Tag: Frustrations

Section one complete

Yes!  I finished section 1 of my novel Hero in Exile today (the rough draft, at least).  The main character, Tristen, just had everything he thought he knew pulled right out from under him, and now he’s on his way “home” to a world he knows nothing about.  New characters, new problems, change of scenery, and fresh new cultures and peoples to explore.  One potential love interest down, another one about to come out of nowhere.  Space barbarians and pirates threaten, and down on his mother’s homeworld, a religiously motivated genocide is about to begin.  How incredibly exciting.

The really cool thing was that I read over all the stuff I’ve written in the past month that was really frustrating me.  All of the edgy stuff that I was afraid I wasn’t pulling off right, and all of the twisted romantic climaxes that I was sure I’d done wrong.  I resisted the urge to revise them, and when I was through reading them, I realized that there’s really something there.  I could make this work.  I might not be able to do it by the rewrite, but there is something compelling in there.

I’m also very happy with the overall structure of this section.  It has a clear start, middle, and end, and all the major elements are clearly connected.  Themes and events weave in and out of each other and affect the characters’ choices.  It all leads up to a gloriously twisted climax that fulfills the promises of the structure while leaving the reader unfulfilled and wanting to read on.

At least, that’s how I see it now.  Maybe I’m too close to the story to be a fair judge of its overall structure.  In fact, I almost certainly am.  Even if it hasn’t taken this structure on the page, however, it has taken structure in my mind.  That is something.

When I started writing this novel, I only had a vague idea where I wanted to go.  In fact, in the freewrite plot overview that I spat out back in Jordan, half of the events in this section didn’t happen, and the rest happened out of order.  Prewriting was helpful, but ultimately the story took shape in my mind as I wrote it out.  That everything eventually ended up tying back to the previous elements (at least in my mind) is very, very encouraging.

So, in short, I can say that this vacation was very much a success.  I got through some of the most difficult parts in my novel, got over some severe obstacles holding me back, pushed BOTH of the wordcount meters deep into the red, rebuilt my enthusiasm of the story, and finished at exactly the spot where I wanted to end.  I’m finally starting to get things right.

🙂

Hooray!

Yay!  I’m FINALLY past the really difficult part of the story.  And man, I’ve written so much these past two days.  3,199 words today, 2,727 yesterday!  That’s something of an accomplishment!

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’d ever let anyone see what I just wrote.  Holy cow, it is so rough!  It’s probably riddled with cliches and cheesiness, not to mention some awkwardly written edginess that would make half my friends from Quark throw the book across the room.  I tried not to be too suggestive (and really, I don’t feel guilty for what I wrote), but everyone’s got their own opinions, and I probably erred on the side of describing things too much.  Not to mention, it’s not all that well written, so if you don’t throw the book across the room because it’s too risque, you’d probably still throw it across the room just because the writing is so bad.

HOWEVER, all of that I can fix in the revision.  ALL of it.  Don’t tell me that I can’t.  I’m not listening to you.

Seriously, though, I really am satisfied with myself for writing all this.  Even if it isn’t anywhere near good enough to get published, it is good practice.  I don’t want to only write cute adventure stories that sell, I want to write characters who are forced to wrestle with some serious issues and dilemmas.  I want to challenge myself and write something that has some deep meaning to it, even if I don’t know consciously what that meaning is exactly.

Maybe I’m doing it here, maybe I’m not.  Maybe I haven’t got my characters figured out well enough to really dive into things–maybe I won’t be until I finally do the revision.  Maybe the revision is going to kill me.  The important thing is that it’s DONE and now I can MOVE ON to the rest of the story.

Oh, and one other really cool thing: I’m exactly where I wanted to be by this time! I can finish this chapter in another 2,000 words or so tomorrow, and then it’s on to a completely new section of the book!  Yay!

Vomitous

Ugh.  This romance in my novel is so…vomitous.  Awkward.  I hope I’m doing something right, but I have no idea.  It’s WAY harder to write good romance than it is to write good action.  Stuff blowing up is so much simpler.

At least I can fix it in revision.  That’s what I tell myself, anyways.

Unstuck

Happy Thanksgiving!  Holy cow, I ate a lot.  Had dinner with the McQueens, my sister’s husband’s grandparents, and all the inlaws.  My sister-in-law can cook a mean chocolate pie.  Holy cow.  Delicious.

