It's the end of Friday now, and I'm satisfied with how it's going. I don't know if I'm actually turning it into a good book, but I am getting it into shape at least.
I'm four days into my schedule, but really I have to say it's the equivalent of 6 "sessions" since I put in time in 2 afternoons. If I figure on losing a couple sessions later to errands, I'll be on my average. I'm about 90 pages in (a little less than one third) which suggests about 20 average working days, which would be lower than my original estimate by at least a week and a half. I'm through about 17 cards in my note card outline. (A little less than one third by that measure also.) I have a little post it flag on the card where I've left off so I know which scene to tackle first on Monday or the next time I return to it.
I'm most excited about the work I did this morning which was addressing the big space that I talked about yesterday. I created a new scene by writing some new bridge material and moving some material from later in the book, and that allowed me to cut out a bunch of other stuff and to remove about four note cards from that section of my outline. It makes a big beautiful blank space on the bulletin board where I have it spread out.
I'm feeling good about it. I can't wait to get through this "patch up" draft and start focusing on really trying to make it into something good.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Some difficulties with cutting scenes
I think I'm progressing according to plan, as best as I can tell. I'm working with average number of pages in a situation where some sections need a little work and some need a lot. After three days -- three sessions -- I'm through about 11 of my note cards and at pg. 60 of the typescript, which is roughly 20% of the total. So 7%/day. 18 working days total if it continues like this. (Big if.) Which would round up to 4 work weeks instead of 6 as I outlined the other day. But I don't have enough good data to really count on accelerating my schedule. I can just hope.
The section I'm in right now makes it especially difficult to predict the process. There are about 4 scenes in a row that either got cut, rewritten, combined or moved someplace else. Some stuff must get cut because the material isn't relevant anymore. Some of it could stay possibly, and I have to decide if it helps. Whatever I do is going to affect the pacing. For example, if I cut a scene that comes between two big events, I might need that beat there for timing, in which case I need to write something to fill the space. Or it might be thought of as an opportunity to get in spread in some of the subplot material that might feel too rushed later on. Or it might be better without a break there and I should just keep things rolling.
Anyway, those decisions are going to bring my average down.
One of the difficult parts about cutting scenes is that there is almost always something in the scene that feels really important even if it's not the main point of the story. As I -- and the textbook I use -- discuss with my students, every line of dialogue and every detail should be doing more than one thing at once -- communicate the literal message and something else like building character or setting the scene or raising the stakes in some way. If you do that well, that makes it harder to cut something. If you cut a line of dialogue because you don't need the one thing it does, there's still the other thing it's doing. Now you need to find some other place to achieve that.
An example. I have a scene where my protagonist and her antagonist have a fight. When I drafted it, it's the first meeting between them that the reader witnesses in the present action. Because it was a draft, I didn't do a good job of making the scene serve the plot. It was really just an introduction of a character. I came up with a better way to introduce her and have them interact for the first time, earlier in the book, in a scene that also moves the plot forward. So this scene isn't necessary. Snip, snip. But it's not so easy. One, in the first draft version, that's where I put some exposition about the history of their relationship. So I have to find a way to weave that in somewhere. Two, and more complicated, I also had other characters in that scene getting in on the argument, too. That begins a process of bonding between those secondary characters and the protagonist that leads to their friendship later. If I cut this scene, the pacing of that emotional development and bonding is disrupted. It's not like exposition that I can just stuff in some place. It's woven into the tone of voice and how they talk with one another. The literal details of their dialogue isn't so important, but the other thing it is doing -- showing the kindling of their relationship at this moment -- is. If you lose that ineffable quality, you lose something in the rest of their interactions later on.
So it's difficult. I have to figure out how to hang on to what is best while I'm cutting out whole scenes.
This section, by the way, is the only one I think where there are whole scene that I know need to come out. The rest of the book is more or less laid out in the proper order after this point.
The section I'm in right now makes it especially difficult to predict the process. There are about 4 scenes in a row that either got cut, rewritten, combined or moved someplace else. Some stuff must get cut because the material isn't relevant anymore. Some of it could stay possibly, and I have to decide if it helps. Whatever I do is going to affect the pacing. For example, if I cut a scene that comes between two big events, I might need that beat there for timing, in which case I need to write something to fill the space. Or it might be thought of as an opportunity to get in spread in some of the subplot material that might feel too rushed later on. Or it might be better without a break there and I should just keep things rolling.
Anyway, those decisions are going to bring my average down.
One of the difficult parts about cutting scenes is that there is almost always something in the scene that feels really important even if it's not the main point of the story. As I -- and the textbook I use -- discuss with my students, every line of dialogue and every detail should be doing more than one thing at once -- communicate the literal message and something else like building character or setting the scene or raising the stakes in some way. If you do that well, that makes it harder to cut something. If you cut a line of dialogue because you don't need the one thing it does, there's still the other thing it's doing. Now you need to find some other place to achieve that.
An example. I have a scene where my protagonist and her antagonist have a fight. When I drafted it, it's the first meeting between them that the reader witnesses in the present action. Because it was a draft, I didn't do a good job of making the scene serve the plot. It was really just an introduction of a character. I came up with a better way to introduce her and have them interact for the first time, earlier in the book, in a scene that also moves the plot forward. So this scene isn't necessary. Snip, snip. But it's not so easy. One, in the first draft version, that's where I put some exposition about the history of their relationship. So I have to find a way to weave that in somewhere. Two, and more complicated, I also had other characters in that scene getting in on the argument, too. That begins a process of bonding between those secondary characters and the protagonist that leads to their friendship later. If I cut this scene, the pacing of that emotional development and bonding is disrupted. It's not like exposition that I can just stuff in some place. It's woven into the tone of voice and how they talk with one another. The literal details of their dialogue isn't so important, but the other thing it is doing -- showing the kindling of their relationship at this moment -- is. If you lose that ineffable quality, you lose something in the rest of their interactions later on.
So it's difficult. I have to figure out how to hang on to what is best while I'm cutting out whole scenes.
This section, by the way, is the only one I think where there are whole scene that I know need to come out. The rest of the book is more or less laid out in the proper order after this point.
