Frustrations – Page 18 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Productivity breakdown

I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing I accomplished in the past few semesters. In some ways, I worry that I’ve become a lot more disorganized and a lot less productive than I was a year ago.

Back in winter ’08, I took a couple of really difficult classes, got up early each morning to work in the BYU Bookstore stockroom, wrote a handful of very difficult research papers…and still managed to write about 120,000 words. Oh, and I wrote on this blog almost daily. I finished my first novel, started my second, read a dozen other novels, wrote reviews of them all…
I accomplished quite a lot.

In fall ’08, however, my workload was much lighter, my classes were ridiculously easy, I didn’t have to get up early to work…and yet I only wrote about 70,000 words, didn’t hardly write for this blog, only read a couple of books, etc etc. Much less productive.

Though, I guess you could say that I made up in other areas. I started working for the FHSS Writing Lab, and that took a lot of my time and mental energy. Also, I think the quality of my writing improved quite a bit, and I experimented a lot with things that I hadn’t tried previously. Right now, I feel that Genesis Earth, my second novel, is a much better work than The Phoenix of Nova Terra.

So maybe all of this “oh my goodness where did my productivity go” is just me worrying for no reason. It’s hard not to worry about it, though.

I know for certain that I could be much more productive with my time. I come home tired, with less than an hour before dinner, and I usually squander the time on the internet or with video game emulators. I tend to put off homework, and only do the stuff that will get me in trouble if I don’t do it (though some would say that that’s a life skill…hmmm…). On any given day, the last two hours before I go to bed is filled purely with time wasting activity. I could use an extra two hours of sleep…

Meh. I guess it’s always a struggle. A year from now, I’ll probably be saying “I can’t believe how productive I was back in winter ’09!” That, and “holy cow, what am I going to do after I graduate??”

Gah! Almost there!

Ok, so I didn’t finish my novel yesterday like I said I would. Instead, I went with a couple of friends from the old capitol house and went up to Salt Lake. Of course, Aneeka and I were in the midst of a race to see who would finish their novel first, so I invited her to come along with us. It just wouldn’t have done well to let her have a lead up on me. 😛

Of course, the next morning I was all busy with the quark writing group and all that, so I didn’t have a lot of time to write in the morning. Then, just as I sat down after lunch and was in the middle of finishing up this last chapter, I get a text from Aneeka saying “I’m done!”

GAH!

This novel is so crazy! But I WILL finish it tonight! I WILL! I’ve worked all afternoon on it and I’m 2323 words from where I was last night–no thanks to a random computer shutoff that made me lose the first 1000 words or so. #$%@!

If this novel has been like the 2nd choice girl you always come back to because she never says no, she’s got to be one of the most passive aggressive girls out there. Reaching the ending is like trying to climb an asymptote–it just keeps getting steeper and steeper, harder and harder, and you wonder if you’ll ever finish it. I swear, I am no further than 2 pages–less than a thousand words, even!–and I can’t finish the thing.

Maybe I’m just burned out for the moment. Maybe if I lie down and rest for a bit, I’ll have the energy to pick it up in a minute and pound out those last few words. I just need to replenish the well.

Assessment

Well, it’s a new year now, and English 318 has started! We had a wonderful class yesterday, getting things set up, figuring out our writing groups and all that. I am so looking forward to this semester!

With all of these changes happening, I thought I’d do a little recap and assessment of the last six months. I tried out a lot of new things over this time, and learned quite a bit about myself as a writer. I wish I could say that all of my experiments were successful, but at least I know a little bit better what works for me and what doesn’t. Here goes.

Experiment #1: Extensive planning and prewriting

About three months before I started Hero In Exile (the book I was writing last semester), I downloaded wikidpad and wrote a huge collection of articles, all about the world and the story plot. I spent a lot of time in worldbuilding before I’d even written a single word. I wanted to try this because I’m a discovery writer, and in my previous writing I tended to figure out the details of my world on the fly, as I wrote out the story.