So, when I wasn’t eating or groggily digesting over at my in-laws’ house, I was writing.  It was pretty tough, to be honest.  Even though yesterday I got through the climax of the chapter that was hanging me up, I still felt really stuck today.  It took me more time than I’d expected to finish the chapter, and I didn’t know how to start the next one.

I was really frustrated the whole day.  There was nothing to do, and nowhere really to go.  I took a break and walked down to campus in the middle of the afternoon, but it was dreary outside and all the buildings were closed.  There was barely a car on the road, and even though it was good to get out and go for a walk, I didn’t come back with any good ideas for how to start things out.

To be honest, I contemplated putting this project on the back burner and working on something else for the next two months.  My novel Genesis Earth is halfway done, and I could probably finish it by the end of January if I put this other novel away and focused all my energy on it.  I’ve recently gotten excited about that story again.

But that would be an admission of defeat.  I didn’t know if I needed to do that yet.  I do have a lot of really good ideas for Hero in Exile–the trouble is, they all take place about a hundred pages from where I am right now!  I should probably write them down before I finally get there and realize that I’ve forgotten them all.

I figured that things are hard just because I’ve been so distant from the story these past few weeks.  I decided I needed to start the chapter out with some action–or, if not action, at least with some dramatic momentum–and figured the best way to do that was to have my two main characters kiss in the first scene.  I was going to do that somewhere in the chapter, but I figured it would be better to start things out with it rather than gradually build up.  After all, that’s not the climax–the climax is much more twisted and painful than that.

But then, before I could start, I had to figure out just how, exactly, these two characters would end up in that kind of a situation.  I mean, it was hard for me to work through their motivations in my mind.  I’ve been building up the tension for the last few chapters, but it all felt so distant, and it was hard to remember exactly how these characters are supposed to be feeling.

It was really frustrating.  I had this kissing scene all figured out in my mind a few weeks ago, but I’d forgotten it all.  As I kept mulling through my characters’ motivations, I got more and more frustrated.  After all, things have changed so much from my original idea.  Are these even the right characters to pull my story through to the end?

I started wondering if I’d made a mistake by starting the story when I did–whether all my ideas had truly come together to the point where they were ready to begin.  Back about a month before I started, I thought I was ready–but now?  I don’t know.  It’s very frustrating and discouraging.

After all, maybe I bit off too much with this novel.  My first novel, The Phoenix of Nova Terra, was more of a straight up adventure story.  There were some deeper ideas and ethical dilemmas in it, but I felt like I had to slog through those parts.  They didn’t work out as good as I’d hoped–the main focus was the adventure, the suspense.  With Hero in Exile, I want to focus a lot more on deeper questions–like, what is honor?  What is heroism?  How do you keep your honor in a dishonorable world?  Do you have to prove your heroism through some grand, daring act, or does true heroism manifest itself in other ways?  These were some of my original questions, but now…I don’t know how it’s turning out.

As a side, note, that’s where I was going with my question a few weeks ago about depicting immorality as immoral without watering it down–how do you get your characters to deal with these challenging issues without driving away readers?  It’s tough, and my main frustration has been that the scenes just don’t seem to be well executed–I’m afraid that they fall flat.  I could be wrong, I could be overexaggerating, I could be trying to write a perfect first draft, and I could be doing all three of these at the same time, but it’s been really frustrating.

Oh well.  At least I know I’m pushing myself.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, but I guess you could say that I had something like it today.  I knew where I wanted to go, and I knew what I wanted to happen, I just didn’t know how to get there.  So then, after checking email and facebook some twenty million times, I opened up my outline and decided to work on that.  Ten minutes later, I remembered how I’d envisioned this scene, and I set down and finally started the next chapter.

Romance is kind of hard for me to write, not only because of my lack of experience, but because it’s hard not to fall into cliches when you’re describing things.  Because of that, it took me a few hours to slog through the end of the opening scene–but I did it!  And now, I’m excited about this story again!  I know where we are, what we’re doing, and exactly where we’re going over the next few scenes.  It’s great!  I’m FINALLY unstuck!

