Frustrations – Page 17 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Running the gauntlet

In the past five days, I have written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words. None of them has been fiction (at least, not explicitly–more BS, if anything).

One monster history term paper, one middling poli sci essay, and two exams requiring 2,000 and 1,000 word essays. Blegh. Like pulling teeth.

The upside is, it’s almost finished! Just got my history exam left, and it shouldn’t be too hard. There is an essay, but the teacher already gave us the two questions from which he’ll pick the one on the test, and a short answer section. The rest is multiple choice. Not too hard, especially because I’ve really enjoyed the class.

The two exams I took today…let’s just say I’m glad it’s behind me. The deeper you get into your major, the more you have to take dumb classes about things you don’t care just to graduate. Blegh.

There is one other exam besides the history one, but I’m not counting it because it’s Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class. His final exams consists of the first three chapters of you novel, plus a query letter and synopsis that he’ll mail out to the editor/agent of your choice (sending out the submission is a required part of the final). I did some research, found an agent, sent out a query email. If I get a response, I’ll send out the chapters to her. If not…I’ll send it out somewhere else. It didn’t seem like she wanted people to send her partials without her requesting it, so I didn’t send that out.

You know, it’s funny how the title of your novel seems a whole lot less clever when you’re finally sending it out to people.

And, as if things weren’t crazy enough, Utah decided to play jokes on us with the weather. We got our worst snowstorm of the year…on April 15th? Holy cow! WTH? (that’s “what the heck,” for all of you non-Utahans)

Here are some shots from my photoblog, before and after (or rather, before and during).

Crazy!

Semester endgame

Seven days! Seven days! And then the semester is over! Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, in the course of those seven days, I’ve got three major papers to write. It’s going to suck.

But then it’s over!

Thank goodness. This semester has been pretty crazy–not in terms of work, but in terms of motivation. A lot of the classes I took (especially MESA 350) are basically just repeating the things I already know, which is really boring. When you’re bored, you don’t have much motivation to do the work, and when that happens…well, let’s just say that bad things happen when that happens.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), there’s nothing quite as motivating as last minute panic. The work will get done.

Unfortunately (and this is definitely unfortunately), the end-of-semester crunch will almost certainly take time away from my writing. Just when things were going so well, too. The revision of Genesis Earth is coming along VERY well–I’m not only enjoying it, I think I’m making some excellent fundamental improvements on the story. Of all of the novels I’ve written or worked on, I think this one is the most promising. If I didn’t have any other obligations, I could almost certainly finish this revision in a week–possibly even less. I’d really love to get into it.

Also, the other day I had an idea how to revive Hero in Exile and turn it into a workable story. Hero in Exile is the working title of the novel I started last fall, but after I got 70,000 words into it, I realized that the story I was writing and the story I had in mind were incompatible with each other. I put it all away, recycled some of the basic ideas, and used those for Bringing Estella Home. Well, now that I’ve put Bringing Estella Home on hold (ironically, after getting 70,000 words into it), I just had some really interesting ideas how I could make Hero in Exile work! It would require throwing out my original outline almost completely, but I could use almost everything I wrote previously–basically, tell the story that I was writing instead of the story I thought I was writing.

Except I have to change the name of the main character. “Tristen” just isn’t a good guy’s name–at least not for science fiction.

So now, I’m considering picking up that story and putting Bringing Estella Home on hold for a while. I’m going to be really busy these next couple of weeks, but after all the craziness has settled somewhat it’s going to be a very interesting question. Honestly, I have no idea. It could go either way.

But it’s all academic until the semester is finally over. But dude! SEVEN DAYS!!!! And then…FREEDOM!!!!

This sucks and I’m a horrible writer

It’s getting really, really hard for me not to believe that statement, especially as I finish up with the middle part of this novel. I’m starting to realize that I made a whole bunch of mistakes pages and pages ago, and that the climaxes just aren’t working without everything set up right.

I know, cognitively, that it’s mostly just psychological and that this book probably isn’t as bad as I think it is, but I’m finding it hard to convince myself of that. I got to the climax of part II yesterday, and it was…not what I’d had in my head. That’s probably what’s frustrating me the most. If I can’t write down the story as I have it in my head, what does that mean? It either means I’m a terrible writer, or that I didn’t get the setup right (or both…gah!).

So…where do I go from here? Throwing out the entire story isn’t an option–I’m not going to allow myself to do that. I could, however, put it on the back burner for a while, let it simmer…or I could do or die and finish the 1.0 draft, no matter how crappy it turns out. I suppose that would accomplish something for my self esteem, but is that the way to best serve the story?