This experiment was largely a failure, I think. I stopped writing Hero In Exile because it became too massive to write. As I wrote the story, I kept receiving story ideas and tried to integrate those, but towards the end of the first part, I realized that I was trying to doo too much. Planning didn’t stop me from discovery writing like I always do, and by the end everything was just too cluttered.

Experiment #2: Extensive prewriting of characters using Meyers Briggs personality types

I remember how a few months ago how I wrote a long post describing my characters using the Meyers Briggs typology (INTP, ESFJ, etc). I did this because I wanted more depth to my characters, and I supposed that by planning them out a little more, I would be in a better position to fully develop them.

My assessment on this is mixed, but overall I would tend to call it a failure. There were a handful of descriptions in the personality profiles that helped me to better understand these characters, but once I sat down and started writing, the characters started to do things that surprised me and that didn’t fit into what I had planned. By trying to describe their character before writing them, I wasn’t giving them enough room to show me who they really were; I didn’t give them enough space to act on their own and surprise me.

Studying the personality profiles was good in that it got me thinking more about my characters, but not a good way for me to conceptualize them before writing. I was simply trying to structure too much and not giving myself enough room to discover them and let them act on their own. By the end, I felt as if I were forcing my characters too much, and that made things very difficult.

Experiment #3: Waiting for the ideas to accumulate critical mass

For Hero in Exile, I felt all of my ideas reach a critical mass and converge while I was studying in Jordan. I then waited for nearly a month before sitting down and writing chapter 1. I did this for a couple of reasons: first, it simply wasn’t practical to start the project while I was studying abroad, and second, I had heard that a good novel is built out of a synthesis of several ideas, not just one, and I wanted to have all my ducks in a row before I started.

This also proved to be a mistake. Yes, it takes more than one idea to make a novel, but you don’t have to have all the ideas lined up before you start. I guess that planners do, but I’m not much of a planner, I’m more of a discovery writer. By waiting too long to start the book, I had too many ideas to work with.

However, with Genesis Earth, I had the exact opposite problem. I started way too early, before I had enough ideas to work with. Now, a year later, I’m struggling to wrap it up. The ideas have come, but the writing process was very choppy.

How do you judge when you’re ready to start? I have no idea how to measure it. It’s very touchy feely. I think I started Phoenix at the right time, but Hero was too late and Genesis was too early. At least I’m in a better place now to tell when is a good time to start.

Experiment #4: Spend more effort on detailed physical descriptions

When I wrote Hero in Exile, I found myself spending a lot of time on the aesthetics and physical descriptions of the world. I did the same in Genesis Earth. In doing so, I always tried to show, not tell, by giving some visceral or sensuous detail of something the viewpoint character was sensing.

I think this was a success. Whenever I brought in an excerpt from Hero into the quark writing group, everyone always complimented me on how how full and engaging my world was. The descriptions really added to the sense of wonder and helped them to feel that they were there.

Experiment #5: Avoid info dumps at all costs

Related to #4 was my decision to completely excise all info dumps from my writing. Anytime I found myself telling instead of showing, I stopped and focused on what was happening in the here and now of the story. I also withheld information to create curiosity and intrigue within the reader’s mind. Throughout this, of course, I always tried to keep my writing as clear as possible.

This, also, was a success, I think. At times, the readers became confused, but the withholding of information did create a lot of curiosity and desire to read more. Many times in the quark writing group, people said that they were sucked in by the writing and very much wanted to read on to find out what happened next!

Experiment #6: Create difficult ethical dilemmas and have the characters wrestle with them

I wanted to try writing stories that are more thematic and deal with controversial and difficult issues. For Hero, I had the main character struggle to keep his honor and chastity, where the people he trusted and loved the most try to manipulate him by tempting him to give in to his sexual urges.

I’m not sure if this was a success or not. I think that it was, but it was like pulling teeth, and some of the scenes are a little bit graphic. I guess that without giving my story out to some alpha readers, I have no idea whether it was a success or not. I have learned, however, that it’s not a good idea to sacrifice entertainment for a message. It’s possible to do both, and if your own story is something you’re not excited to tell, it’s not going to be easy to write it.

