Thoughts and Reflections – Page 41 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Okay, a new direction

I owe a lot to Aneeka. She is the one who motivated me to write The Phoenix of Nova Terra back in 2007 when I didn’t really think I could finish a novel before the end of the school year. Like I said in the last post, I’ve hit something of a wall in my writing life recently, and a couple of days ago she was the one who pointed it out to me. The conversation went something like this:

Empress: lol – okay, okay!
how are your stories going?
me: very slowly
frustrating
mostly just because of personal disorganization
Empress: yeah, that can happen. tired of school? or just a lot of things you want to do?
me: school is pretty easy right now
it’s just hard to get back into writing regularly
I dunno
I’m trying to juggle two projects
Empress: maybe that’s the problem?
it’s hard focusing on two stories at once
(says the girl that does it all the time – the irony!)
but it really is hard to get all focused on two projects at once
me: it probably is
Empress: I flit between projects because I’m not that into them and write because I’ve been inspired (and tend to be inspired on different stories all the time)
when I get into a project though, then it’s best that I leave the rest behind and just focus on that one
get out all that I have and see how far I can go before I get distracted again
me: yeah
I’m trying to be 100% into two projects at the same time
trouble is, I can’t keep the momentum going on both
Empress: yeah. looks like you’re human, after all 😉
me: dangit!
Empress: you should choose one to focus on and then, if inspiration hits for the other one, focus on that one for a bit before turning back to the main project
me: grr
Empress: think of it this way. You could struggle for 6 months trying to work on two projects and arrive halfway done with both
OR you could focus on one project for 6 months, finish it, and then have plenty of energy to finish the next one
me: that’s true I guess
Empress: it’s better than wearing yourself out
then you’ll be left with no project finished
and just a heap of frustrated dreams
me: I guess that’s right
question is, do I revise my old novel or do I go ahead with the new one?
I’m more excited about the new one, but I want to get the old one finished
Empress: how long would the old one take to get finished?
wait…and you’re having problems with them right now, right?
you know, I would think it’s easier to edit two stories then to write two stories at once. maybe you could finish up the new story and then edit both of them at the same time?
me: that’s an idea
Empress: and NaNoWriMo is coming up. you could finish up the first draft by next month and whallah! only have 2 stories to edit 😀
me: ugggggggggggh
I coooooooooould
that’s intense, though
Empress: well, doing two projects at once is intense as well
why not just switch it around and do this kind of intensity instead? 😉

So, after mulling it over for a couple of days, I’ve decided to do things a little differently.

Instead of trying to do two major projects at once, I’m going to put the revision of Phoenix on hold for now and focus all my energy on Hero in Exile. For November, instead of doing nanowrimo, I’ll try to get 50,000 words deep into this novel instead. After that, if I do roughly 1,000 words a day, I should be in good shape to finish it before the end of January. I don’t anticipate this novel going over 120,000 words, and if it tries to, I’ll do my best to reign it in.

So that’s my goal: Finish Hero in Exile before the end of January. Oh, and write 50,000 words in November.

I’ve noticed that I tend to either be too focused or too distracted. Trying to balance two projects at the same time has taught me that…well, I can’t do it very well. But I do know that once I have one project that I can focus on, I can focus on it until it gets done. That’s what I’m going to do now.

In the meantime, I was chatting with Drek from the writing group, and found out that he could program a way cool widget for my sidebar! It’s going to be a pair of speedometers that show my daily wordcount and my wordcount over the course of the last seven days. Oh, and if I’m nice, he might program a widget that displays my writing projects as status bars! I’m way excited!

Drek recently designed a website for nanowrimo this year. The idea is that every minute, it displays a new word from his novel. Something like that. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens once november starts up.

I can definitely say that the goatee gives Drek programming +2.

Hero of Ages release party tomorrow!

Tomorrow at 5:30 pm is the Mistborn release party at the BYU Bookstore! I am so excited!

