Tag: discovery writing

Stuck in a scene

I’ve been stuck in the same scene the whole week, and I really wish I could get it over with so that I could move on to other stuff.  What that other stuff is, exactly, I don’t know, but I’m eager to find out.

I don’t plan things out much when I write.  Usually, when I do think about where I want the story to go, I think ten or twenty steps down the road, painting in broad strokes where things are going to end up.  It’s like Paul Atreides’ foresight in Dune; time is like an ocean where you see a few isolated events like cresting waves, but you can’t see all the stuff in between.

I’m really annoyed because this scene is so long, but in some ways it has to be long.  I’m introducing some of the major characters, the major story conflict, introducing setting and cultural elements, etc etc.  Most of what I’m writing is crap and will probably be significantly edited,  but I’ve got to at least get it out there first.  But it’s hard to do that when you’re only averaging 500 words a day.

I’m going to take advantage of the holiday tomorrow by finishing this scene, no matter what it takes.  Hopefully that will build some momentum that will carry for the rest of the week.

Also, I sent out Bringing Stella Home 2.1 to a bunch of first readers.   I wasn’t originally going to do it, since it’s pretty bad…but Kindal kept begging me to read it, so I figured what the heck and sent it out to half a dozen other people as well.  It’s probably for the best…though, after reading over some of the more violent scenes, I hope the girls I sent it to don’t think less of me after reading it.  Holy crap, it needs a lot of work.

Anyways, in tribute of MLK day, I’ll end with this awesome tribute to Martin Luther King by U2. Happy MLK day!

New city, new life, new writing project

This is going to be a quick post (very quick), since it’s 1:00 am and I am TIRED.  FYI, it might not be edited all that much.   What the heck–it’s my blog anyway.

So today I left home to move into the Barlow Center for the Washington Seminar!  Took the train (Dad had an accident a block from the station–yikes!  A minor one, but still…); left around 6:30 am and arrived at 1:30 pm.  Took the metro to the Barlow Center, unpacked, walked up to the office for my internship (it’s only a 15 minute walk!), then made new friends and hit up the city!

It’s going to be a good semester.

I’ll probably start a separate blog for all the stuff that I’m doing in Washington DC.  It might be a little while before I get it all set up, but I’ll probably run it roughly the same way as my Jordan 2008 study abroad blog.  Still thinking about that.

But, more importantly (at least as concerns the stuff I write about on this blog), I started a new novel today!  After much deliberation, I settled on the title To Search the Starry Sea. It’s a space opera science fiction novel that rough parallels The Odyssey, at least in the first part.

The main character is a girl named (at least for now) Katrione.  She lives with her mother on the family estate, a medium sized moon orbiting a gas giant planet far from civilized society.  Her father was lord of the estate, but he went off to war a long time ago and hasn’t returned.

The novel starts when a woman starship captain piloting the ship Minerva arrives with some limited news of Katrione’s father’s survival, and gives her the encouragement she needs to be more aggressive and proactive about rescuing her father, even if it means crossing some gender-based boundaries in the starfaring society.

I’m totally discovering this story as I write it.  I got stuck on the second paragraph, wondering what sort of things Katrione would be doing before the Minerva arrives–what she does in her spare time–and when the answer came to me (reading a novel), it opened up about a dozen interesting story possibilities.  Things just flowed…at least until I realized I need to come up with more character names.  Blech.

Also, after working so hard to polish and revise Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home, it is very difficult to get over the fact that this draft doesn’t need to be immaculate.  I’m writing down sentences and paragraphs and thinking “this is SO telly,” but I can’t do any better at this point because I don’t know the story.

The important thing at this point is not to perfect the craft but to perfect the story, and that’s a HUGE transition from everything I’ve been doing the last 6 months.  I just need to tell myself that until I believe it.

Anyway, I am definitely excited for this story.  VERY excited!  And excited about Washington DC–it is going to be a very, very interesting semester.  And hopefully fun as well!

Battle scenes are HARD

I’m in the middle of revising a major battle scene right now.  This is supposed to be one of the more important climaxes of the book, adding a lot more tension and emotion as the novel approaches the main climax.