Fortunately, this past week we talked about revision in English 318. Listening to my recording of the class gave me a few ideas. I could make a list of known problems, with their fixes, and continue as if I’d already made them. I think I did that a few times with The Phoenix of Nova Terra, but I don’t know how I feel about that now. I could probably make it work…

The main issue is that I feel very, very distant from this book. A month ago, I was immersed in the thing, writing over a thousand words each day, just chugging it out. Now, for various reasons, other things have come up and drawn away my attention, so I don’t feel that I’m really in this world anymore. I feel like I’m more of an outsider, writing for the sake of writing rather than trying to tell this story the way it wants to be told. I can’t really remember what I wrote a hundred pages ago, despite that big sheet of butcher paper up in my closet.

Another thing that complicates all of this is that I’m really, really excited about the other novel, Genesis Earth. I’ve gotten back comments from most of my alpha readers, and I’m all but chomping at the bit to start working on it again. If I had nothing else going on, no pressing obligations or assignments, with the enthusiasm I have for this project I could probably finish the second draft in a week, and the third draft the week after that.

So…what’s next?

Well, I think I’m going to start the revision on Genesis Earth today or tomorrow. When I was this enthused about revising Pheonix, I decided to wait and finish Genesis Earth instead, and the enthusiasm for that project died down surprisingly fast. Better to start now than wait until I’ve got the free time but struggle with motivation.

In the meantime, I’m going to finish the current chapter of Bringing Estella Home and let it rest for a bit. I’ll probably reread what I’ve got from the beginning, make a few revision notes, perhaps an outline of sorts–try to figure out what’s wrong, what I need to change to make it work. I’ll restrain myself from actually making those revisions (though I did that, mid-draft, for Genesis Earth, and it turned out alright…sort of), but once I feel I’m sufficiently “into” the story again, I’ll get back to work and finish the 1.0 draft. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do all that before the end of May.

The trouble here is that I’ll probably end up writing the first draft of this novel and revising the other one at the same time…something I tried last September and failed miserably. However, by the time all of this is finished, inshallah school will be over and I won’t have to worry about it. Things are looking really good for me to get an internship in NYC, which makes me think I should drop my Spring classes and just take it easy for a month before I start (as for housing, that’s a whole other conundrum…).

Gah! Writing is complicated. Is this something I want to do for the rest of my life? Something I can do? I don’t know. I really don’t know. I just have to keep on writing through this depressing pessimism and trust that it will pass.

As a side note, I took the title of this post from a Writing Excuses episode some time ago; here is the link to that episode, in case you want to hear it.

Ugghhhhh…

Man, I am sick. It sucks.

I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel. That sucks too.

When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project. Is this really any go0d? Is the story really holding out? Things slow down a lot, and you lose most of the enthusiasm that carried you through the first half. The daily drudgery of writing becomes harder and harder, and pretty soon you can’t see beyond the chapter you’re presently writing. It’s not a whole lot of fun.

Then, as you get into the final stretch, the ending comes into sight and you start to regain a little bit of the enthusiasm. Your goal isn’t too distant, and you start to see how things wrap up to bring you to that final climax and ending. You find yourself believing in the story again, and excited to see it to the grand finale.

Of course, the actual writing gets harder and harder, exponentially, right up until the last page, but you’ve regained the motivation and you have at least a portion of the drive.

Right now, I’m kind of at the low point. It doesn’t help that school is starting to get busier, too. It certainly doesn’t help to be sick, even if it does give me more time around the house (man, I need to get out…I need to get out…). But I’m almost at the end of the second act–one climactic battle, one huge and tragic development, one major try-fail cycle, and then I’m on the final stretch. I’m currently at 64,250 words, so I should wrap up part two by about 68k and finish up the novel at around 100k. Perhaps a little longer, but I don’t think part three is going to be much longer than part two.

One of the major doubts I have about this novel is that it’s too predictable. All of my readers from English 318 have been making their predictions, and…really, most of them are correct. In fact, they’re correctly predicting stuff that happens WAY later, stuff from part three that I haven’t written yet. If this story doesn’t have any surprises, I worry that it might not be as good.

On the other hand, it has some ideas and concepts that are really drawing in my alpha readers, particularly with the Hameji. Over and over again, that’s the comment I get–they want to find out more about the Hameji. This is something that might help me to carry the book, even if it is a bit predictable: show this barbarian spacefaring culture at their most brutal, make them the key antagonists, and then slowly humanize them until the readers understand exactly why they do what they do, and even come to agree with them. That is pretty fun.