In short, last semester I wrote about 75,000 words total, without much to show for it except the unfinished rough draft of a flawed book, and a partially finished novel that I started last year. Still, I think I’ve learned quite a bit from the experience.

Back in school

So, school has started again! As fun as the vacation was, it’s good to be back.

I think I’ve more or less finalized my schedule by now. I’m taking an Arabic grammar class, a poli sci class on Islamic politics (taught by an Arab guy who drove ambulances in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion/occupation in the 80s), a class on modern Middle East history, a class on Islam and contemporary society, and…English 318! The one taught by Brandon Sanderson!

I took this class last year, and it was a lot of fun. Brandon Sanderson is the best selling author of the Mistborn fantasy series, as well as the Alcatraz YA series and Elantris. He also teams up with Howard Taylor and Dan Wells for the excellent writing podcast, Writing Excuses. Genesis Earth, the novel I’m currently working on, is a novel I started in his class last year.

Last semester was really miserable for me because few of my classes were challenging or interesting; most of them were easy, boring classes that I was only taking because they were required. Not so this semester. Even if two or three of my classes this semester turn out to be tedious and draining, English 318 is going to make it all worth it.

Here’s the thing, though; I’m not sure if I should rewrite one of my older novels or start a completely new one for English 318 this year. Brandon tends to encourage us to start with something fresh, but I would really like to revise the novel I wrote last year. I was originally planning on doing that, but then I thoought about it for a little bit, and realized that I wanted to do something with the Mongols in space idea before it drifts out of my mind.

In some ways, though, this throws a wrench in the works for my long term plans. I want to have three novels polished for World Fantasy 2009, and I was originally thinking about doing The Phoenix of Nova Terra, Genesis Earth, and Hero in Exile. However, if I were to start something completely new, that would mean throwing out all the work I did last semester for Hero in Exile and doing something completely new.

I don’t know, but before I can do anything, I’d better finish Genesis Earth, and fast. The first English class is in two days, and I don’t want to juggle two novels. That means I’m going to have to sprint these next two days to finish this novel.

Finishing this novel is harder than I’d thought

So is trying to hit 3,000 words each day. For the past week, I’ve been doing between 1,500 and 2,500 words every day, but lately it’s just been really hard. I’m on break, and I know that I should have more time for this kind of stuff, but I don’t know.

It has been a while since I’ve worked on this story, and that might be a part of it. I dropped it in the summer and just picked it up again a week ago. That might have something to do with it.

I think it’s more than that, though, and I’m not sure what it is. Instead of savoring the time that I have to write, I dread it and find myself putting it off and finding other things to do. Most of my writing has been coming late at night, at the end of the day. If I really was driven and enthusiastic about writing this novel, I think I’d be doing all my writing earlier on in the day.

Bah. It’s like there’s some law of the universe that the closer you get to the end, the more you think it sucks and the less motivation you have to finish the damn thing. At least, that’s the way it is for me.

But I will finish it before school starts up again. That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what I’m going to accomplish. Even if it ends up being less than 50,000 words, which is quite possible.

Right now, I’m just over 35,000, and right on the cusp of the central climax of the story. At least, that’s the way I’d originally envisioned it–the rest should mostly be winding things down.

The really interesting thing is that now that I’m banging my head against a wall with this story (Genesis Earth), the other one that I was struggling so much with before (Hero in Exile) doesn’t look nearly as bad. I could almost pick it up and work on it again. And the novel I finished last year–the one that I want to workshop in Sanderson’s English 318 class this year (The Phoenix of Nova Terra)? When I wrote the last chapter, I felt like the book was pretty crappy. Now, though, I can’t wait to work on it, I think it has so much potential!

It’s all so weird. All I can hope for is that something publishable will come out of it all.

2,850 words more than I thought I could write today

Yes, that’s true. I wrote 2,850 words today, and it’s more than I thought I could do.