Let me just say, writing a good battle scene is tough.  The first version of this one…yeah, it sucked.  Hardcore sucked.  I’m cutting whole sections at a time–five hundred words, eight hundred words–and completely rewriting them from the ground up.  I’m not sad to see these sections go, either–they were BAD.

I think the most difficult thing is to keep the pacing up without confusing the reader.  For that reason, I reconceptualized most of the action here and made it simpler.  I also repeated several times the main point of tension–basically, will we get out of here before reinforcements come and kick our trash?  I hate it when a fight scene is so confusing that the tension just leaks out.  I don’t want that to happen here.

At the same time, I’m trying to filter everything through the viewpoint character.  Too often, I’ll read an action scene that’s just a blow-by-blow of the physical action.  That gets boring REALLY fast.  Without character, you have no stakes.  I want the stakes to be high from the very onset.

Still, it’s hard.  I don’t know if I’m succeeding yet.  I probably won’t until I distance myself from what I’ve written tonight and take a good, hard look at it.

Since I can’t do that until the third revision, I’m not going to worry about it.  Better to write it out now and move on than to try so hard to get everything perfect that I can’t see the story for the words.

On the plus side, I’ve been listening to a LOT of Star Wars battle music while writing this.  That’s always fun!

Outlining for a discovery writer

I’m almost finished with the rough draft of Bringing Stella Home, but I can’t shake the feeling that this draft really sucks and is full of holes.  

Part of that is probably that I wrote the whole thing  out of the top of my head.  The only part that I really took the time to outline was the back histories of the mercenaries–and that gave me material to make the story a LOT stronger.  This probably means that I need to do more outlining in the future.

I think I know now what to do and not to do.  Here’s my list of do’s and don’ts for someone like me who is more of a “discovery writer”:

Do’s:

  1. Keep a list of brief explanations for setting elements (history, cultures, traditions, technologies, magics, etc).  These do not need to be full length articles, but they should have enough information to trigger your knowledge and/or record the things that you are likely to forget.
  2. Keep profiles of all the major/viewpoint characters.  These should:
    –Briefly explain their backstory, including parents/family/origin, childhood, education/training, major formative events, etc.  This part should be fairly extensive, and will help you discover even more things about your character as you write your story;
    –Explain, in some detail, their motivations–not just their desires, but the basis behind their desires.  These usually grow out of the backstory;
    –List some basic stats: age, height, distinctive physical characteristics–basically, the stuff someone is going to get on a first impression;
    –List their important strengths.  This part can be sparse, but you should at least be aware of the things in which they are competent;
    –List their important flaws/handicaps.  This part can also be sparse, but it should be extensive enough to at least make you aware of and/or get you to think about the potential conflicts that will arise;
    –Explain why this character is sympathetic–why the reader is going to like this character.  You MUST make a conscious effort to think this out.  As the writer, you will love your characters simply because you created them, but the reader will not share in this euphoria.  Write this section like a pitch, as if you’re addressing the reader (I haven’t tried that yet, but it sounds like a good idea and I’m going to try it on my next project).
  3. Keep an ongoing list of all the major plot conflicts, with a checklist for each one of things that must/should happen in order to make the conflict as juicy and story-rich as possible.  These lists should be sparse: one sentence to explain the conflict (character vs. character), and each point of the checklist should also be one line.  You will flesh out each of these points as you go along, and you may even add new conflicts and get rid of old ones as your story takes shape.

Tip: None of these sections needs to be extensive.  Sometimes, it will work better if you simply cut and past excerpts from your novel in the appropriate places in your outline.  This may be especially helpful for setting elements and minor characters.

Tip: Not all of your outlining has to be done before you start writing.  The outline should be an organic document that expands and changes with your draft, and your best ideas will come as you write the story, not as you write the outline. The outline exists to serve the story, not the other way around. 