Monday, January 31, 2011
New scene and tentative schedule
I wrote a new scene today totaling 1,000 words. That's the biggest new chunk that I have planned, though I wouldn't be surprised if during the rewrite I discover problems that make me develop scenes that long. But the outline calls for smaller additions here and there from now on.
That puts me one day behind the schedule I mentioned in the middle of last week. Oh, well. We're getting record snowfalls this winter, by the way, and it's been incredibly disruptive to every kind of schedule, not to mention just plain distracting. Wild weather has a way of making you want to look at the window all day and to dig around in the cupboards for comfort food.
From this point on, I expect to be tackling issues in the typescript in order. I'll start with the first scene and move through the book. I don't have any reliable way to guess how long the first rewrite (draft 2) will take.
But I'll venture a schedule anyway using this dubious logic: the book is outlined on a total of 55 note cards representing 55 episodes or events. Let's say it averages out to 55 scenes, even though some note cards elongate the time represented, and some of the note cards foreshorten the time represented. I haven't done a real account, but let's assume that 1/2 the cards have notes about some kind of significant revision that will require me to read the scene over carefully and think about it. Let's assume that on average that will exhaust the energy of one writing session, and that I average 5 sessions a week. That's 27 working days or 5 1/2 weeks starting tomorrow. Round up to make it 6 weeks starting from today.
That makes March 11 my target date to finish the second draft.
Here's an even more tentative schedule for the step after that. I'll make the next draft a polishing draft and try to cover 30 pages per working day. Roughly 2 1/2 weeks of that would give me a target of March 31 to finish that third draft. Then I'll have to move on to the serious and difficult task of reducing the length. Let's say I finish that next pass by the end of the college semester, which is the middle of May.
In other words I'm giving myself about 15 weeks to work through it three times and make three different kinds of rewrites and revisions with the hope that it will be in excellent shape by the end of that time and ready to start sharing with readers other than my wife.
That's a hell of a plan. It makes as much sense as any other plan and has about as much chance of working, which is not much.
That puts me one day behind the schedule I mentioned in the middle of last week. Oh, well. We're getting record snowfalls this winter, by the way, and it's been incredibly disruptive to every kind of schedule, not to mention just plain distracting. Wild weather has a way of making you want to look at the window all day and to dig around in the cupboards for comfort food.
From this point on, I expect to be tackling issues in the typescript in order. I'll start with the first scene and move through the book. I don't have any reliable way to guess how long the first rewrite (draft 2) will take.
But I'll venture a schedule anyway using this dubious logic: the book is outlined on a total of 55 note cards representing 55 episodes or events. Let's say it averages out to 55 scenes, even though some note cards elongate the time represented, and some of the note cards foreshorten the time represented. I haven't done a real account, but let's assume that 1/2 the cards have notes about some kind of significant revision that will require me to read the scene over carefully and think about it. Let's assume that on average that will exhaust the energy of one writing session, and that I average 5 sessions a week. That's 27 working days or 5 1/2 weeks starting tomorrow. Round up to make it 6 weeks starting from today.
That makes March 11 my target date to finish the second draft.
Here's an even more tentative schedule for the step after that. I'll make the next draft a polishing draft and try to cover 30 pages per working day. Roughly 2 1/2 weeks of that would give me a target of March 31 to finish that third draft. Then I'll have to move on to the serious and difficult task of reducing the length. Let's say I finish that next pass by the end of the college semester, which is the middle of May.
In other words I'm giving myself about 15 weeks to work through it three times and make three different kinds of rewrites and revisions with the hope that it will be in excellent shape by the end of that time and ready to start sharing with readers other than my wife.
That's a hell of a plan. It makes as much sense as any other plan and has about as much chance of working, which is not much.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Renaming characters
So the main thing I'm working on today is brainstorming new names for a couple of my characters. I guess you could call one a secondary character and one a minor character. Let's call them B and C for now.
They come as a team. They work together and are almost always together when they do appear. But B has a bigger influence on the main characters. C is just a bit player.
So the first thing about their names is that they are a little bit "Dickensian," in the sense that I use a little bit of phonetic and lexical horseplay to make the names reflect or comment upon their personalities. Like how someone dishonest and treacherous might be named Grift. That isn't my usual style, but in this story it's more appropriate and I'm having a little fun with it.
I came up with B and C's names before I really began writing the story and certainly before I got to the scenes where they first appear. Which means I had an idea of what they would be like from the very start and the names B and C to reflect that.
But then they emerged on the paper somewhat differently from planned, so now their original names no longer suit them. Thus the need to brainstorm new names.
This is also important because for now the working title uses the names of these characters, even though they aren't the major characters. They are guardians of a central mystery. It's sort of like if Harry Potter wasn't titled Harry Potter but The Hogwarts Academy. You'd have to be sure that the name Hogwarts was what you really wanted for the academy.
That's probably not a good example, because it seems pretty dumb to name the Harry Potter story after the school he attends. It seems to miss the main point. . . . The Wizard of Oz. That's a better example. It's Dorothy's story, but the thing she is pursuing or searching for is what the story is named after. That's more like the route I'm going in my working title. And the situation I'm in is like if Baum had originally used a working title like The Wizard of Topeka before the story took off in a little bit of a different direction and he decided to rename it.
So anyway, the working title that I've been using for the last five months is now suddenly something else. Which is kind of a big deal.
They come as a team. They work together and are almost always together when they do appear. But B has a bigger influence on the main characters. C is just a bit player.
So the first thing about their names is that they are a little bit "Dickensian," in the sense that I use a little bit of phonetic and lexical horseplay to make the names reflect or comment upon their personalities. Like how someone dishonest and treacherous might be named Grift. That isn't my usual style, but in this story it's more appropriate and I'm having a little fun with it.
I came up with B and C's names before I really began writing the story and certainly before I got to the scenes where they first appear. Which means I had an idea of what they would be like from the very start and the names B and C to reflect that.
But then they emerged on the paper somewhat differently from planned, so now their original names no longer suit them. Thus the need to brainstorm new names.