I’m trying to finish up Genesis Earth, but it’s difficult because I haven’t been with these characters in a long time and I’ve forgotten a lot of their motivations. I look at what I’ve written before and I see all these inconsistencies in the things they say and do. Not that regular human beings are without inconsistencies, but I just worried that these ones were too…inconsistent.

Eventually, I had to come back down on that cardinal rule that you have to allow your first draft to suck. Yes, not everything they say or do really runs together, but I’ll be in a better position to make sense of it once the first draft is done than while it’s still mostly a cloud of ideas in my head.

Today, I just kept on putting off writing, and I started wondering why I was doing it. Was it because my characters aren’t making sense? Was it because I’m finding my own story to be unbearably boring? Am I really cut out to do this for a living when I’m struggling with these things? Those are some disturbing questions.

I took some time to watch The Empire Strikes Back, on the twenty five year old VHS copy my parents taped it on when it came to HBO, with all the wavy lines and fuzzy resolution–the one that captivated me when I was nine years old. It’s such a classic! Space opera at some of its finest! Yeah, there were holes all through the science, and the romance is kind of cheesy at parts, but the script, the overall story, the buildup and the climaxes–so classic! In some ways, I think that Empire is the best movie of the entire series.

It got me thinking, maybe I just need to get interested in my story again. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. Genesis Earth, while still being a primarily character driven story, has a lot more hard science to it than the epic space opera that I tend to write. Maybe I’m more cut out for space opera than the hard stuff.

I got about a thousand words in, watched a movie with my family (it was Elf–reminded me of everything I hate about Christmas and Hollywood, simultaneously), and sat down to blog and go to bed, but I noticed that I’d only done 1,190 words, and decided I’d at least finish the chapter.

I’d no sooner picked up the story than the characters started to take on lives of their own. Yeah, I might not have them figured out before this point, but I can fix that later. Better to focus on what they’re doing right now.

And as I did, things got really interesting. They went from almost killing each other (especially scary, considering that they’re both alone on a small spaceship twenty light years from anyone else) to rolling on the floor together, laughing and giggling and letting loose with all the things they wanted to say back at home but couldn’t because of what everybody else would think. When you’re alone on a spaceship, you’re free from a lot of social norms and pressures.

It goes to show that the way to get out of writer’s block, or writer’s avoidance, is to ignore all the doubts, worries, and negative thoughts in your head and just write. Those doubts and worries are all just illusions anyways. The story is still there, underneath it all. Give yourself to the story and you’ll figure it out.

Genesis Earth is now around 27.7k words. I’m making progress but I want this thing to be a full blown novel, so I’ve got at least 22.3k words to go. That’s roughly 2,000 words a day before school starts. My goal is 3,000 words a day from now to January 5th. That should be enough to tie up all the loose ends and finish it up.

And when that’s done, I can focus on rewriting The Phoenix of Nova Terra! I’m really excited for that!

I am SO ready to wash the dust of this semester from my feet

Ugh. I feel like this has been my worst semester yet. Not in terms of grades, or in terms of social life, or even in terms of workload, but just…in terms of my classes. Classes, and just school in general.

Here’s what I’ve figured out. My best, most enjoyable classes are the ones that really push me, and the most miserable classes are ALWAYS the ones that are too easy. If it doesn’t help me to learn and grow, if it doesn’t change my perspective, if it doesn’t open new doors of knowledge to me, I hate it. All the rote things that we do for grades–tests, papers, homework, attendance quizzes, extra credit assignments, all that stuff–if it’s all for the grade’s sake, I just go crazy. I can’t stand it. And if it’s all about memorizing data and spitting it back like a machine, I feel like I’m going to lose it.

Well, that’s the way I’ve basically felt all semester. To make it worse, all of my classes overlapped to the point where it started to feel like I was listening to exactly the same lecture over and over again. When that happens, what little there is about the subject that is interesting just seems to dissipate.

I can work really hard when I have the motivation. When I’m doing something that I love, I can really accomplish some amazing things. But when I don’t have the motivation…it’s almost impossible to bring myself to sit down and do it.