Don’ts:

  1. Don’t feel that you have to write encyclopedia-style articles on all of your setting/worldbuilding elements.  You are the only one who will see these, so you don’t have to extensively edit or proofread these sections.
  2. Don’t try to explain every detail of your characters’ personalities.  When you have a clear backstory, these will come out naturally.  To write believable characters, figure out the basics and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and let them take over.
  3. Don’t outline the plot; outline the major plot conficts with their necessary events, but expect these to change as you write.  This should be the most flexible part of your outline.
  4. NEVER feel that you have to fit your story to the outline.  The outline exists to serve the draft, not the other way around.  Use it as a reference and a set of guidelines, not a set of rules.  You will discover your story as you write and daydream about it, not as you write your outline.
  5. Don’t worry if your outline is spotty and full of holes.  You’re not writing this to an uninformed audience; you’re writing this to your future self, who can fill in the holes quite well.  In fact, your outline only exists to fill in the holes in your future self’s head and point him in a clear direction.
  6. Don’t worry if your story gets ahead of your outline on the rough draft.  For discover writers, outlines are more of an after-the-fact thing anyway, and your outline will continue to grow and expand in the rewrite.  In fact, you may find it more productive to write the rough draft in a burst of frenzied creative energy, leaving 90% of your outlining for the rewrite.

These are a few of the things that work for me, as a discovery writer.  I haven’t tried out everything on the do’s list, but looking back, I can see that they would have helped tremendously if I’d done them while writing Bringing Stella Home.  

Just because you’re a discovery writer, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep an outline.  It just means that you need to keep a different kind of outline, one that will enhance your discovery writing process rather than constrain it.

Genesis Earth pitch and other assorted thoughts on writing

Today I got together with Charlie after her work and discussed how to pitch my novel Genesis Earth.  We did it in the following way: I took a few minutes to explain what the book was about, while she wrote down the words that stood out and excited her.  Later, I took the words and worked out a thirty second pitch for it.

It was HARD!  I spent nearly two hours after meeting with her just to write out a stupid four or five sentence blurb!  Selling your work is totally different from producing it.  Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Michael has never set foot on Earth, but it haunts him as much as the legacy of his parents.  So when his parents build the first artificial, traversable wormhole, he sets out with his mission partner, Terra, to explore the Earthlike planet on the other side.  They arrive only to discover an empty, abandoned world and an unresponsive ghost ship advancing towards them.  When Terra’s schizoid tendencies threaten her mental stability, they both must learn to trust each other in order to confront the mysteries of the new universe–and the personal insecurities that keep them from what they truly desire.

I have that down to 29.6 seconds.  I should probably cut it shorter, but as it is it only has about half of the words that Charlie wrote down.  If I cut it any more, I’m afraid it just won’t make sense.

It’s a start, though, and talking with Charlie helped me out tremendously.  I realized that when I’m selling this stuff, I need to focus on the characters.  Sure, all the worldbuilding stuff is interesting, but it’s not what hooks the reader.  If all you’ve got is thirty seconds, don’t cut to the chase–and don’t give a synopsis!  Synopsis =/= pitch!

Charlie was exhausted, so as we talked, she started ranting in a way that can be described as bluntly honest.  Interestingly enough, most of what she said was actually quite helpful, not only for Genesis Earth, but also for my other projects.

The most helpful thing she mentioned was that when you’re writing characters, you often have to pick out their distinctive character traits and consciously overemphasize them.  If you don’t, the reader might not pick up on it and find your characters stale and boring.  While I hate melodrama and try to keep my novels free of it, I also need to keep my characters interesting.  It’s a fine line to walk, but one that you can’t avoid.

She also said that it’s very easy for protagonists to be more boring than the main characters.  I think this is probably because we rely on formulas and cliches when we’re starting out, since that’s much less risky than breaking the rules we don’t yet fully understand.  The protagonist is the character closest to the trope, while the side characters can do what they want without threatening the integrity of the story.  

Charlie said that because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of a boring protagonist, you need to consciously choose the traits that are interesting about that character and work them into the story as much as possible.  I realized, as she said that, that my main protagonist for Hero in Exile is, indeed, a boring character.  I need to pick out the things that make him interesting and consciously work those into his character.

This got me to think about planning.  I’ve found that if I try to outline a novel when I set out to write the rough draft, I end up telling a completely different story.  However, if I try to write a second draft without an outline, I have a hard time keeping things straight and fixing all the stuff I missed while discovery writing the first draft.

(I’m really upset now, because I was going to mention something that I need to foreshadow in the next revision of Genesis Earth, but…I totally forgot what it was!  GAH!!!  That’s what I get for not outlining!)