This is also important because for now the working title uses the names of these characters, even though they aren't the major characters. They are guardians of a central mystery. It's sort of like if Harry Potter wasn't titled Harry Potter but The Hogwarts Academy. You'd have to be sure that the name Hogwarts was what you really wanted for the academy.
That's probably not a good example, because it seems pretty dumb to name the Harry Potter story after the school he attends. It seems to miss the main point. . . . The Wizard of Oz. That's a better example. It's Dorothy's story, but the thing she is pursuing or searching for is what the story is named after. That's more like the route I'm going in my working title. And the situation I'm in is like if Baum had originally used a working title like The Wizard of Topeka before the story took off in a little bit of a different direction and he decided to rename it.
So anyway, the working title that I've been using for the last five months is now suddenly something else. Which is kind of a big deal.
Events in the news: Egypt
I have the T.V. on in the other room while I work this morning listening to live reports from events in Cairo. It reminds me of doing something similar and also blogging about it during the protests in Tehran in June 2009. It's not conducive to work, obviously, but part of the benefit of working at home is that I get to be flexible and tune into news like this when I want to. I'm not going to beat myself up about it.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Back to work, starting second draft
I'm returning to work on the novel today after about 2 1/2 weeks off.
In spirit I'm starting the second draft. Technically, there was one significant scene that I went flying by and left unwritten so that I could get into the scenes that were holding me up from the ending. So my first order of business today was writing some new material to fill in a gap. The result is 1,700 words of new material and about 8 pages. For the sake of consistency in the count, we'll just count those as part of the second draft. Emotionally or psychologically, that's where I was before today anyway.
That will probably be the biggest single new chunk added, I suspect, but I expect the typescript to grow and grow by little pieces if the experience of my first book is any guide. That went from about 135,000 words in the first draft to 225,000 words in the second draft without me having the conscious intention of adding anything. Just scene by scene as I clarified, developed and dug in deeper the material grew. I expect the same to happen here, but hopefully not to such a great extent. One, it just can't. I need this to be a much shorter book. Two, I still hope that my first draft is in much better shape than the first draft of my other book and so won't need so much digging and developing.
Still, I can't let those hopes get in the way. If it needs developing, I have to get out my own way and let it develop and worry about the page count later.
Next up . . . I have the beginnings of a to-do list here, and the next thing I need to do is to change the names of a couple of my secondary characters who lend their names to the working title of the book. They've gone in a different direction from what I originally imagined and need different names to reflect that. My plan is to read over the scenes that develop them with an eye toward renaming them and possibly the book.
After that I need to write a new scene early in the book made necessary by the direction the conclusion went. Hopefully I'll finish those two errands by the end of the week.
After that I'll start at the beginning of the typescript and start working my way through the whole thing. At that point, I think I can make reasonable prediction of the timeline.
In spirit I'm starting the second draft. Technically, there was one significant scene that I went flying by and left unwritten so that I could get into the scenes that were holding me up from the ending. So my first order of business today was writing some new material to fill in a gap. The result is 1,700 words of new material and about 8 pages. For the sake of consistency in the count, we'll just count those as part of the second draft. Emotionally or psychologically, that's where I was before today anyway.
That will probably be the biggest single new chunk added, I suspect, but I expect the typescript to grow and grow by little pieces if the experience of my first book is any guide. That went from about 135,000 words in the first draft to 225,000 words in the second draft without me having the conscious intention of adding anything. Just scene by scene as I clarified, developed and dug in deeper the material grew. I expect the same to happen here, but hopefully not to such a great extent. One, it just can't. I need this to be a much shorter book. Two, I still hope that my first draft is in much better shape than the first draft of my other book and so won't need so much digging and developing.
Still, I can't let those hopes get in the way. If it needs developing, I have to get out my own way and let it develop and worry about the page count later.
Next up . . . I have the beginnings of a to-do list here, and the next thing I need to do is to change the names of a couple of my secondary characters who lend their names to the working title of the book. They've gone in a different direction from what I originally imagined and need different names to reflect that. My plan is to read over the scenes that develop them with an eye toward renaming them and possibly the book.
After that I need to write a new scene early in the book made necessary by the direction the conclusion went. Hopefully I'll finish those two errands by the end of the week.
After that I'll start at the beginning of the typescript and start working my way through the whole thing. At that point, I think I can make reasonable prediction of the timeline.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Losing two weeks
I didn't work any last week because I was away on vacation, and I don't think I'm going to work any this week because I'll be concentrating on other personal, household and paying job issues. I hate to be away from it, but I don't really think it's a problem. I shouldn't have any trouble generating momentum again, and the break is well timed in the sense that I'm transitioning from one draft to another. It's usually a good thing to let it sit for awhile. In fact, it's probably better to let is sit a long longer than two weeks, but I'm not going to do that.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Word count revision
I forgot that for the best comparison to the previous book I need to count about 10,000 words that were written, typed up and already thrown in the scrap pile. The typescript stands at 70,000 words now, but I need to give myself credit for 80,000 words of drafting to get there.
So that averages out to about 1,600 words per weekday over 10 weeks.
So that averages out to about 1,600 words per weekday over 10 weeks.
Celebrating
Still on a high from passing this milestone. I can see a dozen ways to discount it -- that's my superpower, actually -- but I'm concentrating on giving myself credit and enjoying it.
Let's tally it up . . .
First of all, comparing this to writing my first book is has some apples to oranges conversion problems. In this case, the first draft is in much better shape I believe. More objectively, the first draft is completely typed, whereas in the last book I called the manuscript the first draft and the process of typing it in (and revising some as I went along) the second draft. That typing took probably about two months, so this is comparing two different kinds of time lines.
Another way I'm better set up this time is my outline. I had put it all on note cards when I got stuck a few months ago, and I've been updating them as I went along. I spent this morning getting them in shape. There are about 60 of them with good descriptions of each scene and lots of good notes about what needs to be revised. They should help a lot in the next draft. I had a less focused and helpful outline for my first book. (Still do, actually. Maybe that's what I need to fix to get that book back on track again.)