Brandon Sanderson is a great fantasy writer, an awesome teacher of creative writing at BYU, and a really friendly, approachable, good person. I had loads of fun in the English 318 class he teaches (definitely my favorite class of the semester) and he was kind enough to take the time and come speak to the Quark writing group on how to become a published author.

I also read Mistborn: The Final Empire and The Well of Ascension last year, and was greatly impressed with both of them. In particular, I think that Mistborn is one of the best fantasy books that I’ve read. Vin’s transformation and personal growth throughout the book completely fascinated me, and it rang as true as anything else I’ve read. Also, I enjoyed the fact that the good guys did not always win; in fact they failed a lot more than I expected them to, and the ways they had to adjust their plans with each failure kept me engaged and interested in the story with every page. There were enough genuine twists that I was only able to predict the ending and climaxes about half of the time. Eventually I stopped trying and just enjoyed the book–and I definitely enjoyed it!

When I picked up The Well of Ascension and started reading it, I remarked to Brandon that I didn’t realize how much I had missed his characters until I picked up the sequel. I wonder if that’s how I’ll feel once I start reading Hero of Ages? I definitely will. The thing I most want to see is how Vin and Eland end up, what kind of peace is brought to the empire and how it comes about, what happens to Sazed (he was my favorite minor character)–but mostly I just want to see how Vin grows into a person with a full, healthy life. The magic system and dark lord and setting and other characters are all really well done, but the thing that I’m most invested in as a reader is Vin and her character arc.

So I got a sub for work tomorrow, which means that I’ll be in line at about 4:00 pm. The signing starts at 5:30, so I’ll probably be one of the first people in line. It really helps an author when you buy their book in the first week after it’s released, because those are the numbers that publishers and critics put the most stock on, so I figured I’d help Brandon out and come to the release party. There’s even a fairly good chance I’ll get one of the first fifty numbered editions–those are supposed to be super valuable or something.

But really, the thing I care the most about is finishing the series. The release party and everything else is going to be fun, but reading a good book–a genuinely good book–that’s the best thing of all!

Wrestling with my novel

Grrr…writing was so hard today.

It probably didn’t help that I was operating on only four hours of sleep, or recovering from a sickness, or constantly allowing myself to be distracted, but for some combination of these and other reasons, it was just really hard to write today.

I usually love revising. I think it comes naturally to me, in some ways. However, I’m well past the beginning of Phoenix and just starting to get to the part where I got muddled the first time I wrote it

Last year, I started to stall and sputter at this point because I had followed several of my initial ideas from the beginning to their preliminary conclusions and had to start adding new ideas to enrich the main story. I still didn’t know the ending, so I was basically throwing all sorts of ideas in at random and waiting for the magical reaction to happen.

That reaction did happen, but it didn’t really take off until around page 300. By that point, I’d thrown in enough random story elements that I had the start of a causal chain that would carry the story to an ending that excited me. I let things take off and rode the story to its conclusion, having a wonderful adventure right up to the last page.

Trouble is, now I have to clean up the mess I left behind–all those other random elements I threw in that never really mixed well with the others. Loose and frayed ends that I need to cut out or tie back in. At the same time, I need to isolate and strengthen the elements that ended up being important. That involves restructuring sections within chapters as well as paragraphs within sections, and it is bloody annoying.

It’s more than cutting and strengthening existing narrative. It’s cutting and pasting from multiple places, reorganizing it, and then throwing it all out and totally rewriting it in a way that actually works. It is so difficult, I’m probably going to get it wrong and have to rewrite the whole novel again to get it right.

(If I hadn’t taken a step back a few days ago and started outlining each section and chapter from a more macro view, I wouldn’t know what I need to do to fix this story. I’d see the problems and know that they exist, but I wouldn’t know how to restructure things so that the novel works together as a whole. So thanks, Reigheena, for helping me to step back and look at the wider picture.)