Charlie then started to rant about some of our writing friends, and how she would never listen to criticism on her writing from someone she considered to be an inferior writer to herself.

That part was…interesting.  While I agree 110% that arguing with criticism is a sign of a poor writer, I don’t think it’s especially useful to rank writers in terms of “good” or “bad.” I would like to believe that I can learn something from everybody, and not just what not to do.  Perhaps that’s optimistic, but I think it’s also practical–I’ve found that a bloated ego can shoot you in the foot six ways to Sunday before you even know what’s going on.  I’ve found that not just through one unfortunate experience, but through several.

Brandon Sanderson said something very interesting in the last email he sent out to his English 318 class: he said that in New York, editors and agents don’t rank manuscripts by “good” and “bad,” they rank them by how much work they think it needs to be publishable.  There is a distinction between the two, just as there’s a distinction between recognizing something that works really well and something that follows the rules.  

That’s about all I have the time for now.  I’ve got to get to bed.  Late night internet == bad idea.

Fine tuning and David Gemmell ROCKS!!!

With Danke’s help, I’ve tweaked the site yet some more: updated the header image, put in the site description under the title, moved the comments link at the bottom of each post (where it really belongs–having it at the top is confusing), etc.  Now, the site is even better than ever!

All this playing around with CSS and the site code is making me wish I had majored in computer science or graphic design–this stuff is kind of fun!  I’ve also noticed that there seems to be a ton of job opportunities for graphic design (though I haven’t really been looking)–maybe this is something I could teach myself and figure it out while on the job?  It sounds like fun, but where to start?

Speaking of which, I need to do something useful with my photoblog.  I’ll bet I could make money off of it, I’m just not sure what the best way to approach it is.  I’m thinking a “tip the artist” button somewhere unobtrusive, a “buy this image” kind of thing, perhaps some kind of a print-on-demand coffee-table book…well, probably the BEST place to start is to drive more traffic to the site.  30 unique visitors per day isn’t all that impressive. =P

In miscellaneous updates, I picked up a book by David Gemmell at the library.  Gemmell writes some amazing heroic fantasy, and I’ve realized that that’s kind of what I’m shooting for with Bringing Stella Home.  I’m reading some other novels, too, but none of them have really grabbed me (in fact, I put a couple of them down just out of disgust and content issues).  

This Gemmell book I picked up, however, is awesome!  Hooked me on the first page, with some fast action, engaging characters, and interesting philosophical reflections.   Unlike the other stuff I’ve been reading, most of which I’ve been reading over the past few weeks, I’ll probably finish this Gemmell book in a few days.  Good stuff!

And…it’s past 2am.  Bah.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that I decided to pick up Hero in Exile and revise it.

 I’ve completely revised my outline (translation: I threw it out wholesale and decided to play it by ear, with a vague idea of the ending instead of a firm plan) and decided to give one of the side characters a viewpoint, since I don’t think the main protagonist has enough of a story to drive the entire novel by himself.  Renamed him from “Tristan” to “Cavin,” and I’ll probably change the title as well.  

The first chapter is still shaky, but meh, it’s good enough for a first draft.  I’ll probably throw it out once I’ve written the ending and start somewhere else.

There are two reasons I decided to pick up this project–three, actually: 1) I enjoy writing in the universe of Bringing Stella Home, and Hero in Exile is where I got most of my setting ideas for that novel; 2) I need practice writing endings, so I didn’t want to leave this as an unfinished project, and; 3) I feel I need a second project to work on when I get exhausted with the first one.  

Hopefully, instead of getting tripped up,  can recharge my creative batteries for the one while working on the other.  At least, that’s the theory; we’ll see how it translates into practice.

The second wind of inspiration

The more I write, the more I’ve come to realize that in order to finish a novel, you have to rediscover something powerful about the story that motivates you to tell it.  The thing that motivates you to start the story is rarely the thing that drives you to finish it.

Around the second half of the novel, I usually find yourself losing steam and groping for inspiration. As I write, the story takes its own shape and morphs into something different than it was when I started. My initial motivating idea becomes obsolete, and I have to find another source of inspiration to drive me to finish.