So, in terms of time line . . . I'm calling the official start date Sept. 1, 2010. (I actually didn't do a good job dating my notes and manuscript the first couple weeks, but that's close.) The official end date is January 6, 2011. That's just about exactly 18 weeks including pauses and interruptions. Figure a week off for Christmas and another for Thanksgiving. I'll put about two weeks of planned pauses for paying work in the same category -- let's call those pauses -- to get 14 weeks intended to be devoted to this. Everything else -- dealing with plumber, oversleeping, morning meetings that couldn't be avoided -- we'll call an interruption to the plan and just part of what you have to expect during the writing process. I'll guess there were about 2 weeks worth of those. Figure another 2 weeks of fear, boredom, self-doubt and generalized terror of the blank page where I didn't make any progress. That leaves an estimated 10 weeks of actual writing. I count a week as M - F. In reality I sometimes caught up with some work on the weekends.
My first book book took about 22 weeks before the subtractions, including a 2 week vacation in the middle of it. (Again that's without counting the time to type it in after the first draft was written.)
Length . . . this one is much shorter. The document with everything in it and in order is 300 pages exactly and just over 71,000 words. (My goal was to keep it under 65,000 words.) That includes a few pages at least of editing notes, though, so I'm going to round down the word count to 70,000 exactly and call it 295 pages. That doesn't count all the brainstorming, notetaking, character sketching and discarded material not worth typing in.
The first book was 135,000 words in the first draft. (And I was trying to keep it under 100,000.) It now stands at about 95,000 I think.
So, in terms of pace, it's not super great when I figure it up. It's about 777 words per week day over 18 weeks. 1,400 words per weekday over 10 weeks. Really I should add back in my freakout days, which would make it 1,166 words per weekday over 12 weeks. So the average is somewhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes of good writing on a typical working day. Which sounds slower than I remember the first book being, but, again, this first draft is in better shape at the end than in that case.
Well, this is what counts as celebrating for me. Pretty dorky. But I am reading the new autobiography of Mark Twain that was just published, which has a lot of discussion of working process and page counts and word counts, and it confirms for me, not for the first time, that other writers have this same kind of obsession.
I could make other comparisons to our working processes, but I better stop there before I embarrass myself.
Oh, by the way, no one is supposed to read this until a hundred years after my death.
Let's tally it up . . .
First of all, comparing this to writing my first book is has some apples to oranges conversion problems. In this case, the first draft is in much better shape I believe. More objectively, the first draft is completely typed, whereas in the last book I called the manuscript the first draft and the process of typing it in (and revising some as I went along) the second draft. That typing took probably about two months, so this is comparing two different kinds of time lines.
Another way I'm better set up this time is my outline. I had put it all on note cards when I got stuck a few months ago, and I've been updating them as I went along. I spent this morning getting them in shape. There are about 60 of them with good descriptions of each scene and lots of good notes about what needs to be revised. They should help a lot in the next draft. I had a less focused and helpful outline for my first book. (Still do, actually. Maybe that's what I need to fix to get that book back on track again.)
So, in terms of time line . . . I'm calling the official start date Sept. 1, 2010. (I actually didn't do a good job dating my notes and manuscript the first couple weeks, but that's close.) The official end date is January 6, 2011. That's just about exactly 18 weeks including pauses and interruptions. Figure a week off for Christmas and another for Thanksgiving. I'll put about two weeks of planned pauses for paying work in the same category -- let's call those pauses -- to get 14 weeks intended to be devoted to this. Everything else -- dealing with plumber, oversleeping, morning meetings that couldn't be avoided -- we'll call an interruption to the plan and just part of what you have to expect during the writing process. I'll guess there were about 2 weeks worth of those. Figure another 2 weeks of fear, boredom, self-doubt and generalized terror of the blank page where I didn't make any progress. That leaves an estimated 10 weeks of actual writing. I count a week as M - F. In reality I sometimes caught up with some work on the weekends.
My first book book took about 22 weeks before the subtractions, including a 2 week vacation in the middle of it. (Again that's without counting the time to type it in after the first draft was written.)
Length . . . this one is much shorter. The document with everything in it and in order is 300 pages exactly and just over 71,000 words. (My goal was to keep it under 65,000 words.) That includes a few pages at least of editing notes, though, so I'm going to round down the word count to 70,000 exactly and call it 295 pages. That doesn't count all the brainstorming, notetaking, character sketching and discarded material not worth typing in.
The first book was 135,000 words in the first draft. (And I was trying to keep it under 100,000.) It now stands at about 95,000 I think.
So, in terms of pace, it's not super great when I figure it up. It's about 777 words per week day over 18 weeks. 1,400 words per weekday over 10 weeks. Really I should add back in my freakout days, which would make it 1,166 words per weekday over 12 weeks. So the average is somewhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes of good writing on a typical working day. Which sounds slower than I remember the first book being, but, again, this first draft is in better shape at the end than in that case.
Well, this is what counts as celebrating for me. Pretty dorky. But I am reading the new autobiography of Mark Twain that was just published, which has a lot of discussion of working process and page counts and word counts, and it confirms for me, not for the first time, that other writers have this same kind of obsession.
I could make other comparisons to our working processes, but I better stop there before I embarrass myself.
Oh, by the way, no one is supposed to read this until a hundred years after my death.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Getting very close to the end of the first draft
I've lost track of what counts as new material and what's already been counted, but I can add in at least 1,500 words -- handwritten yesterday and typed in today.
That was key bridge material on the part that I've been struggling with, which feels good. It went a little more low key a direction than I wanted, and it creates some awkward seams that will take a lot of work to smooth out, but it gets me off the dime.
That puts me very close to calling my first draft done. I want to take care of those seams before I say I'm done with this section. And I need to draft the first half of the final scene. (The very very end of that scene and of the book I already wrote, but I skipped over the build up.)
I really want to finish by the end of this week, since I'm not going to be able to work on it at all next week and part of the following week. It would great to go into that break having passed this milestone. And I should be able to if I was focused, but there are some distractions around the house that are making it difficult the last couple weeks.
We'll see.
That was key bridge material on the part that I've been struggling with, which feels good. It went a little more low key a direction than I wanted, and it creates some awkward seams that will take a lot of work to smooth out, but it gets me off the dime.