So now, I just have to keep up at a good pace before I forget everything again.  Shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of this vacation, but the next two weeks are going to be a tough sprint to the end of the semester.  Still, it won’t be impossible.  And after, I’ve got more than two weeks of winter break–with the netbook I went ahead and ordered a couple of days ago!  Hooray!  I can hardly wait!

Satisfaction

Yes.  I finally broke through this one scene that’s been giving me trouble for the last few days.  I don’t believe in writer’s block, but I do believe in writer’s avoidance, and I’ve had that for the past ten days or so because of this one chapter.  I’ve really wanted–and really needed–to get beyond this section of the book, but this one part of Tristen’s journey has really been hanging me up.   Now that the climax has passed, I’ve only got a few hundred words before the next chapter.  Thank goodness.

As frustrating as the last few days have been, and as frustrating as it was to slog through 1,700 words to close up the major fight scene in this chapter, it felt really satisfying to have it behind me.  These last few days, I haven’t been writing very regularly, and I’ve also felt kind of…down, a little.  I don’t know if it’s connected to my frustrations with this novel or with something else, but it just really feels good to know that I wrote 1,704 words today and got past a major hurdle.

Productivity.  What an aphrodisiac.

If I finish the chapter tonight with another 500 words or so, then that’ll bring the 7 day wordcount meter up around 5,500 or so.  If I write another 1k or 2k tomorrow, that’ll push it up around 7,000.  If I write another 3k or 4k on Friday (and that’s not unreasonable–I’ve got the whole day off), I can probably be in the red.  If I keep up with at least 2k for the rest of the break, I can have both counters in the red for at least three days.

And hopefully, before Monday comes around, I’ll be at that part of the book where I want to end up–with my main character offworld, headed for his mother’s home planet.

There are other things about this book that I want to talk about, but the library is closing and I have to go.  Fortunately, I went ahead and bought that tiny little laptop I was talking about in the previous post, so come next week I won’t be limited to public computers outside of my apartment.  I’m excited to get this thing in the mail!  Now that’s going to be satisfying!

playing catchup

Holy cow!  I feel like I haven’t been blogging or writing hardly at all in the past week.  Last year, I was so enthusiastic about the writing–and I still am, it’s just that school has freaking blindsided me.  I had a 10 page history paper to write for today, and it threw off my schedule big time.

Fortunately, Thanksgiving break is almost upon us, and that means FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, you’d better believe it!  I’ll be here in Utah for the break, probably having Thanksgiving dinner with my sisters and their husbands’ families.  In the meantime, though…FREEDOM!!!!!!!  Ah, how sweet!  I am so looking forward to it!

So, to help me catch up with the writing, here’s what I plan to do, starting tomorrow.  Every day, I’ll wake up early (I hate sleeping in anyways) and start off the day with some writing.

If I can get in just 500 words each morning, that will be awesome.  I always put off writing until the end of the day, after I’m already tired from running around juggling fifty different things at once.  By that time, I don’t want to write–I want to veg out on a computer game.  As a result, it’s been hard to keep a schedule–something I absolutely must do if I’m going to be anything more than a hobby writer.

If I start each day with writing, that will help me in a couple of ways.  Not only will I tackle the day’s wordcount before I’m too tired to do anything except rot in my unproductive disgustingness, but I’ll be thinking about the story a lot more throughout the day.  That will help me to keep the story moving.

Right now, I feel like I’m still in the first third of the story, not even halfway through with the thing.  I really, really want to finish this before the end of January–if I don’t do that, it’s going to be really difficult to have three polished novels by World Fantasy 2009.  So, that means that before the end of the month, I need to get Tristen off of the planet and into the Mormons-in-space society that I have envisioned.

Except, I really don’t have it envisioned yet–nothing concrete, anyways.  Augh!  So much to do!

So this whole break, I’m going to try and hit 4,000 words every day.  If I can’t do that, at least I can do 2,000.  And before school starts again, I want Tristen to be off of this planet and into the next section of the book.

Oh, and I’m going to blog more.  There’s so much that I want to discuss here that I just haven’t been able to post for lack of time (as well as general disorganization and disgusting unproductiveness).  So, more updates during the break.

I’m playing catchup.  Let’s hope that the vacation is awesomely productive as well as refreshingly liberating.

I’m being responsible (for once)

I’ve got this history paper due on Thursday.  It’s the big research paper for the semester, and it counts for a large portion of the final grade.  Because the deadline is coming up, it’s really pressing on my mind right now.