For Genesis Earth, that thing was a scene in the fourth chapter. Late at night sometime in March 2008, I sat down in the FLSR laundry room to clunk out the 2,000 words required for my English 318 class that week. I don’t know what it was, but everything aligned just right and the words flowed out beautifully onto the page. When I was finished, I looked over what I had written and realized that it wasn’t that bad.  On the contrary, it was unusually good.

A few months later, when I was about halfway through, everything seemed to be going wrong. The characters weren’t working, the conflict was petering out, my writing sucked, and it was all terrible. I was honestly tempted to throw out the whole novel and forget about it.

But then I remembered that scene–the one that was so much better than all of the other stuff that I’d written. I realized that if I threw out the novel, that scene would die with it. I had to finish my story, if for no other reason than to give that scene a place to live. As a result, I pulled through and finished the novel–and I’m glad I did, because that work represents a major landmark in my writing life.

The scary part is that you can never really know what it is that will give you your second wind. If you’re too critical, too judgmental of your own work, or sometimes just too focused, you’ll miss it. To find it, you have to be flexible with your outline, sensitive to new thoughts, emotions, and impressions, and (perhaps most important of all), you just have to have faith in the story you’re trying to tell.

I recently found the inspiration for my second wind with Bringing Stella Home. It’s a scene that I wrote just last week, where a major character dies.  I’d planned it out as a gut-wrenchingly tragic moment, the ultimate low point in the protagonist’s quest.  When I wrote it, however, I realized that it was much more than that: it was a merciful release for the character who died, and (though he doesn’t realize it) a victory of sorts for the protagonist.

That scene affected me in ways that I was not expecting. While the prose itself needs tightening and the scene needs revision, I realized that it has some great potential.  Because of that, I now have a driving desire to see the story finished.

13,837 words in a day?

Yeah, that’s right.  Believe it or not, I barreled through about 13,837 words today.  That’s thirteen THOUSAND, not thirteen hundred.

Now, only about a thousand of that was new stuff  that I was writing.  Most of the rest of it was rearranging scenes that I’d already written, touching them up only a tiny bit.  I did merge a couple of scenes, delete or tone down some stuff, etc.

So really, about 90% of my work today was just revision, and not even really hardcore revision at that.  I’m still treating this version of my story as a rough draft; I’m not taking the time to polish things up and fix the known minor problems.  Really, I’m just running through what I’ve already written to make sure I have what I need to get past the roadblock I hit back in April.

The biggest thing I’m doing right now is rearranging scenes into entirely new chapter arrangements.  This seems to be a problem everytime I write a story with multiple viewpoints: I never seem to get the prelude-rising-falling-resolution-cliffhanger action that good chapters have.  I write scenes as they come to me, in a progression that seems natural at the time, but once I take a step back, I find that things work better on the macro-level if I complete rearrange which scenes come where in the narrative.

Part of that is that sometimes I just need to write a few paragraphs (or even a few scenes) just for me to figure out what’s going on, plotwise or settingwise.  What I’m finding with Bringing Stella Home is that I’m taking scenes from James and Danica’s viewpoints and moving them up a chapter or two, cutting out the filler in the middle.

I’ve got a long way to go before I master the art of good chapter structure.  Or perhaps it’s something that I do better when I’m revising, not drafting.  After all, I think I’m more of a discovery writer than a firm outliner.  Perhaps I write in a sort of puzzled up everywhere kind of way, and then do best when I don’t put all the pieces together until after I’ve vomited them all on the page.

I am getting more excited about this story, though.  Taking a step back and looking at things from a more global perspective has really re-energized me.  I can see the major turning points, and that helps me to build up for them much better.

I’m only worried that the “midpoint” is going to be somewhere around the 3/5ths mark, not the halfway mark as it should be.  One of my goals with this book is to see if I can hold to the three act structure and whether that makes my story any stronger.  But, according to the website, the midpoint occurs “approximately” at the halfway point, so I guess I can fudge it.

Also, the midpoint is supposed to be where the main character hits rock bottom.  Hee hee hee…oh, he will.  He will.  Bwahahahaha!!!

In the meantime, you owe it to yourself to listen to this:

Almost done!

