One Thousand And One Parsecs

I feel an emotional roller coaster about to begin…

You know, I used to get really freaking emotional about my writing. I’d post these notes up all over my room, some of them philosophical, others just giving myself general encouragement, and I’d read, revise, analyze, reanalyze, tear apart, and thrash my own writing. And then I’d get so emotionally wrapped up in it that when I got to about 120 pages I’d decide that the whole thing was crap, take down all the notes, put away the story, and just leave it all behind me. Totally cut it out of my life. And then I’d be depressed for a long time–until I could finally work up the courage to take out the wretched manuscript and look at it again.

Well, those were the old days. That’s what I USED to do. I’m much too grown up and enlightened to revert back to that. After all, it was just teenage angst. I’m past it. I’m capable of looking at my writing rationally and keeping its quality detached from my own view of myself. I can be brave, self-confident, and not get hung up on the little things. I can look at the problems with my writing and fix them without getting upset or depressed. I can take criticism and it won’t be all that painful.

Well, these were the things that I USED to believe. But now, I’m starting to realize that it’s probably all crap.

I’m approaching 120 pages again. My story is at 25,000+ words and I’m definitely committed to it now. More committed, perhaps, than I’ve been to a story since returning from my mission (at least, more committed to a novel-length story since I’ve already finished two short stories). And now that I’m committed, and right in the middle of the story itself, I’m starting to feel the unpredictable emotions coming on.

It’s like I’m on a roller coaster as it slowly gets pulled to the top of that very first drop–the machine is going <click> <clack> and I’m about 200 or 300 feet up in the air. The first drop off is maybe 30 feet away and I’m already starting to feel sick.

I think this realization came today during the writing meeting. It was a very good writing meeting, and I got some good and much needed feedback on my story. But I really started to feel kind of anxious as I heard people analyzing my story. I’ve felt that a little bit before, but I’ve always been able to put it aside. This time, it felt a lot stronger, and came when I wasn’t expecting it–even when people were giving my praise.

Last Winter, when Aneeka was still around, I remember the expression she would have on her face as I would give her feedback and criticism on her writing. She’d get really tense and almost a little bit scared, like an animal backed up into a corner or like a prisoner watching the torturer approach carrying some kind of unpleasant looking tool in his hand. It seemed very strange to me at the time, but I think I started to feel like that today.

And also, I think that it’s getting easier and easier to doubt my story. I’m past the honeymoon stage, where the story has just begun, I’ve got all these great ideas in my head and everything is in front of me. Now, I’ve covered some sizeable distance, and I can look back and say “oh, I need this character to be more like this,” or “I really did a poor job of this and it’s going to affect what I want to write in this upcoming scene.”

At the same time, I’m approaching the point where all these crucial questions and concepts about the world I’m writing need to have concrete answers. When I started, I could just generalize and say “well, the universe of my story is kind of like this,” or “this culture has a certain religion, and it’s kind of like this, but I’m sure I’ll work out the details when I get to that point.” Well, I’m at that point now, and I haven’t finished working out the concept. And because I don’t have the answers that I need in the concrete and specific form that I need them, it’s very easy to doubt the story and say “is this idea really any good anyways?”

So, things are starting to get a little bit tough emotionally. I can only expect it to get worse as I go along. If it happens even to the pros, so how can I expect to get away unscathed?

But there is some hope. Plenty of it, in fact. Right after the writing meeting today, I decided to go through and quickly make all the revisions that I felt the story needed (and there were plenty of them, including the embarrassing fact that Jorgen praised me for how villainous I made out this one character to be, when in fact that character was supposed to be one of the good guys!). As I thought about the revisions that I needed to make, I got really worried about them. My story, I felt, was pretty bad, and needed some major work. Well, as soon as I put in my flash drive and pulled up the story, those thoughts of “my story isn’t very good, it needs a lot of work” went away, and I just focused on what was in front of me. I saw a problem, fixed it, worked in some new stuff that made that area a little bit better, then moved on to the next thing. In a couple of hours, I had made all the revisions that had been suggested and really felt satisfied with the changes. I was excited to move on and keep writing. It was great!