Earlier in the semester, we had smaller assignments related to the paper–for example, we had to get our preliminary bibliography together, write a preliminary outline, etc.  I…pretty much did the bare minimum on all of those.  Yeah.  Didn’t do so well.

So for this final paper, I decided to finish it early, so that I could bring it in to the FHSS Writing Lab where I work and have one of my coworkers help me with it.   That means, of course, that I can’t wait until the night it’s due to write it (which is pretty much how I’ve done every other paper of my college career).  I need to be responsible and get it done early.

I woke up today thinking “crap, I’ve got a paper I’ve got to write.” I decided that I’d sit down and write the whole d*** thing today after dinner.  I had the urge to play Genghis Khan II, but I resisted it and went to the library.  I worked really hard–I only spent about 25% to 35% of my time there chatting with friends and engaging  in avoidance activity.  It was tough.

I started out hating the paper, but once I had a thesis and an outline, I started to really get into it.  History is kind of like storytelling, and I like storytelling.  When I figured out how to insert footnotes on Word 2007, I started to get the urge to just insert a ton of them everywhere because it’s so cool.  Gamila was chatting with me, and when she mentioned something from her Latin class, I said “hey, you could be the Franks and I could be the Saracens–after all, Saladin’s given name was Yusuf!” (my paper is on the crusades–can you tell?)

The coolest thing was that when I came back to the apartment, I just felt so FREEEEEEEE!  I mean, yeah, the paper is still due on Thursday, and yeah, there is still a ton of work that I have to do for it, but it’s half done, and the rest is easy!  I’m even starting to really enjoy this subject.  I can’t wait to tell the story of Reynauld de Chatillon and all the things he did to piss off Saladin!  That guy was so smug, sitting in his castle in Kerak.  He even defied the orders of the king in Jerusalem to break the truce between the Franks and the Saracens!  If it wasn’t for that, perhaps the Battle of Hattin would never have happened–perhaps the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have survived.  Who knows?

So, yeah, I was responsible tonight…and dangit!  It’s 1:45 am and I haven’t written at all for today!  I would crank out a couple hundred words before going to bed, but I’ve got to get up at freaking 7am…holy cow, it’s going to kill me.

But yeah, I’m just really happy to have that burden at least partially lifted from me.  Being responsible can have its perks–I should try it more often.

No writing yesterday…but there is a reason

Well, as you may notice, I didn’t write at all yesterday.  My wordcount meters are both down significantly, especially the 7 day one.  Grr…I will get them back up before too long!  New goal: get both meters in the red by the end of the week.

However, I have a reason for not writing, and it’s not a lame excuse that such-and-such happened outside my control and I had to put my writing on hold.  It’s a lot more complex than that.

Basically, the scene that I’m stopped at has some graphic content, and I didn’t feel that it would be appropriate to write that scene on a Sunday.  At the same time, I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t write this scene at all.  In terms of the story, I think that this scene is necessary, but I can see people taking it the wrong way when they read it.  I can also see myself feeling somewhat embarrassed when my friends read it.  I’m not usually the kind of person that avoids controversy, but this is something where I’m not sure how to proceed.

Basically, here’s what I have in mind: Tristen, the main character, is on a mission to find his birth family.  He’s left behind this futuristic Bedouin camp that’s raised him, except that the sheikh of this camp will do anything to get Tristen to stay.  The first leg of Tristen’s journey is a pilgrimage to this famous temple, and the sheikh sends his daughter with Tristen, ostensibly because she want’s to make the pilgrimage too, but won’t have the opportunity in the future.  Really, though, the girl has conspired with the Sheikh to try and seduce Tristen to convince him to stay.

That’s the background, but it really has nothing to do with this specific scene.  In the scene I have in mind, Tristen and the girl are in a bar/restaurant halfway around the world, way far away from home, when this graphic performance occurs on the stage at this place.  Basically, there is this major religious cult in this part of the world whose priestesses are basically holy prostitutes, like many Ancient Near East goddess cults.