That puts me very close to calling my first draft done. I want to take care of those seams before I say I'm done with this section. And I need to draft the first half of the final scene. (The very very end of that scene and of the book I already wrote, but I skipped over the build up.)
I really want to finish by the end of this week, since I'm not going to be able to work on it at all next week and part of the following week. It would great to go into that break having passed this milestone. And I should be able to if I was focused, but there are some distractions around the house that are making it difficult the last couple weeks.
We'll see.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Books read in 2010
It's time for my fourth annual totally irrational and OCD-driven list of all the books I've read for the year.
There are a lot of rules to this goofy mind game I play with myself, but the short version is that I count only books that I complete cover to cover, that I allow myself to cheat slightly with long reference or technical books if I read most of them, that I don't allow myself to pad the list by choosing short books and, on the other hand, if a short book comes up in the natural course of my reading life, I do get to count it.
Those rules were particularly influential this year. The reference/technical book comes into play with all the traveling I did. I have several guidebooks on my list that I read about 70-90% of. Also I have the textbook I used in my teaching.
More influential is all the children's books I read as part of the research I'm doing for the book I'm writing. That pushed my numbers to a record high. I added a new rule along the way that I would only count what might be considered a novel for its age group. I counted James and the Giant Peach and Harry Potter but not Where the Wild Things Are.
Take the 20 or so children's books on my list and convert that into about 5 adult novels I might have read, and the tally would be about the same as in previous years. So the list is skewed in a new way this year, but the list has always been skewey. In reality, I probably read a little bit more -- mostly because of the down time I had while traveling -- but since I'm counting books instead of pages, words or time, it's impossible to tell.
As always, there are dozens of books I started and didn't finish. If I gave myself a quarter credit for each of those, I'd be well over my goal of averaging 2 per week. (104). But those aren't the rules.
As it is, I came closer than ever. The tally this year is 96.
It sounds like a lot, but I'm hyper aware of how slow a reader I am and how much more ground I wish I was covering. I got another reminder of that this week. My wife -- who has much less reading time available to her but is a fast reader -- is on vacation this week and has knocked off four novels in the last few days while I read one. It makes me wanna holler.
Those 96 books include, as I said before, about 20 definite children's books, another 5 or so that I pitched as children's classics but that might be considered adult novels (Treasure Island), several books of theory and analysis about children's literature, a mix of nonfiction that satisfied some curiosity I had during the year (a history of Buddhism; a history of Paris), most of the Lonely Planet guides for Southeast Asia, all of Richard Price's novels for some reason, books related to research I was doing for the so-called "second novel" I was writing but that is now on hold and books based on movies I saw and became curious about (Winter's Bone; Atonement).
In the first half of the year, the list is a very strange miscellany of novels that I took with me overseas based on a complicated set of criteria plus the weird random books that came my way while I was over there. (The Pickwick Papers? I was really desperate for reading material there at the end.)
Well I won't list them all. Here are some highlights.
Favorite new books from the last year or two include The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Both highly recommended. I also read another backlist title by Hilary Mantel that has stuck with me -- Beyond Black.
Favorites from the near past that are new to me include Mating by Norman Rush and Transmission by Hari Kunzru and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.
I re-read several old favorites with pleasure again, most of which I've written about on this blog before. Straight Man by Richard Russo gave me a new appreciation for the comic novel. My previous memory of it was of how funny it was, but now I remember it as much more than that.
Lastly, as always, the best part of reading is finally getting around to "classic" books that are new to me. I'll include The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow here for lack of a better place to shelve it. (Author deceased but the copyright not yet lapsed. I guess I could call it backlist, but not recent.) The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain still has me cracking up and amazed at his talent. Peter Pan might be my new favorite book. I was genuinely surprised at its thematic and emotional complexity, and I'm surprised it's not read more. I found The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad by confusing it with The Secret Sharer, to my good fortune.)
I read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It doesn't make me excited and it doesn't make me angry. I certainly don't resent the attention it's getting. If you benchmark the favorable reviews it has gotten at 100, I guess I would give it a 95. I would say it's overrated, but not by so much that it's worth fighting over. One way I think about it is that I consider it to have a similar ambition and scope as The World According To Garp, which I read for the first time about 20 years ago and re-read for about the 6th time this year. I don't see myself re-reading Freedom and having it stick with me the same way.
I read a lot of dogs this year, too -- books whose praise I don't understand, books that seemed pretty good when I read them and now can't remember a single image from, books that I can't understand why were ever published. But I won't beat up on those in public. I will say that there are two major authors that over the years I have tried and tried and tried to get into but that I am now giving myself permission to at least hold in lower regard than the conventional wisdom and maybe to give up on entirely. They are Charles Dickens and Henry James. And I'm not going to feel guilty about it.
Not on the list is any complete book of poetry. That's a change from past years, though I did read some in doses smaller than a book. I read a ton of short stories this year, so my list got gypped more than usual on that point.
Well, that leaves about another 40 books that I haven't mentioned that just kind of came and went. Pretty good books that I enjoyed reading but that I don't see myself recommending, returning to, recommending against or arguing about. That's kind of how reading goes, I think. We're lucky to find two really really good books in a year. Jacob de Zoet and Wolf Hall. Go out and get them.
There are a lot of rules to this goofy mind game I play with myself, but the short version is that I count only books that I complete cover to cover, that I allow myself to cheat slightly with long reference or technical books if I read most of them, that I don't allow myself to pad the list by choosing short books and, on the other hand, if a short book comes up in the natural course of my reading life, I do get to count it.
Those rules were particularly influential this year. The reference/technical book comes into play with all the traveling I did. I have several guidebooks on my list that I read about 70-90% of. Also I have the textbook I used in my teaching.
More influential is all the children's books I read as part of the research I'm doing for the book I'm writing. That pushed my numbers to a record high. I added a new rule along the way that I would only count what might be considered a novel for its age group. I counted James and the Giant Peach and Harry Potter but not Where the Wild Things Are.