So, I guess that once you REALLY commit to a story, you start to experience some pretty intense emotions. But not all of them are going to be bad. My experience so far has been that the more distanced I am from my story, the worse I think that it is, whereas the more I sit down and work on it, the more satisfaction I get. That may change in the future, but for now, it’s enough to keep me going.

Some thoughts on writing, reading, and stories

I’ve had some interesting thoughts recently about stories. It’s come mostly from interacting with the writing group and with friends from the writing group. As I’m getting more and more into writing fiction, my thoughts about fiction, stories, and science fiction get more and more complex and interesting. This post is going to be a little bit abstract, but I think it will be a bit shorter than usual. And probably a bit more interesting.

There was this thread on the Quark board going on in the last couple of weeks about giving and taking criticism, and one of the points was that, as a writer, you really shouldn’t defend your own work. You shouldn’t argue with the readers.

I’ve heard this same argument before, but on slightly different terms. Those terms were “you should let your work stand on its own, without you trying to defend it.” I think that’s good rationale, but I would go a step further: I would say that you shouldn’t argue with readers because criticism is never objectively true or false. Criticism is a reaction from the reader’s experience, and no matter how much you argue with the reader, you can’t change the fact that that was the experience that he (or she) had with your story. The reaction isn’t objectively true or false; it simply “is.” And therefore, if you start arguing and saying “that’s not true about my story!” then really you’re just wasting your breath. Criticism may be helpful or unhelpful, but it isn’t going to be true or false–at least, not in some objective way independent of the reading experience.

So then, I was reading Aneeka’s personal writing blog (notice, Aneeka, how I preserve your privacy by not linking to you, even though it’s a really good blog), and I read this really depressing post about how bad her novel is (even though it’s not that bad) and about how she’s doubting that she can ever be a writer, etc. I wanted to say something, so I left this really long comment. And I wasn’t planning on saying anything in particular, but as I was writing, this really interesting idea came out:

I guess that at some point you just have to transfer ownership of the story to the reader. Since everyone has a different life experience, they’re going to experience your story a little bit different. When you want it to be “perfect,” you might actually be trying to control what cannot be controlled. Everyone who reads your book is going to come away with a slightly different story in their heads, just because they’ll approach it in different ways. You can’t really control the readers’ experience, so trying to do it is futile. I guess all you can do really is open a door and invite the reader in. Your story needs a reader just as much as it needs a writer in order to exist.

I wasn’t planning on saying that, but the idea just came to my head and I said it. Usually, when I do something like that, it ends up a) offending people, or b) making me say or do something that I regret, or c) both. But this time it just got me to thinking: does a story exist independent of someone reading it? What is a story anyways? What does “perfection” mean when you apply it to writing fiction?

Once you realize that a story doesn’t exist independent of someone reading it, it can really free you up in a lot of ways. First of all, you realize that you aren’t going to please everyone, since the story will be different for different people. Second, you realize that “perfection” is not something that you create alone. It’s something that is created by the writer AND the reader. You aren’t, by yourself, going to write a “perfect” story. At least, not independent of someone reading it. Your goal is not to write some story that is objectively “perfect,” independent of someone reading it, but to reach through the narrative to connect with the reader in some way, and allow them to realize the “perfect” story.