So we’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early–9:30 or 10:00. This sickness is just killing me, and I don’t know of anything more effective at curing it than sleep. G’night.

Slow but steady

Okay, quick post before I go to bed.

Things are progressing in this novel, slowly but surely, as you can see from the wordcount. Unlike past weeks, I’m not pushing myself too hard, mostly because I’ve got a lot of schoolwork right now and if I were to spend much more time on this novel, I would neglect a lot of the more important stuff. Even though my course load is relatively light this semester, I’m a senior and I’m really not as motivated to do this stuff as I used to be. I get done what needs to get done, but just barely.

I have been successfully getting up early, however. And I’ve discovered something very interesting: I’m more productive when I have less free time. Thursday, I didn’t have class until noon, so when I got on the computer at about 6:30 to write, I opened up the email, opened up facebook…and, by the time I had to leave for class, I had only written about 430 words. Disgusting. But today, when I had class at 9:00 am and still had my Arabic homework to do, I got in about 700 words in half an hour.

I still have a lot of self discipline to learn, I guess. 😛 The scary thing is that my idea, up to this point, has been to keep my time open in the summer so that I’ll be able to write. Err…yeah. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments back from my alpha readers on Genesis Earth, and it’s been REALLY fun! Even the criticism–as long as it’s helpful criticism, I really appreciate it. This one girl in my ward asked me if she could be an alpha reader, then read the whole thing in only a couple of days. She had a LOT of positive comments–in fact, almost all of her comments were positive–and she said she really loved it! So much so, in fact, that she said she was having withdrawals, so I sent her The Phoenix of Nova Terra v1.2. Hopefully, getting her comments back will give me motivation to pick up that old thing and rework it…goodness knows it needs it. Needs it bad.

My first two novels, The Phoenix of Nova Terra and Genesis Earth are completely different in some ways, but very similar in others.

<spoiler alert>

They both have an important romantic element, and they both have generally positive endings. The book I’m writing now is something of a tragedy, at least at it’s core, and there is a completely different dynamic there. No love stories, no happy resolutions–lots of pain, lots of violence, lots of grappling with difficult issues.

</spoiler alert>

I suppose it’s good to try out a lot of different things early on in your writing career. That’s what I’m doing. At the same time, though…I get feedback on the one novel, and I kind of want to work on it instead of the one right in front of me! And when I think about what I did right in the one I finished, I look at the one I’m currently writing and I think “man, this is crap.” Of course, I keep working on it because I recognize that I ALWAYS think “man, this is crap” at some point before I’m done. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier, however.

Jason from the FLSR writing group said something interesting about that, however. He said that writing a draft of a novel is like climbing a mountain: you do it three times.

The first time, you climb it in your mind as you plan it out. You’re excited and motivated, and busy with all the preparations.

The second time, you actually physically do the work of climbing. It is long, hard, and frustrating, you get lost a few times, the summit is anticlimactic, and the return is boring. You can’t wait until you’ve finished and it’s all over.

The third time is when you look back on the experience after you’re safely back down. No matter how excruciating the climb was, you look back on it fondly and remember all the best parts. You thrive on the memories and wish that you were back up there, standing on the summit, enjoying the experience.

Right now, I’m on my third climb for Genesis Earth and my second climb for Bringing Estella Home. I can remember how miserable I was when I was still in the middle of Genesis Earth–for a while I seriously thought about throwing the whole thing out and doing something else. However, now that I’ve been letting it sit for a while, I’m getting really, really excited about it! I can hardly wait before I can get back and write the second draft.

But that’s not going to happen until I finish Bringing Estella Home. And, no matter how difficult it gets, I swear I WILL finish this book! I’m a chapter away from act III, and that’s too deep into the thing to quit and start something else! This book WILL be finished–if not by April, then by sometime in May!

Experiment, take two

Ok…the experiment I wrote about last week…yeah, it failed. Miserably. Got almost no writing done, and I wasn’t able to get up early hardly ever.

However, I’m going to try it again. Part of the problem was that I always ended up staying up late, past 1am, even when I intended to get up early, and that just killed me. Also, whenever I did get up early, I always allowed myself to get distracted by other important things, such as email, homework, etc. The predictable result? No productivity.

There were other problems too, however. It’s the middle of the semester, so the weeks are starting to race by like so much rushing water. I’m not the only one who feels like the last week was sucked out of my life without my realizing it. Also, before I started the week, I lost a lot of writing momentum by missing a few of my daily wordcount goals. I would write 2,000 to 3,000 words one day, the next day, nothing. Lost momentum can be really crippling.