Take the 20 or so children's books on my list and convert that into about 5 adult novels I might have read, and the tally would be about the same as in previous years. So the list is skewed in a new way this year, but the list has always been skewey. In reality, I probably read a little bit more -- mostly because of the down time I had while traveling -- but since I'm counting books instead of pages, words or time, it's impossible to tell.
As always, there are dozens of books I started and didn't finish. If I gave myself a quarter credit for each of those, I'd be well over my goal of averaging 2 per week. (104). But those aren't the rules.
As it is, I came closer than ever. The tally this year is 96.
It sounds like a lot, but I'm hyper aware of how slow a reader I am and how much more ground I wish I was covering. I got another reminder of that this week. My wife -- who has much less reading time available to her but is a fast reader -- is on vacation this week and has knocked off four novels in the last few days while I read one. It makes me wanna holler.
Those 96 books include, as I said before, about 20 definite children's books, another 5 or so that I pitched as children's classics but that might be considered adult novels (Treasure Island), several books of theory and analysis about children's literature, a mix of nonfiction that satisfied some curiosity I had during the year (a history of Buddhism; a history of Paris), most of the Lonely Planet guides for Southeast Asia, all of Richard Price's novels for some reason, books related to research I was doing for the so-called "second novel" I was writing but that is now on hold and books based on movies I saw and became curious about (Winter's Bone; Atonement).
In the first half of the year, the list is a very strange miscellany of novels that I took with me overseas based on a complicated set of criteria plus the weird random books that came my way while I was over there. (The Pickwick Papers? I was really desperate for reading material there at the end.)
Well I won't list them all. Here are some highlights.
Favorite new books from the last year or two include The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Both highly recommended. I also read another backlist title by Hilary Mantel that has stuck with me -- Beyond Black.
Favorites from the near past that are new to me include Mating by Norman Rush and Transmission by Hari Kunzru and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.
I re-read several old favorites with pleasure again, most of which I've written about on this blog before. Straight Man by Richard Russo gave me a new appreciation for the comic novel. My previous memory of it was of how funny it was, but now I remember it as much more than that.
Lastly, as always, the best part of reading is finally getting around to "classic" books that are new to me. I'll include The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow here for lack of a better place to shelve it. (Author deceased but the copyright not yet lapsed. I guess I could call it backlist, but not recent.) The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain still has me cracking up and amazed at his talent. Peter Pan might be my new favorite book. I was genuinely surprised at its thematic and emotional complexity, and I'm surprised it's not read more. I found The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad by confusing it with The Secret Sharer, to my good fortune.)
I read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It doesn't make me excited and it doesn't make me angry. I certainly don't resent the attention it's getting. If you benchmark the favorable reviews it has gotten at 100, I guess I would give it a 95. I would say it's overrated, but not by so much that it's worth fighting over. One way I think about it is that I consider it to have a similar ambition and scope as The World According To Garp, which I read for the first time about 20 years ago and re-read for about the 6th time this year. I don't see myself re-reading Freedom and having it stick with me the same way.
I read a lot of dogs this year, too -- books whose praise I don't understand, books that seemed pretty good when I read them and now can't remember a single image from, books that I can't understand why were ever published. But I won't beat up on those in public. I will say that there are two major authors that over the years I have tried and tried and tried to get into but that I am now giving myself permission to at least hold in lower regard than the conventional wisdom and maybe to give up on entirely. They are Charles Dickens and Henry James. And I'm not going to feel guilty about it.
Not on the list is any complete book of poetry. That's a change from past years, though I did read some in doses smaller than a book. I read a ton of short stories this year, so my list got gypped more than usual on that point.
Well, that leaves about another 40 books that I haven't mentioned that just kind of came and went. Pretty good books that I enjoyed reading but that I don't see myself recommending, returning to, recommending against or arguing about. That's kind of how reading goes, I think. We're lucky to find two really really good books in a year. Jacob de Zoet and Wolf Hall. Go out and get them.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Closer and closer to the end
I'm getting closer to the end of my first draft. A few good working days, with luck. (And getting those days will take some luck. I have a few interruptions coming up.)
I added about 2,100 words to the total in the last two days. That's with a little bit of new material and typing in that and some older scraps that had never been typed in. It includes the actual last words, but I got there by skipping over some scenes leading up to the last scene, so I can't really say it's done.
I'm back at the point in the cycle with a lot of doubt and confusion that I need to work through. Just have to find the time. The only real problem is frustration from the sense that I'm missing self-imposed deadlines. If I don't worry about that, then I would have to conclude that everything is fine.
I added about 2,100 words to the total in the last two days. That's with a little bit of new material and typing in that and some older scraps that had never been typed in. It includes the actual last words, but I got there by skipping over some scenes leading up to the last scene, so I can't really say it's done.
I'm back at the point in the cycle with a lot of doubt and confusion that I need to work through. Just have to find the time. The only real problem is frustration from the sense that I'm missing self-imposed deadlines. If I don't worry about that, then I would have to conclude that everything is fine.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Shaping up
Worked several yours today on the section I've writing and re-writing for the last few weeks. To extend my Frankenstein metaphor, I guess I've been trying to smooth out some of the scars. It's more or less functioning, now, but along the way I identified places where I need to do some more serious physical therapy to get it to move more naturally.
It's the kind of digging in and development work that really is the hardest part of revision. Trying to get to the heart of it and develop the full emotional power.
Two key spots where I want to work on that for now. I'll try to tackle those tomorrow -- the last day before the holiday -- and then I can call this good enough to attach to the first draft.
Tired.
It's the kind of digging in and development work that really is the hardest part of revision. Trying to get to the heart of it and develop the full emotional power.
Two key spots where I want to work on that for now. I'll try to tackle those tomorrow -- the last day before the holiday -- and then I can call this good enough to attach to the first draft.
Tired.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Plus 3,000 words net
I've lost track of what I've already counted and what was written but not yet part of the accounting, but anyway, I think the net result from the last week or so of work is about 3,000 words. That's after cutting out a lot of stuff, pasting in the new stuff (including about 1,500 words from today) and moving a lot of stuff around. The total of material now included in the first draft is 63,000 words. I was hoping to keep the first draft under 65,000 words, but I'm not going to make it. Maybe 75,000 if I'm lucky.