The most frustrating thing about this process, by far, is the choppiness.

When you have a blank page in front of you and you’re forging ahead with the first draft, it’s difficult but fairly linear. Everything flows out in a relatively streamlined progression. When you’re fixing the relatively minor details, it’s deliciously linear because you’re going going from paragraph to paragraph.

But when you’re revising the novel on a more macro level, overhauling the major story elements, you have to look at the story as a whole, transforming stuff on page 120 and introducing it in its new form on page 90, or adding new stuff between pages 80 and 100 to make the stuff before and after flow more smoothly from one to the other. You get a whole section full of dialogue and you realize it’s not working, because you’ve developed your character deeper than you had at this point in the original draft, and so you end up throwing out and rewriting everything.

Because the process is so choppy, I find it really easy to be distracted. I’ll have the exact sentence in my mind that I want to say, but the urge to get just a few moments of relief will be so strong that I’ll switch over and check my email, or check Facebook chat, or check my blog aggregator, or play a game for a little while, etc etc. So then, when I get back to work, it takes time to readjust, and that sentence that I had will be buried under half a dozen other ideas, so then I have to dig it out. Grrrr…

I’m tired, it’s late, I’ve had a miserable time wrestling with this novel today, and I’m going to bed. But before I do, I want to link to this highly interesting and well written blog post I saw on A Motley Vision, a Mormon arts and culture blog. The blogger tells the story of how she picked a controversial LDS fiction novel by Virginia Sorenson for her ward’s book club. Both her reactions and her friends’ reactions to the novel were really interesting, especially because they were so different. The ensuing discussion on the blog is really interesting because it’s all about the pros and cons of controversial, edgy LDS fiction, both to the readers as well as to the LDS publishing industry and LDS society in general. At least, I found it interesting. You can check it out and see for yourself.

I am so going to be in bed twenty seconds after I finish this sentence! Gnight!

I really love this story

I should have written this last night, but yesterday I set out at 8:00 to write in Hero in Exile, and two hours / 1,300 words later, I realized that I really like this story.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the romantic, exotic Western view of the Middle East–stunning deserts with their rocky cliffs and enormous sand dunes, desert caravans with their exotic wares, colorful clothing and tents, etc. Desert Bedouin with long, flowing robes and headscarves, swords and horses, striking fast and then disappearing back into the desert. I know it’s not entirely true…but I’ve been over there, and it’s not entirely false either. But in any case, I just really love this kind of stuff, and it really shows in the stories I write.

I mean, both Hero and Phoenix feature relatively primitive tribal desert cultures. In Phoenix, though, the people have a very low level of technology (bows and arrows), whereas in Hero they have stuff like nuclear powered dune buggies and portable hydroponic gardens. However, in both stories, the society is very tribal, monotheistic religions with prophets play a very important role, women and men are strictly separated, and everything else is just very…Arab. Maybe not Arab 100% (because hey, I’m not an Arab myself and even though I’ve lived among Arabs for the past year+ I’m sure I still have some misconceptions about them), but enough so that a Westerner reading one of these stories will basically be like “oh, these are Arabs on another planet. Cool.”

But last night, as I finished up the first chapter of Hero, I realized that I’ve got a really interesting set of conflicts going on here. Tristen (the main character) basically crash landed on this world after his family’s ship was attacked in orbit, and he’s been raised by this group of pseudo-Arabs in the desert. He wants to get back out into space and find out what happened to his biological family, but he has mixed feelings because he’s strongly attached to his adopted family.

Meanwhile, the sheikh of the tribe (Tristen’s adopted father) doesn’t want Tristen to leave because he has no living sons to inherit after him. He wants to manipulate Tristen to keep him in the camp. And the way he tries to do it is sooo dirty! It’s going to screw up Tristen’s emotions and relationships so bad, it’s just going to be so much fun to write. Because, you see, the sheikh assumes that Tristen, like most adolescent boys, is a slave to his hormones. The thing is, though, that Tristen has a conscience and a sense of honor that he’s willing to die for. But when everything starts to go grey, and all the role models Tristen’s ever had turn out to be false, what does he do?