Sometimes (in fact, quite often) writers will have this fallacious idea that there is some possible combination of words, sentences, paragraphs, and other elements that is the “perfect” version of their story. They’ll slave and slave just to get that write combination, then get discouraged and fed up with it all. But if you can realize this point–that it is impossible for a story to exist independent of it being read–it can free you up to realize that there isn’t any one perfect combination of words, letters, sentences, paragraphs, structure, form, etc. Once you try to get down to that level of minuteness, you are trying to exert too much control over the reader. The truth is that the reader has some work to do as well. We don’t call it “work” because it’s actually pretty fun, but the reader is the one who puts things together and actually “creates” your story from the ink that he (or she) sees on the page. So, really, you shouldn’t be focusing on the words, sentences, paragraphs, and other structure, but on the reader and how the story will be read. It’s not about getting the perfect combination of words as much as it is helping the reader to construct the story in his (or her) own head. And really, you have to free yourself up to the idea that maybe the story that the reader reads isn’t the same story that’s floating around in your head. You have to leave freedom for that, otherwise you cut the reader out of the act of creation. When that happens, your story starts to suck–but if you can, essentially, open a door for the reader and enable the imagination to spread its wings and take off–if you can do that, you have got the potential to write an amazingly good piece of work.

So, those are basically my thoughts at this point. I may be right about some things, and I’m probably wrong about most things. But it’s a fascinating journey. I love pondering things. And these are my latest thoughts. Feel free to share your own, debunk mine, or otherwise enlighten me. I’m very eager to hear your own thoughts.

Eid Sayeed! and 1587 words!

Man, this whole week I never got around to writing! I seemed to be stuck on this one scene, too–when I would write, I’d write a little bit more of the scene, but never enough to finish it. So, yesterday, I decided to just sit down and WRITE. And it was good!

But…you see, I have a whole bunch of Arab friends. And, if you understand at least a little bit about Arab culture, you know that the way they see friendships is a little bit different than here in America. Specifically, with demands on your time. Last week, one of my good Arab friends thought that something was going wrong in our friendship because it had been five days since I saw him. That’s actually a little unusual, I hear–in Arab countries, they’ll think something’s wrong if they don’t see you every DAY.

Not that I really mind it all that much. I’ve been hanging out with my Arab friends just about every day for the past week, and it’s been fun. It’s also been fairly good for my Arabic. It’s just that writing isn’t something you can really do while hanging out with friends.

In fact, writing is pretty solitary. You can get together with a bunch of people in the same room, but if you’re really writing, you’re probably not going to be talking very much with those friends. Really, writing is something that requires you to shut yourself up in an imaginary world. Not a very social activity.

So, yesterday, I had just gotten back from an awesome jujitsu practice, and I was ready to take a shower and finally WRITE, when my roommate gives me a call and asks me to give him a ride from this party on 700 North up to Glenwood where Malik and Huthifa live. And then I started to wonder…am I going to actually get a chance to write tonight?

It didn’t really annoy me that much to break away and give him a ride, but it was a little annoying that he expected me to do it. But I guess that’s the difference between our culture and theirs. He probably couldn’t understand why I’d want to spend a Friday night by myself. Also, yesterday was the last day of Ramadan (which makes today Eid! Eid Sayeed! Kul 3m wintum bakheer!), so he was in a party mood. In fact, if I don’t hang out with my Arab friends at some point today, they’ll probably think that something is wrong with me.

Well, I gave him and Basseem a ride, and visited with Malik for about ten minutes or so, but then they started to watch a movie, and I excused myself. I guess you could say I had a date with my novel. Three hours later, I was 1500 words into my story, past the scene that had been hanging me up the whole week, and very very happy. But…I’d told my friends that I’d come back in an hour. I called my roommate, and he said that they were going over to Denny’s. I contemplated coming, but it was 3am, so I ended up calling him back and apologizing that I couldn’t come. You see, I wanted to actually be alive on Saturday (when I left the apartment at 11am, my roommate was still asleep).

So, now, I don’t only have to juggle schoolwork, but I have to juggle all my Arab friends. Not that I don’t mind hanging out with them. It’s just that sometimes I want some time to write. How to balance all this out and not offend my new friends? I don’t know. I’ll tell them that I’m writing a novel, and hopefully they’ll understand.

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