That leaves this section of the book that I've been struggling with at 10,000 words and about 40 pages in the second super rough rough draft. That's probably way too long, but I'm too close to it now to see how, and it needs to have bigger picture revisions before I think about cutting. I need to do some digging and developing and unifying. It's kind of a Frankenstein monster right now.
But I think it is on the path to working. I've punched my way out of the paper bag in the last week. In the condition it's in right now, I doubt anyone would agree, since it's such a mess. But its potential is clearer in my mind, so I think my next task over the next couple mornings is to pull into a better shape so I can show it to my wife.
I think I can probably get two working mornings in before the holiday interruption.
If that works, then I can start the week after Christmas driving toward the final battle scene. That would be awesome.
That leaves this section of the book that I've been struggling with at 10,000 words and about 40 pages in the second super rough rough draft. That's probably way too long, but I'm too close to it now to see how, and it needs to have bigger picture revisions before I think about cutting. I need to do some digging and developing and unifying. It's kind of a Frankenstein monster right now.
But I think it is on the path to working. I've punched my way out of the paper bag in the last week. In the condition it's in right now, I doubt anyone would agree, since it's such a mess. But its potential is clearer in my mind, so I think my next task over the next couple mornings is to pull into a better shape so I can show it to my wife.
I think I can probably get two working mornings in before the holiday interruption.
If that works, then I can start the week after Christmas driving toward the final battle scene. That would be awesome.
Friday, December 17, 2010
A couple of good days
I'm cruising now.
I wrote 1,600 words today (longhand) and got them typed in. This material will replace some existing material, so the net word count probably isn't changing, but I won't know that until I finish up this section and do the related cutting and pasting.
I also spent a lot of time updating my note cards based on the changes I've made in the plot so far. That's a little intimidating, because it makes clear how many scenes I need to revise, rewrite, move or just plain write for the first time. Basically the whole book.
Last night I read what I wrote yesterday, the false peak scene, to my wife, and it made her cry. So that was a shot in the arm.
I still don't know exactly how this whole section is going to be organized, but I feel like it's doable. I wish I could work on it over the weekend, but it's that holiday weekend where there's not time for anything except parties. Then I have 2, maybe 3, days next week before the holidays cause a big interruption. Maybe with luck I'll have this section nailed down before then.
I wrote 1,600 words today (longhand) and got them typed in. This material will replace some existing material, so the net word count probably isn't changing, but I won't know that until I finish up this section and do the related cutting and pasting.
I also spent a lot of time updating my note cards based on the changes I've made in the plot so far. That's a little intimidating, because it makes clear how many scenes I need to revise, rewrite, move or just plain write for the first time. Basically the whole book.
Last night I read what I wrote yesterday, the false peak scene, to my wife, and it made her cry. So that was a shot in the arm.
I still don't know exactly how this whole section is going to be organized, but I feel like it's doable. I wish I could work on it over the weekend, but it's that holiday weekend where there's not time for anything except parties. Then I have 2, maybe 3, days next week before the holidays cause a big interruption. Maybe with luck I'll have this section nailed down before then.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Satisfying resolutions
I'm struggling quite a bit with the problem of how to resolve a story. (Still working on the so-called "false peak" section that I've been stuck on for a few weeks, so there's still the real resolution to come.) I've taken a run at it several times and am having trouble with coming up something that seems right.
Intellectually, I know what the ingredients must include, though there is probably some other required ingredient I don't know about. It has to involve an externally manifested action taken by the main character that resolves not only her external problems (e.g. the bear at the door) but resolves the internal issues that she is struggling with and that complicates her ability to deal with things. I think it also ought to -- or at least I want it to -- be an action that has some kind of resonance with the thematic issues of the story. It should also be visually vivid and surprising without feeling unrealistic or unfair or unearned -- like it is playing by the rules of the game set up earlier.
That's a lot of for one little moment to accomplish. I can' intellectualize it and I can describe how any given solution I've come up with is lacking some ingredient. But I have trouble imagining the right solution.
And imagining is what it takes. That's where the missing ingredient lies. Coming up with some fantastic vivid image. The slipper going on to the foot. Romeo tipping the poison back down his throat.
I think in my case I have an additional complication that's difficult to explain without giving away too much of the story. First off, it can't be the hero slaying the dragon, because the enemy resembles the hero too much. It can't be the hero winning a contest of wills or power against another fighter because in the rules of the world I've set up, the solution rests on disarming the opponent but there is no way to disarm them without disarming yourself. (That probably doesn't sound like it makes any sense. I hope it would if I was willing to tell more about the story.) In any case, I need a resolution with all those characteristics above and that work in the narrow space allowed by the rules I've set up.
It's probably the internal conflict part that interests me most. To my mind, the most satisfying stories don't just solve the internal conflict cut arise from the internal conflict. It's a two-way street. The internal struggle up to this point, while being a complication and an obstacle, also yields insights and resources that, if realized, become useful in the final resolution. If the character hadn't been dealing with that internal conflict, then they wouldn't have what they need to slay the dragon. I guess I can't think of any perfect examples of that right now, but it's still the ideal resolution for me, at least in the abstract.
One other idea that I think is relevant to this . . . Toni Morrison talks in one of her interviews about how if she has the key metaphor for her story that's all she needs to get it going and get it written. Just hold that metaphor in her mind. That idea has been on my mind this week. I feel like I need some kind physical manifestation of my story's themes. Some talisman that shows up at key moments, including at the resolution. The sword or the golden chalice would do that in a typical romance. Like when Harry Potter gets hold of the philosopher's stone or Tom Riddle's diary or a specific sword or whatever.
So I've been writing the equivalent of a master's degree thesis on these problems all week trying to figure out how to end the story, how to set up that ending, how to seed the book so that the ending bears the right fruit. I don't think I've come up with anything as ideal as I outlined here, but I've got an improvement. I think I know what the talisman could be. I've written another version of the ending that I'll read over and think about in the next couple days. And then we'll see.