Oh, it’s going to torture him! And this is just the first section of the book–this is nothing!

The trouble is, if I’m already 7,700 words into this novel and I just finished the first chapter, the completed first draft is going to be WAY long. As in, maybe 150,000 words if I’m lucky. I mean, the scope of my novel here borders on epic. There is so much cool stuff I’ve got planned for this story, and I haven’t even really figured out the ending.

So, if I’m going to write this novel, I’m really going to have to focus. No more avoidance behavior or procrastination. Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.

I did that the last two days and really had a lot of fun. Friday, I wrote 1,300 words in Hero in Exile, and today I revised the first part of chapter 6 in Phoenix of Nova Terra. Trouble is, I have trouble switching between the two projects. I can work on one the one day, and the other on another day, but not both on the same day. Still need to work on that.

So anyways, since I talked about how my understanding (and love for) Arabs and Arab culture has influenced my writing, I’d like to close this post by linking to some my friends’ blogs from the Jordan study abroad this summer:

I hung out with Nikki quite a bit on the Jordan study abroad, and she’s got a pretty cool blog. She has tons of pictures on her site that you can check out. Right now she’s in Ecuador blogging about her experiences there, but if you check out the archives you can see some really interesting posts she wrote.

Gini didn’t blog very much while we were in Jordan, but she has an interesting post up right now about her feelings on Americans and the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’ll just say that I share her frustrations 100% and leave it at that (for now).

Nate’s got an interesting blog about the far off places he visits. You should check it out; he’s got some interesting stories and perspectives about the places we visited in Jordan. Plus, he can name 88 countries in five minutes.

Finally, Breanne blogged extensively about Jordan and the Middle East, probably more than me in fact. Even though her experiences were not always as positive as mine, she describes what things are like over there really well. Her blog isn’t active anymore (she’s on her mission now), but it’s worth it to check out the archives.

One last thought: I was chatting with an Arab friend of mine from Zarqa today. She’s a writer like me, and we exchanged stories and gave each other book recommendations while we were over there at the University of Jordan. I emailed her a copy of Hero in Exile (what I have so far), and it’s going to be really interesting to hear back from her. She’s probably going to think it’s ridiculous–my dreamy, romantic ideas about Arab culture as a foreigner looking at her culture–so it’s going to be really interesting to get her feedback.

Revising, outlining, and a goals adjustment

The comments on my last post were really interesting, and made me do some thinking today. When I sat down to work on Phoenix today, I decided to look at the broader picture by outlining, in two or three sentences, what is going on in each scene I’ve revised so far.

As I did this, I realized that my chapter breaks are in all the wrong places. Not only are most of the beginning chapters way too short, but the breaks just didn’t feel natural. I decided to rearrange them.

At first, I thought it would be easy, but after an hour of trying to figure it out, I realized that it was a lot harder than I’d thought.

Then, I remembered what Brandon Sanderson taught in English 318: chaptes are like miniature stories in themselves, where each one has a beginning, middle, and ending that leads to the next chapter.

Once I starting thinking of it this way, I was able to organize things in a workable pattern. While the story progresses at a steady pace throughout the book, each chapter is organized around a common theme. The chapter begins with an issue or problem, and ends when that problem either is solved or totally spins out of control.

For example:

Chapter one begins and ends with Ian’s unease about setting his feet on the surface of a planet since he was six years old. His ship, the Avion-45, gets hit by some kind of futuristic EMP and the captain decides to abandon ship. The central issue is Ian’s fear of going planetside–a fear that he doesn’t understand.