When you write late at night, you tend to go through this routine of distracting yourself, checking your email, playing a game here and there, chatting with friends, etc, before you finally settle down to start writing. This is my current routine. I need to get to the point where I’m able to sit down, open the document, and get started. Or, if I can’t get to that point, I at least want to minimize the distraction time.

So, this week, I’m trying it again. I’ll try to get up early, 6am if I can, and get in at least a half hour of writing each day. We’ll see how it goes.

Progress!

I’m sludging through the middle of Bringing Estella Home. I’ve heard people call this the “blue collar work” of writing, all the parts between the beginning chapters and climactic ending chapters. I believe it.

In particular, I was having some difficulty with chapter 7 last week. I have, basically, three separate plot threads tied up in four viewpoints. Sometimes, it can be frustrating to give them all equal time while putting the scenes together in such a way that they contrast and build off of each other. In particular, it’s difficult to get the chapters right.

I’ve heard that each chapter is supposed to be its own distinct sub-story, with its rising action, a mini-climax, and a falling action of some kind. I’m fairly confident that I can do this intuitively over one or two viewpoints, but over four viewpoints, with three different plot lines? It’s tough. Last time I tried was with my first novel, and when I went back for the rewrite I had to reorder several of the chapters, especially the first three ones.

The way I’m doing it for Bringing Estella Home is picking one of the plot lines to be the main subject, if you will, of the chapter. I build on the other plot lines as well, but the big climax, the big reveal, comes in the plot line that I’ve designated for that chapter. Typically, I’ll start each chapter with a viewpoint from the plot line that is central to the rising and falling action of that chapter–or, if I don’t start it with the viewpoint, I start it with the characters talking about the idea that is central to the climax of the chapter.

Originally, I thought that the climax / central aspect of chapter 7 would be the brainwashing / mind-altering procedures that Ben undergoes in becoming a soldier for the Hameji. I started with James discussing the Hameji with the other mercenaries on the ship and talking about various legends they’ve heard of mind-altering drugs that give the Hameji special powers. The next scene was Ben forced to take some of those drugs.

However, I really hadn’t figured out Ben’s part of the story at this point. I knew he’d take the drug, and I knew how it would change him, but I didn’t know what happened next. As a result, the rest of the chapter just felt like a chore, one that I accomplished over several late nights (probably to the detriment of the quality of the writing :P)

It wasn’t working. The chapter just didn’t feel like it held together.

Then, I had a genius idea–why not make the last scene of chapter 6 the first scene of chapter 7? The viewpoint was from Estella, meeting the jealous head wife of the Hameji overlord. That scene set up the conflict for the next two chapters of Estella’s story–in retrospect, why didn’t I make it an opening scene for that reason alone?

I don’t know. But it worked out wonderfully well! Once I shifted the central focus of the story to Estella, EVERYTHING fell into place! Her conflict at this point really was a lot more interesting than anything else in the chapter.

So now, with chapter 7 under my belt, I am WAY excited for chapter 8! While I was walking back from school one day, I figured out exactly what needs to happen next in his story, and it is amazing! Brutal, violent, and torturous, but it is amazing! And this is the perfect chapter to insert James’s philosophical discussion with Danica, the one that I wrote down nearly a month ago just because I had to get it out! I’m excited. Maybe I’ll even finish it before Saturday.

Anyways, it is 2:30 am, and I am way tired. Time to get some sleep. Thank goodness my first class doesn’t start until noon! 🙂

update on the novel

Ughh…….

Alright, in the tradition of last year when I would write until 2am every night and then blog on it before going to bed, here is another update on how Bringing Estella Home is going right now.

It’s getting tougher. I’m right in the middle of it right now, in chapter 7, and I’m not sure whose viewpoint I should do next or how I should be organizing these chapters. I’ve got four viewpoints, but really there are three separate subplots going on, and I need to give them each equal time while structuring them so that the tension builds from one to the other. When you don’t know what your chapter is doing in relation to the novel as a whole, it’s difficult.

My readers in English 318 tell me that one of the most interesting things in this story is the culture of the antagonists, the Hameji, and that’s really good because I want it to be interesting. I’ve created a sort of ruthless, cold-hearted, irrationally violent barbarian culture, and over the course of the rest of the novel I’m going to show exactly WHY they are so violent, what drove them to it, etc. Sound familiar? It’s my Mongols in space idea, and it’s coming along very well…

…except that I didn’t have Ben’s part figured out very well. He’s the one who gets brainwashed and turned into one of their soldiers, given a drug that melds his emotional being with that of a collective–kind of like the borg, but only with feelings and emotions, not with thoughts. It will be interesting to play with that idea, but this chapter, which was originally supposed to focus more on his experience with that transition, just…didn’t work out as well. Not a lot of screen time for him, for some odd reason.