The scene would involve some suggestive nudity and would raise the already existing sexual tension between Tristen and the daughter of this Sheikh.  Basically, he’s been raised in this ultra-moralistic conservative environment, so the dance of this temple prostitute shocks him to the point where he doesn’t know what to think about it.  He gets these images in his mind that he can’t get out, and he feels confused, guilty, passionate, and just…well, weird.  This confusion gets him to the point where he doesn’t know what he’s doing with this girl who’s supposed to seduce him, so that she is able to break through his resistance and almost succeed in getting him to stay (and all that that implies).

Also, I want to throw this scene in to show the moral depravity of the society that Tristen passes through.  By demonstrating just how graphically immoral the mainstream society has become, I’m hoping to show who Tristen really is–a morally upright person.  I want to have this contrast in the story, even if it does mean writing a scene that might cause a lot of LDS readers (and even some of my friends) to throw the book across the room.

So how do I do this?  How can I write a scene that is graphic and yet not pornographic?  What do you think about my ideas here?  What should I do–and not do?  Why?

The week is OVER!!!

I am so happy.  Yeah, I’ve got a current events paper I’ve got to write for MESA 201…but I can do that in like twenty minutes.  Especially since the paper itself is not due, just the stuff that has to be peer critiqued.  And really MESA 201 is like a flashback to high school, so it’s really not that hard.

As for Arabic homework…I’m trying hard not to think about it…was trying…dangit!

This is the main issue I had with this past week.  Every time I thought I was free, some assignment or deadline that I’d forgotten would pop up and smack me across the head.  Today, it was the Poli Sci 201 midterm (take home, open book).  There was no other time except today (when it was due) that I could take it, so I ended up clocking out at work and doing it then.  Freaking test probably cost me $30 to $40.

But this blog isn’t supposed to be about my frustrations with school, it’s supposed to be about my frustrations with writing.  And other life stuff.  So I’ll write about something else.

I’ve started to think about what I want to do after I get my bachelor’s degree(s?).  Which is to say, I’m completely clueless at this point, but I’m trying to get a feel for my options.  Yesterday there was an information session for the Masters of Public Policy program at BYU, and it looks interesting.  I would like to go to grad school, and it looks like this program would take me in a direction I’d be interested in following.

Basically, the program prepares you to work as a policy/research analyst, which seems like an interesting skill set I could take to a non-profit / NGO / lobby group / think tank, which is a career path (or set of paths) that I find intriguing.  I’ll bet I could find some real satisfaction putting my mind to work for a social cause that I really believe in.

But is this really what I want to do with my life?  Do I want to spend 90% of my time working behind a computer at a desk, crunching statistics?  And what about Arabic?  How would I be able to use that?  These are questions that need answering.

As for writing, the plan at this point is to do it on the side if/until it becomes lucrative enough for me to support myself and my family.  In other words, for the next five-ten-fifteen years / forever, I’m going to be a mild-mannered man in a conventional (at least partially) career by day, and a super-power world-saving writer by night.  Writing, at this point, is a given, a constant–I know what I’m doing as far as my writing career.  I just don’t know if/when I’m going to make it my primary, so I have to make other plans like grad school / career path / whatever.

I guess that’s one thing I find reassuring about all of this: writing leaves me a means of escape from being pegged down in a boring career for the rest of my life.  And my pursuit of a career feeds my writing by giving me new and exciting ideas and perspectives to bring into my writing.  I’m glad I’m not studying English.

And…that’s about it for tonight.  Holy cow I’m tired!

A slow spot

This last week has been somewhat frustrating.  Started it off well, with good progress in my story, but early on in the week, all kinds of assignments started piling onto me–stuff that I should have seen coming, but have been putting off ’til the last minute (as usual).  It didn’t help that I just discovered Genghis Khan II, a really awesome old DOS game. :p

So, between juggling homework, struggling not to get addicted to this new game, and dealing with exhaustion in general, it’s been a pretty slow week.

The upside, though, is that I’ve had lots of time to think about the universe of Hero in Exile.  I’ve got some REALLY awesome ideas for the world, stuff that’s inspired by Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy and the rise of the Mongol Empire.  History 240 is one of my favorite classes this semester–it gives me so many good story ideas!

As a result, I can hardly wait to get to the really good parts of my novel.  I just wish I didn’t have so much school to worry about.  Grr…

There is a lot that I want to blog about, but I need to get my sleep tonight.  Take home test due tomorrow for PLSC 201, and I want to get it finished before work at 10 am (yeah right…).