Chapter two begins with the crew loading onto the escape pods to make an emergency landing on the planet. There is an accident, and Ian’s pod gets separated from the rest of the crew. Ian, with Melinda and Ben, crash land in a desert. The chapter ends with the bandit attack, with Ben and Melinda wounded and possibly dead. The central problem is that Ian is progressively separated from his peers, and it gets worse right up to the end.

Chapter three introduces Leila, a princess kidnapped by the bandits and abused by their women. They send her out to investigate the battlefield, and she meets up with Ian. She manipulates the situation so that the bandit women think that Ian has rescued her and subjugated them. The main problem is Leila’s subjugation by the bandits, and the chapter ends with her successfully turning the tables on them.

Etc etc.

So then I used this way of thinking to outline the next chapter that I need to revise. As I wrote it out, scene by scene, I realized that the best way to develop the central focus of that chapter was to combine two events into one and reorganize how I did the perspectives. Not only would that shorten the chapter, but it would also make it less choppy and more straightforward. It would also build the suspense a lot better.

So now, even though I know that I have a ton of work to do to rewrite that chapter, I’m stoked to dive into it because I know what I’m doing. If I keep to this method, I think that the second draft will be much stronger than it otherwise would have been.

Oh, and I decided to revise my goals a bit. Here are some daily goals that I think I can actually accomplish:

Revise at least six pages of The Phoenix of Nova Terra.
Write at least 500 words in Hero in Exile OR write a wikidpad article about some aspect of the story universe.

These are goals that I feel I can actually accomplish on a daily basis. And if I think I can accomplish them, I’m sure I will.

What I really need is to keep my mind in both stories at the same time. That’s the real challenge. But if I want to write professionally, that’s a skill that I’m going to need.

Finally, here’s something cool a friend of mine just showed me. If your Meyers Briggs personality type is INTP (or if you have a significant other whose personality type is INTP), this might interest you. It’s just so hilarious that a bunch of INTPs got together and made a website devoted to their personality type. If any of the sixteen types were to do it, it would definitely be them.

Posting story ideas

My friend Steve posted a comment on my last post that I thought was deserving of a post all to itself. He said:

Joe,
If you have a good idea, you shouldn’t put it up on your website, man. Someone is gonna’ steal it. Take your flower idea and hoard it, man. Because, I’m gonna’ be honest with you, Victorian women using flowers to fight with in that punk setting is awesome. And you need to protect your kids, dude.

I can understand why people would be wary of sharing their best story ideas in a public place. For a long time, that was my philosophy as well: that good ideas should be hoarded and protected, lest anyone should “steal” them and run away with all the credit.

However, I know what I’m doing. My perspectives have changed, and I have several reasons for posting my story ideas up here publicly. Here are a few of them:

1) Ideas are cheap.

There are a ton of really good story ideas floating around in the sf/f publishing world. In English 318, Brandon Sanderson said that any given editor sees dozens of fascinating, imaginative, stupendous ideas in any given day. The thing that gets you the contract, though, is the quality of your writing. There are just so many amazing story ideas out there that even the most amazing ideas are relatively common.

2) Everyone has a different take on the same idea.

Two authors, writing essentially the same story, will come at it so differently that both books will be unique. Heinlein’s take on space travel is very different from Frank Herbert’s or Arthur C. Clarke’s, and Haldeman’s take on galactic war and colonization is radically different from Scalzi’s. Trantor is not Coruscanth, and Arrakis is not Tatooine.

All these story elements, though based on similar ideas, differ radically from each other because each author had a different take on things. When we write fiction, we bring all our personal beliefs, values, experiences, and perspectives to the story, whether consciously or subconsciously. It’s unavoidable. And since all of us are unique and different, so long as we’re honest in our writing our stories are going to reflect that uniqueness.

I’m not afraid of someone “stealing” my ideas because I know that my approach is different enough that my stories (so long as they’re honest) will be very different.

3) It takes several ideas, combined in a unique way, to make a full novel.

