. At least, it does that for me.

I know what I want to do in the next twenty or so pages, and I’m excited to do it! New characters, new conflicts, solving some of the old ones and creating new ones in the process, and describing the culture of the people indigenous to Nova Salem. It’s going to be fun to write! IF I can freaking find the time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

miniscule progress

Busybusybusybusybusy!!!! But, I did write a little. Mostly, though, I was busy today with homework and the writing group. We had an AWESOME meeting that I’ll write about tomorrow (inshallah), but it left me really drained and tired. I did take a few useful suggestions, though, and that’s really what I worked on mostly this evening; revising the stuff that I submitted rather than adding new material. I did, however, advance the story one more paragraph. WHOOOO HOOO!!!

Holy cow, I’ve got to do better. But now that Tuesday’s writing meeting is out of the way, and I’ve got about a week and a half until the next one, I think I’ll find the time to advance the story as much as I’d like. I would have written more tonight, but by the time I’d done enough homework to be functional in my classes tomorrow, it was two AM, and when I tried to write, the only thing that would come is a garbled mess. Blech. A foretaste of nanowrimo. Man, writing fiction when you’re busy full time with school is HARD.

This show made me retch

Alright, this isn’t necessarily related to anything I’m writing, or anything science fiction / fantasy, or even writing in general, but it got such a strong reaction out of me that I had to blog about it, and this seemed like an appropriate place.

There is this excellent radio show each week on NPR called This American Life, where the main writer, Ira Glass, collects unusual stories from people around the country and puts them together in a fun and interesting way. The show also publishes a fully syndicated podcast. Usually the show has a theme of some kind. This week’s theme was “it never dies.” That should have been a warning to me.

Out in the world of popular culture, they say that Science Fiction is strange, weird (which I actually take as a compliment), disconnected from real life, pathetic, escapist, and just plain a waste of time. These snobs should take a good look at the rest of society. Compared to the people who were on this week’s episode of This American Life, the sci fi geeks are living life to the fullest.

The first story was about a guy who was picked on in high school and went back to his high school reunion to try and confront the bullies. It’s not the first time that This American Life has done this kind of a story (though strangely it is the first time when the story has nothing to do with America or American culture), but this one surprised me because usually I can sympathize with the victim to some degree. After all, I got made fun of quite a bit in elementary, middle, and high school. But this guy started off his story by bragging that he was a bestselling writer and that he makes more money than the people who used to bully him. He then keeps repeating over and over this one incident where the alleged bully threw him into a pond.

Ok, first of all, I find it hard to sympathize with someone who brags about how much money he makes. If someone is a jerk, I’m going to see them first and foremost as a jerk, and I despise jerks. Second, GET A FREAKING LIFE DUDE!!! So, you were thrown into a pond twenty years ago. And? Get over it! Life is tough! Move on! I understand that it was a bad experience, and you were victimized and all that…but what’s the freaking point of holding a grudge for that one single event for twenty years? IF YOU @#$@#! HATED HIGH SCHOOL SO MUCH, STOP LIVING IN IT!!

He meets up with the two bullies at his high school reunion. The first guy remembers the event completely differently, but in a very believable (though false) way. The bully no longer sees the guy as inferior or anything, and in fact regards him as an old friend. That might be weird, but it’s hard for me to hate the guy. Is this guy really an evil “bully,” or a regular human being who hurt someone’s feelings once?

The second “bully,” though, hits the nail straight on the head. He remembers exactly what he did and why he did it: the guy was being an ass and he threw him in the pond for it. Honestly, at about this point, I wanted to do the same thing, because the “victim” was STILL being an ass, in so many ways! The alleged bully then continued: “it seemed that so and so always wanted to be the popular kid, and because he tried so hard to be one, he just wasn’t.”

EXACTLY. You don’t have to have been the popular kid to still have your life stuck in high school. And that’s where the geeks and nerds differ from everyone else. When they were getting picked on and shunned by all the popular kids, they renounced the clicks and in-crowds and formed one of their own. They all got together and did their own nerdy things, like playing computer games, watching sci fi / fantasy movies, doodling dragons and spaceships, and reading and writing sci fi / fantasy stories WITHOUT CARING WHAT THE POPULAR CROWD THOUGHT. And because of this, it’s easier for geeks and nerds to grow out of high school and get on with their lives. Thank freaking goodness I was a nerd in high school!

This rejection of the popular culture by the geeks and nerds, many of whom would become avid devotees of science fiction and fantasy, seems to have played a big role in keeping the genres as good as they are. Postmodernism has taken the hero out of fiction and screwed it up in dozens of different ways. The literary elite tells us what is “good” fiction and “bad” fiction by arbitrary standards carefully calculated to create an in-crowd where they are the ones in charge. They preach their values and fashion metaphors and symbols that keep you from thinking honestly and independently of things–in the name of “open mindedness.” Mainstream fiction and popular culture believes these lies and changes with them. Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, has gotten away relatively unscathed. There are still heroes in sci fi and fantasy! There are still good stories! It’s still fun and enjoyable to read! It still makes you question and think about the world! Hooray for the geeks and the nerds!

I stopped listening through the first story on the podcast after about two minutes. But the next day, when I had nothing else good in my mp3 player, I turned it on again. Boy, if I thought the first story was bad, I was completely blown away by the second on!

It was an episode from some sort of podcast/radio show that a guy wrote that was all about…his ex girlfriend. It was ridiculous! He had an “ex-girlfriend sighting” segment, where people would talk about whether or not they saw her somewhere, a segment where he and a bunch of his friends got together and talked about how physically beautiful this girl was, a segment where he encouraged people to walk up to her and tell her how much she was missing, and all kinds of other stuff like that!

HOLY COW. If I were this girl, I would have gotten a restraining order on this guy and thrown every possible law against him! If that’s not stalking, I don’t know what is! It was just CREEPY and GROSS.

And then, a friend of his called up and said “dude, get a life! It’s over! There are hundreds of other girls in the city–go after them! Let it rest!”

To which the creep responded “you don’t know what true love is.”

WHAT???

I know what true love is! It’s in the Ender’s Game series, where Andrew Wiggins stays with Novinha even though she lashes out at him for the problems that she’s unable to deal with in her own life! It’s in hundreds of other places in sci fi / fantasy as well! Maybe, if this guy would just leave his miserable can’t-get-over-the-breakup-with-her life and escape into a good story, he could learn a thing or two about “true love.” And they say that people who like sci fi / fantasy are escapists who don’t know anything about the real world! Honestly, sometimes the only way to keep your sanity is to escape the “real world” for a little while! You can carry it to extremes, of course, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t do you good!

Holy cow!

Listening to This American Life is, among other things, one of the ways that I keep in touch with “mainstream” culture (whatever that is). And it’s an awesome show–I would highly recommend it. But quite frequently, I see stuff in these stories of people’s lives that makes me think “holy cow, why are they so bothered by that? Why are they letting that ruin their lives?” And I don’t want to be snobby about this, but sometimes I’m really glad that I left the popular crowd for geekdom when I was in high school. Listening to this last show is one of those times.

If you’ve read this rant through it’s entirety, I congratulate you. And please, if this post ends up getting linked to and flamed by tons and tons of fans of This American Life, just like my criticism of Firefly was flamed by dozens of Firefly fans, please realize that this is just a rant, and it probably contains a ton of inaccuracies and exaggerations.