That’s basically been the story of this semester: trudging through day after day of work, pushing myself to do things that I didn’t really want to do. I suppose I did a good job of it…but it was very draining. It took almost as much work just to force myself to sit down and focus as it did to actually do the work. As a result, even though the workload wasn’t particularly hard or particularly exhausting, I never felt that I had the time to do what I wanted to do.

I suppose it would be immature to say “I’m not going to do what I don’t want to do,” but at the same time, life is too short not to get out and have fun. If you’re doing what you love, you can have fun and work hard at the same time. Like this Earth, I don’t have an inexhaustible supply of energy. I need to find and develop renewable resources–the things I love to do, the things that engage my imagination and passions and really energize me–and build my life on those. I wouldn’t even care living poor, so long as all my needs were supplied. I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and utterly burned out.

Interestingly enough, because of this crappy semester, I am more motivated than ever to break into publishing and get paid full time for writing novels. My plans haven’t changed yet, but now I want, more than ever, to actually make a living doing this stuff. Most of my inhibitions now are gone, it’s just…well, that first step. It’s pretty hard, and I don’t want to build up my expectations too much only to find myself out of school, without a job, and without money to pay the rent. Especially not in this recession.

But I do want to become a full time writer now–at least, more than before. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but if I’ve dedicated this much of my life to it, why shouldn’t I shoot for it? I don’t know. We’ll see.

Change of plans

So, it’s been two weeks since the end of Thanksgiving break, and things have changed quite a bit. I’ve been struggling quite a bit with my story. I could hardly get past the first chapter of the second section of the novel, and I’m at a critical point where I have to start introducing key characters and setting things up that will be important later. The complicated thing is…well, I don’t know where I want to take things at this point.

My conceptualization of this novel basically began winter of last year when I thought to myself, “what if I set the pioneer exodus in space?” It didn’t really take off, though, until the summer, when I started building a really cool universe in my head and came up with an interesting main character. From there, a whole bunch of loosely related ideas started to coalesce and I thought I had something.

Unfortunately, now that I’m in the middle of it, I’m starting to realize that my characters aren’t what I envisioned them to be, the conflict as I’ve set it up isn’t what I’d started out with, and that main idea that sparked this thing–the pioneer trek in space idea–it’s been flooded out by so many other cool ideas that I don’t know where to take it. In this next section, as I’ve envisioned it, I need to set up the religion and the space pioneers, but I haven’t thought it through enough to really understand what’s going on. Plus, I feel like my main character…isn’t all that interesting.

I’ve found, these past two weeks, that it’s been very hard to write this story when I have other issues and obligations on my mind. A lot harder than Phoenix. With that story, at least I always felt like I knew what the next step was. Here…I know what the next step should be, according to my plan, but it just…doesn’t feel right.

A lot of it is related to worldbuilding. I haven’t thought out certain things in this world enough, mainly because there are just so many ideas to consider. The part that I’ve worked on the least has, ironically, been the idea that sparked the whole thing: the Mormon pioneer trek in space. I have no idea what to do with that, or who the main characters are, or what the religion should be, other than a thinly veiled version of Mormonism.

So, either I’ve planned things out too much, to the point where I’m trying to control things at the exclusion of just letting the story come out naturally and honestly, or I haven’t thought things through enough, so that now that I’m at this point, I don’t know what I should do next. It’s pretty tough.

If I had nothing else that I were doing right now–no other daily tasks or obligations, other than personal chores–I could write my way through this. But now, as I think about it…it’s just too much for me right now.

With Phoenix, I at least had enough of a seed that I could keep the momentum, even when my classes were very hard. This semester, all of my classes have been ridiculously easy, and yet I still haven’t been able to keep a steady momentum in writing this novel. Momentum ebbed and flowed with Phoenix, but at least I always had some kind of momentum. With Hero, if I’m not dedicating lots and lots of time to the story, making it my primary priority, I lose all momentum and go days without writing.