I used to think that you could write a novel based off of two or three really good ideas. Maybe that’s why I never finished anything. I’ve learned over the last year that, in fact, it takes somewhere around fifteen or twenty ideas, minimum, to come up with a good story. And that’s just for starters. Once you sit down and start writing it, new ideas erupt as the story progresses, and you find yourself taking things in unplanned directions. Adjusting your plans and integrating the new ideas with the old ones is part of good writing.

Brandon Sanderson said this in English 318, and I believe it: a novel is not found in the ideas by themselves, it’s found in the synergy that happens as you combine them together. As ingredients, your ideas may be powerful by themselves, but when you combine them together, the end result is much more powerful than the mere sum of them all. It’s all in how the ideas intermix.

4) Ideas grow and develop when you bounce them off of other people.

I do not believe that story ideas are static. They are not like Lego blocks that you stack together to make a construct. They are dynamic–they change and grow over time, like plants in a garden. If you take a plant and hide it in a closet, it will die. Similarly, I believe that if you “hoard” your story ideas, showing them to nobody and putting off writing them until you can write the best novel possible, those ideas will become weaker.

I tried to hoard one of my story ideas a few years ago, thinking that it was the best idea I’d ever come up with and that I needed to wait until I was experienced enough to include it in my magnus opus. Now, the idea doesn’t even interest me that much. I’ve grown, but the idea hasn’t, and I’ve moved on to other things.

My goal in sharing my story ideas here on this blog is to bounce them off of other creative minds and start a discussion. From that discussion, I think that my ideas will grow and become stronger. Other people often see things that I miss, and their take on things can really spark my imagination and help me to take my ideas to a new level. Discussing my ideas, not hoarding them, is what I need.

5) It’s easier to lose a notebook than it is to lose data stored on your website.

This last idea is purely practical. I keep a notebook with me at all times and scribble down story ideas in it as they come to me. Over the summer, I lost a notebook that I’d been keeping for several months. It had maybe thirty or forty story ideas in it, and now those are lost. From that, I learned the importance of keeping a backup. This website, in a way, is my backup.

So those are the main reasons why I’ve decided to blog about my story ideas and make them public. If my story ideas inspire you, then by all means go ahead and run with them. We live in an open source world, and besides, your take on the idea is still going to be very different from mine. And if you have any thoughts to share, please do! I welcome comments, especially for these posts on my story ideas. My goal is to bounce ideas off of you as the reader, because interaction is one of the things that makes blogging so useful.

Letter to the Daily Universe

My roommate Matt wrote this awesome letter to The Daily Universe last year (scroll down to the heading “Message for Sisters” to read his letter), and garnered some incredibly hilarious responses from the BYU community. He struck a tightly strung chord in this community, something that everyone here at BYU spends a lot of time thinking about: dating.

Well, I figured that I have something I’d like to say on this subject, so earlier this week I drafted a letter of my own. I haven’t actually looked at the submission guidelines for letters to the editor, so I’ll probably have to shorten this quite a bit, but I wanted to post the full version here in case anyone’s interested. Enjoy!

When girls complain that they don’t get asked out on dates, we are quick to find fault with the guys and slow find fault with the girls.I believe this is a mistake.While it is true that a lot of the stinging criticism leveled at the guys is true and valid, there are many things that the girls do to turn off potential admirers.With regards to that, here are five general principles for dating that I believe every girl at BYU should know and follow:

1.Everyone is worth a first date.

Of all of Elder Oak’s dating counsel, the point we ignore the most is that a first date is not a big deal.Relax.Have fun.Give it a chance.How do you know that it can’t work out?And even if it probably won’t, at least it’s a great learning opportunity.No one is too far beneath you for a first date.

2.If you turn down a first or second date, no matter the excuse, it says “I’m not interested in dating you.”