So I did a little bit of thinking as I was walking home today. I thought to myself, “if I were a Hameji commander, how would I train these guys?” And it worked out very well! I think I know what I need to do now, what Ben’s story is going to be for the next couple of chapters. That’s very good.

Man, going for a walk can really help you sort things out and figure out what happens next. Even though I have an mp3 player, I rarely listen to it as I’m walking to and from campus. Many times I have my best ideas while making the commute. If/when I become a professional novelist, I’m going to have to set aside time each day for long walks.

Finally, I’m a little worried that I’m falling behind on my deadline. I wanted to finish this thing by the final exam day, sometime in April, but now that I’m sludging through the middle, I wonder if it might take longer. I have the climaxes figured out very well, but I’m still a long ways away from them. I might not finish this novel until the end of May, especially since I’ll have to do some major revisions of the first three chapters to hand it in for the English 318 final. That won’t give me a lot of time to revise my novels for World Fantasy 2009…

Bah. There is so much to think about. Rather than deal with it now, I’m going to go to bed.

Worldbuilding

This is what I was doing the other day. The FLSR (Foreign Language Student Residence) at BYU has chalkboards in the common rooms, and I just discovered that those can be WAY useful for diagramming your story.

On this occasion, I drew out a couple of space battles, according to how they’d play out with the FTL technology I’ve been thinking up and a few other things. I worked things out logically and figured out a few basic rules of combat–some basic strategies that you can expect people to follow. I then took what I know about the Hameji, the main antagonists in my novel, and figured out how they would use their special abilities to counter these tactics.

Pretty fun. Now, when I go back and rewrite the beginning, I can make the opening space battles feel a lot more vivid, immediate, and engaging.

I finished part 1 of my story last week, and now I’m at the beginning of part 2. I’ve got the novel roughly outlined out in my head, and it’s following fairly closely to the three act structure. Not exactly, but pretty close.

According to Brandon Sanderson (and several other people), act 2 is the most difficult part of the story. It’s where you need to do the “blue collar work” of simply sludging through and writing the thing. It’s where things get complicated enough that you can get lost if you don’t know how to plot things out. Considering the fact that I’ve only gotten this far with two other novels I’ve written, I’m expecting this part to be really difficult.

Only 599 words today, and none on Sunday (more because I was feeling sick than anything else). It really is getting easier to get hung up on a single scene; even if I know where I want to be three or four chapters from now, if the scene right in front of me isn’t working out, it’s almost impossible to move past it and get things to work.

Today I took a big piece of butcher paper from upstairs and drew a diagram of everything I’ve written so far, scene by scene. That was immensely helpful. Now I know what this chapter is about, what I need to do to bring it to a natural close and leave a hook for the next few chapters, and how to develop my characters and what they’re doing.

While taking a shower, I figured out what Estella needs to do next, and how to take her story over to the end of act 2 and carry her to act 3. That’s something of a breakthrough. I’m excited.

And…it’s late. I’d better get some sleep.

Always too slow

I’m kind of paranoid the way I plan things out. I set a grand deadline for the novel I’m writing, then I figure out a general plot (VERY general, without any of the subplots or other stuff), and use that to tell myself where I should be from week to week. I’ll have the few days ahead of me partitioned out really strictly, with “I want to be at this point in the story by this day,” but only for the week immediately ahead of me. I need a lot of room for discovery writing.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to be done with “act I” of Bringing Estella Home by the middle of last week. That didn’t work, because I got hung up in the chapter talking about Estella and her captivity. Then, I decided to be finished with “Act I” by Sunday…but as of now, I’m two scenes from the end of it. Blegh.

I tend to think I can write more than I actually do. Perhaps part of it has to do with just too many distractions. That’s a self-discipline issue. Another thing, though, is that I really do tend to burn out after a while. I can keep writing, but it will be difficult and probably not as good. My limit is at about 1,500 words per session.

However, another thing is that I do most of my writing late at night. What if I were to write in the mornings? Is that even possible? I could put down 1,500 words in the morning, spend the rest of the day replenishing the well (so to speak), and then write late at night after everything else is done. That would double my productivity.

It’s an interesting idea. I’ll try it out.

In the meantime, I am sooooo excited for how this act is going to end. They say that if you show a gun in Act I, someone’s going to get shot in Act II. Well…the last scene involves a gun…in the hands of James’s brother. Oooooh!

I’m so glad I’m not a character in my own novels. My life would be miserable. 😛