So, upon realizing this fact earlier this week, I decided to take something of a drastic step. I’m going to put Hero in Exile on the back burner for a while, and bring back Genesis Earth to finish it over the break.

Genesis Earth has been on the back burner since July or August, but I’m excited about it and feel that it’s worth bringing back. Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Hero, and in some ways quite a bit simpler. I don’t have a dozen completely different ideas swirling around chaotically inside my head concerning this story–all of my ideas are straightforward. What’s more, I’m excited about it again. When I pick it up after exams, it will be fresh.

As far as Hero in Exile, I haven’t given up on it…well, not entirely. I may end up deciding to drop it, but I’m sure I’ll be recycling ideas. As of now, however, I still think I can pull it off. I just need to let things settle, figure out some things about the world of this universe, and rewrite the first 50,000 words to draw out the main character a lot better. Since that’s work that I can’t finish over this winter break, or even by the end of January, I’m going to lay it aside and focus on other things.

The goal is to finish the rough draft of Genesis Earth before the next semester begins. I think I can do it. Where I left off, the story was about half finished, maybe a little less. I highly doubt this novel will go over 60,000 words. With 18 free days after I finish these finals, that averages to 2,000 words a day. I can do this.

The best part is that if I do this, I’ll be able to focus all my energies on the Phoenix of Nova Terra rewrite in the winter! Now that I’ve spent some time away from that story, I’m starting to feel more and more confident about it. I honestly believe that it has the potential to be publishable, and not only publishable but desireable to someone out in the world of science fiction publishing. I’m excited. I think, with a little work, I could walk up to an agent or editor at World Fantasy 2009 and talk enthusiastically about it.

So, if I finish the rough draft of Genesis before winter 2009, polish Phoenix before summer, and polish Genesis while I’m interning somewhere for spring term, I could take a couple of months off to focus on all the problems with Hero and still have 3 novels finished in time for World Fantasy 2009. One of them won’t be as polished as I’d liked, but I could perhaps do that in the fall.

These past two days, I wrote up a 2.5k synopsis for Hero in Exile in my project notes. It basically details where I see the story going from here. I may end up not following it–I certainly didn’t follow the synopsis I’d written for the first section, except in a very broad sense. However, this is good because it preserves my thoughts on the story as they exist at this time. When I pick it up again, I can use the notes to jog my memory.

So, as of now, Hero in Exile is on the backburner. Even if I never pick it up again, I know that I’ve learned quite a lot just by pushing myself to get this far. On to Genesis Earth!

…

This week has been rough. Last day of classes is tomorrow (today), next week is finals.

I’m going to take as many finals as possible on Monday, just to get them over with. Scholastically, it has been a somewhat disappointing semester, though I don’t think my grades have suffered much. I just want it to be over.

As a result, I’m not writing much. Or blogging much. Or sleeping much. But I will be back soon.

Not bad…but not where I need to be, either

959 words isn’t bad. But I want to be further along in the story than where I am. I need to get Tristan out into space so that he can meet the space trading family, fit himself into their dynamic on the spaceship, develop a new romantic interest, find out about their religion, and be all ready to get caught up in the religious wars once they land on his mother’s homeworld. Right now, I’m almost 2k into the second section and he’s still on Nova Gaia, where we left him at the end of the first section.

I’ve found that I tend to make more progress when I pick out major landmarks in the story and use those as daily and weekly goals, rather than a wordcount. I can spit out tons of words but still get stuck really bad because the story itself hasn’t been progressing. When I think in terms of major events and developments, I can keep the momentum going and know when I’m getting stuck.

Also, when I start a story, I really have no idea how long, in terms of a wordcount, it’s going to be by the end. My story is already long enough to be considered a novel, according to some definitions, and yet I’m only about a third of the way finished.

Fortunately, MY NEW COMPUTER JUST CAME IN THE MAIL!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 I’ll blog more about that later, when it’s not past three in the morning =P

The point is, now that I have a tiny, ultra-portable laptop, I can write just about anywhere. Hopefully, this will mean that I’ll write more often. As to whether that’s actually going to happen, we’ll have to see…