Ambiguity is more painful than rejection.Even if your excuse is legitimate, guys will assume the worst.They may ask you out again, after some time, but they will be much slower to do so.On the other hand, if you want to communicate disinterest, turning down a second date is the polite way to do it.

3.If a guy asks you on a date and the time does not work for you, the way to say no without communicating complete lack of interest is to suggest an alternative time and activity.

If you have an honest scheduling conflict but are interested in dating him, do this and you erase the painful ambiguity that makes him reluctant to ask you out again.Besides, it is polite and very classy.

4.Backing out of a date at the last minute not only says “don’t date me,” it is inconceivably rude and extremely unattractive.

Guys step up to the plate by taking the initiative; girls step up to the plate by following through.If you are guilty of backing out after saying yes, you have absolutely no right to complain that guys don’t ask you out enough.Quite frankly, you are getting what you asked for.

If something genuinely does come up and you must cancel at the last minute, remember principle three.Show by your actions that you are not flaking out just because you got cold feet.

5.If you rudely turn down one guy, others will hear about it.

Guys are not as aloof as you think.We have our social networks and we talk with our friends about our dating experiences just as much as you do.Keep that in mind when someone out of left field asks you out.The word gets around.

Please know that I don’t mean to blame the girls at BYU for not getting asked out.Too many guys at this university aren’t man enough to step up to the plate.At the same time, the girls are not beyond the need for repentance.I’ve found, in my experience, that these five principles work, and I sincerely believe that if every girl in this university followed them, not only would we all date more, but we would all have a lot more fun.

I love revising

Today, after I got through with my homework for tomorrow, I figured it was time to do my writing for the day, so I opened up the rough draft of Phoenix and picked up where I left off. I didn’t really feel much in the mood for writing, but forty five minutes later the library was closing and I was getting so into it that I didn’t want to stop.

Revising is one of the aspects of writing that I really enjoy. I hate prewriting–love coming up with the story, hate actually writing it out on paper–and writing the first draft, while it has its good points, is also quite a struggle for me. But give me a rough draft of a story that I can believe in, and I’ll have so much fun making that story work. When I revise, I really feel like I’m making progress–like I’m making something better. Maybe that’s what makes the inner critic in me so less caustic when I’m revising, because I don’t find myself saying “this is crap,” I find myself saying “gotta do this, and this, and this over here…” and when it’s all over, I just feel so productive and satisfied, it’s great.

I’m finding with this novel that cutting things out can actually make the story a lot stronger than putting new stuff in. I think I read something about this by Hemmingway once in high school, how the revising process involves cutting out everything that doesn’t work. I tend to be a discovery writer, so this makes a lot of sense. I prefer to write myself into a story, which means that most of the stuff that I write is more for my own benefit than it is for the reader. It’s like baby fat that naturally comes off as the story matures and grows under my hand.

I’m also finding that revision is an excellent opportunity to practice the “show, don’t tell” mantra. I’ve heard that most beginning writers (and a lot of experienced writers) really struggle with this–they tend to tell everything in an uninteresting, unengaging kind of way, instead of incorporating the information into the story so that it naturally flows with the setting and the action. Revising helps me to see just how much I tell instead of show, which not only gives me a chance to replace it with “showing,” but hopefully will help me as I write the first draft of my other story, Hero in Exile.

Connected with all this, I’m starting to realize the importance of giving specific, concrete, almost anecdotal sensory details about the things that the viewpoint character notices. This is something that I need to work on. When it comes down to Jungian types, I am sensing, not feeling, which means that I tend to miss sensory details because I spend so much time thinking about abstract theories and ideas. However, sensory details are important, both because they enrich the setting and because they effectively develop the viewpoint character.

I was browsing through Robert Charles Wilson’s book Spin the other day, and I was surprised to notice how often he did this. Every paragraph is full of the oddest sensory details, small things that the viewpoint character notices that really enrich the story. He doesn’t spend a lot of time on any given one–maybe just a passing sentence or a phrase–but they build up in such a way that really draws you into the world, and into the character’s life. You start to care about him in ways that you wouldn’t have before. It’s very interesting.