Yay!  I’m almost done with Genesis Earth 2.0!  6k words of revision done today, bringing the project up to 95% complete.  Just the final scene of the final chapter, and then the epilogue, and she’s done!

(Well, at least the second draft is done.  She’s probably going to need a lot more work after that, but if I don’t put some distance between myself and this novel for a month or two, I’m not going to be able to see what she needs.  Still, I feel confident that this rewrite is a significant improvement from the first draft.)

The coolest thing about this revision process is that it’s actually been kind of fun.  It has involved a lot of work: hours and hours of grappling with the text to find the right way to say things, research ranging from various psychological disorders to the structure of wormholes to the composition of DNA, and lots and lots of time thinking through various aspects of the story (basically, daydreaming…but hey! it was hard work!).  But even though it was a lot of work, it was fun work and I really enjoyed it.

What’s even cooler is that I’ve got 22 beta readers lined up to read it and give me feedback–boo yah!  Inshallah I’ll be finishing the second draft tomorrow sometime and sending it out to everyone before the end of the day.  

After this project, I’ll be moving on to Bringing Estella Home.  It needs a major rehaul before I can pick it up from where I left off (the rough draft is currently incomplete), but that shouldn’t be too hard.

I put up a status bar for Bringing Estella Home on the sidebar, even though it’s stilll the rough draft.  It’s currently at 60k words, and I set 100k as the base for calculating the percentage complete.  It probably won’t be more than 100k…120k at the very most.  We’ll see how that works out.  

Currently, it’s at 0%, since I’m going to start from the very begining and rewrite it up to where I left off.  I know, everone says that’s not a good idea–and usually it is–but it’s been almost a month since I’ve worked on this project, and I need to get back into it, starting with the beginning.  

Taking a break from it for a while was a good idea, I think, because I realized things just weren’t working.  The time off helped me to step back and see what was wrong, as well as recouperate my energy and enthusiasm for the project.  I made the mistakes of simultaneously outlining too much and too little as I was still writing the rough draft; too much, because I was keeping a map of every scene on a piece of butcher paper, cementing scenes where some of them needed to be cut; too little, because I tried to create a private mercenary outfit without figuring out all the crew roles I needed the various characters to fill.  

But now, none of that is an issue, and I’m ready to get started.  Tomorrow, in fact, if all goes well.  🙂

Revision, revision, revision

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the other chapters.

The thing about revising is that if you change something fundamental about the character / setting / plot early on, it changes everything that happens later, meaning that you have even more revisions to make. It’s like ripples on a pond, or switching tracks at a railroad junction hundreds of miles before your destination. Right now, a lot of the changes I decided to make earlier are making much larger changes necessary later on. That’s one reason why this chapter took so long to revise.

Another reason is because I felt I’d told it wrong the first time. A lot of my alpha readers said that my novel was weakest on conflict; they didn’t feel that it had enough conflict to carry them through the longer parts in the middle. I realized, when I reread it, that the conflict was mostly there, it just wasn’t emphasized properly.

A lot of these revisions had to do with connecting the events better, starting late and exiting early, creating more of a build up to the climax. They also involved changing the order in which I explained certain things–it created more tension to bring up certain things earlier, before the action. Tension and release.

I think I failed to do all that in the rough draft because I’m more of what Sanderson calls a “discovery writer.” The middle sections are always the hardest for me, because I have to figure things out as I go along. I’ve tried planning everything out from the beginning, but when I did that, the story that came out was completely different than what I’d planned.

Trouble is, if I’m discovering my story as I’m going along, the middle sections are going to be much more choppy and rough. I can write a pretty good beginning, and I think I can pull off a decent ending, but the stuff in the middle is just all over the place, every time I write.

Fortunately, I think the revision process is going well. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s producing results. I think chapter 6 works much better now, though it could probably use a little more tweaking just to fit it into the context of the story as a whole. Better finish the 2.0 revision before I do that, though.

For a while, I thought that with school out and all this free time on my hands before I really go anywhere, I could finish the 2.0 revision before the end of the week. Now, I’m thinking it will probably take more time. I could probably be about 75% done by the end of the week, though. Even with all these deep revisions, I’m plugging along at a healthy pace. And honestly, this is the kind of work I enjoy. It’s a challenge, but not an unpleasant one at all.