I feel like I made some very good progress today. Edited chapter three, which was about fifteen or twenty pages. There was definitely a lot that needed changing, but that’s not bad because now it’s so much better! And not only that, I think I can see that I’m gradually becoming a better writer. Revising is definitely my favorite part of writing.

Awesome weekend!

This was a really good weekend for writing. We had a REALLY fun writing meeting with Quark and I got some very helpful feedback for the first chapter of The Phoenix of Nova Terra (aka The Lost Colony), and now after another rewrite I feel really happy with it.

On Friday, as I was walking between the FLSR and campus, I thought about the fact that I haven’t really been getting into my new novel, and wondering what was holding me back. I realized that it’s this game that I just recently started to play through for the second time, Final Fantasy Tactics. Excellent game–one of the best in the series, IMO–but as I reflected on it, I realized that it’s been distracting me, both in terms of how I use my time and how much I think about my stories. It’s hard to immerse yourself in an imaginary world when your mind is fixated on something else. So, I decided to drop FFT and erased all my saved games. Now, I’ll have a lot more time to think about and write in the worlds of my stories.

The writing meeting on Saturday was great! We had about eight people there, which was cool, and joked around quite a bit. The best thing I think is that the new people aren’t afraid of criticism, so we tore into their stories and everything was still fine. We went a little over time, but I think it was ok because we spent a lot of time bantering and getting to know each other. That’s important too, I think–to get a sense of community and friendship going.

I rewrote the first chapter of The Phoenix of Nova Terra for this meeting, but something was wrong with it and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Well, the meeting helped me to see what it was–the action didn’t start soon enough and the protocol between the officers on the ship wasn’t all that interesting. So I took another look at my story and realized that I was trying to give too much of the big picture, the grand overarching “this is how the main character’s mission is going to help mankind,” and not enough of the concrete details as seen through the eyes of Ian himself. Man, even after writing for so long, I still make mistakes like this! But once I saw the problem clearly, it wasn’t that hard to fix it.

Now, I’m really excited about this story, and I’m ready to move on and edit everything else. Really, about 70% of the work is going to be cutting out all of my “discovery writing,” the stuff that was really just me figuring out the story by explaining it to myself. There is a ton of that on every page, and it all has to go. But once it’s gone, I really do think that I’ll have a sweet story underneath it all.

I just want to have it done so that I can say, once and for all, that I have a novel under my belt–a novel that I can be proud of. It’s not enough to say “I’ve written a rough draft”–I want to be able to say “I have written and finished a novel.”

Three novels by fall 2009…it’s going to take work, but I’m going to do it. The momentum is building, and I’m getting back into writing.

Dang.

Dang. I haven’t written at all for the past two days. That’s lame.

Fortunately, I have a really good idea for a short story / abstract little piece / whatever. I don’t usually write short fiction, but when I do get an idea for something, wow. It’s like Ray Bradbury: one of the characters does some random thing and “two hours later the story is finished.”

This one is based off of an interesting thought I had about dating and relationships that goes like this: dating is like trying to bring the space shuttle in for a landing. If you don’t come in hard enough, you’ll ricochet off of the atmosphere and be flung out into empty space. If you come in too fast, though, the friction with the air will be so hot that your ship will burn up like a meteor. If you want to land that shuttle, you have to hit just the right angle…good luck.

I went on a really fun date today with a really awesome girl I know, and I think I got the angle right. Two or three more and that’ll be a semester record for me. After two years of taking things too slow, burning up in the atmosphere is looking a lot more attractive to me than floating endlessly in empty space. This is going to be one roller coaster of a semester.

It’s 2:50 am and I’m getting up at six to be the first one at the BYU Bookstore’s progressive book sale. Tomorrow I’m going to be a walking zombie and it’s going to be awesome.