About 2,500 words of new material. (And I ought to get credit for about 4 times that much of note taking and brainstorming and character sketching to help me break through.)
Intellectually, I know what the ingredients must include, though there is probably some other required ingredient I don't know about. It has to involve an externally manifested action taken by the main character that resolves not only her external problems (e.g. the bear at the door) but resolves the internal issues that she is struggling with and that complicates her ability to deal with things. I think it also ought to -- or at least I want it to -- be an action that has some kind of resonance with the thematic issues of the story. It should also be visually vivid and surprising without feeling unrealistic or unfair or unearned -- like it is playing by the rules of the game set up earlier.
That's a lot of for one little moment to accomplish. I can' intellectualize it and I can describe how any given solution I've come up with is lacking some ingredient. But I have trouble imagining the right solution.
And imagining is what it takes. That's where the missing ingredient lies. Coming up with some fantastic vivid image. The slipper going on to the foot. Romeo tipping the poison back down his throat.
I think in my case I have an additional complication that's difficult to explain without giving away too much of the story. First off, it can't be the hero slaying the dragon, because the enemy resembles the hero too much. It can't be the hero winning a contest of wills or power against another fighter because in the rules of the world I've set up, the solution rests on disarming the opponent but there is no way to disarm them without disarming yourself. (That probably doesn't sound like it makes any sense. I hope it would if I was willing to tell more about the story.) In any case, I need a resolution with all those characteristics above and that work in the narrow space allowed by the rules I've set up.
It's probably the internal conflict part that interests me most. To my mind, the most satisfying stories don't just solve the internal conflict cut arise from the internal conflict. It's a two-way street. The internal struggle up to this point, while being a complication and an obstacle, also yields insights and resources that, if realized, become useful in the final resolution. If the character hadn't been dealing with that internal conflict, then they wouldn't have what they need to slay the dragon. I guess I can't think of any perfect examples of that right now, but it's still the ideal resolution for me, at least in the abstract.
One other idea that I think is relevant to this . . . Toni Morrison talks in one of her interviews about how if she has the key metaphor for her story that's all she needs to get it going and get it written. Just hold that metaphor in her mind. That idea has been on my mind this week. I feel like I need some kind physical manifestation of my story's themes. Some talisman that shows up at key moments, including at the resolution. The sword or the golden chalice would do that in a typical romance. Like when Harry Potter gets hold of the philosopher's stone or Tom Riddle's diary or a specific sword or whatever.
So I've been writing the equivalent of a master's degree thesis on these problems all week trying to figure out how to end the story, how to set up that ending, how to seed the book so that the ending bears the right fruit. I don't think I've come up with anything as ideal as I outlined here, but I've got an improvement. I think I know what the talisman could be. I've written another version of the ending that I'll read over and think about in the next couple days. And then we'll see.
About 2,500 words of new material. (And I ought to get credit for about 4 times that much of note taking and brainstorming and character sketching to help me break through.)
Friday, December 10, 2010
Revision -- uggh
I haven't worked up the courage yet to start drafting the conclusion yet. (Mainly because I don't have confidence in the material I just finished. It feels like it will have to be radically different and therefore set up a different kind of conclusion.)
In the meantime, I'm doing some patch up work on the rest of it. I have my main file that most everything is typed into, and then I have another file where I drafted my new opening. (e.g. about 30 pages.) I started copying and pasting and cutting to put the new opening in place and take out the parts of my original opening that no longer work. That leaves a lot of jagged seams, which I spent some time trying to smooth over, but I can see it's going to be a lot of work. And not the most glamorous work, either. I'm not looking forward to it.
So, my main file, which has everything that I possibly could be using to create a first draft and from which I have cut out stuff I know won't be included, now is at 59,000 words and 250 pages. That, plus about 10,000 words of scrap material, all of it typed in and with some light editing, in the last 15 weeks approximately. Not bad. Not great. Not my goal. I really want to have an ending that I can believe in drafted before Christmas.
In the meantime, I'm doing some patch up work on the rest of it. I have my main file that most everything is typed into, and then I have another file where I drafted my new opening. (e.g. about 30 pages.) I started copying and pasting and cutting to put the new opening in place and take out the parts of my original opening that no longer work. That leaves a lot of jagged seams, which I spent some time trying to smooth over, but I can see it's going to be a lot of work. And not the most glamorous work, either. I'm not looking forward to it.
So, my main file, which has everything that I possibly could be using to create a first draft and from which I have cut out stuff I know won't be included, now is at 59,000 words and 250 pages. That, plus about 10,000 words of scrap material, all of it typed in and with some light editing, in the last 15 weeks approximately. Not bad. Not great. Not my goal. I really want to have an ending that I can believe in drafted before Christmas.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tense
Verb tense, that is.
As a reader I have an aversion to the use of the present tense in fiction. I feel like it is often used as a gimmick to generate cheap energy through a sense of immediacy when vivid and singular writing in the past tense would do that more authentically. Sometimes when a writer uses the present tense it feels like a patch up to disguise the shortcomings in the writing such as there not being any active verbs, probably because the writer doesn't really know what's going on in the scene. Perhaps they've failed to get in touch with it.
There are plenty of counter examples and many many novels I've enjoyed that are in present tense -- usually pulling me in before I've had to become aware of technique. So, probably the most accurate thing to say is that in my opinion present tense is a technique that can have an interesting effect but that is overused. (I also feel that same way about first person -- that the technique is sometimes used to hide the shortcomings in the story behind a clever voice. I could go on forever about the neglected virtues of the third person, especially the third person limited.)
So I usually rely on the plain vanilla techniques of past tense and third person, my present project included. But . . . when I was drafting the other day I found myself slipping mid-scene into the present tense. Where is that coming from, I asked myself.
It actually happened during a parenthetical remark in the narration that explains some context about what is going on in the story. When I thought about it more closely, I realized that parts of this project might actually benefit from switching between present and past tense in an organized way.
To explain this I might have to give away more of my story than I usually like to do on this blog. How do I put this? Let's just say that in the abstract that the story takes places in two different "realms" in terms of time and space. Think of it as inside the castle and out in the forest, to use the romance model. The characters move back and forth between these different realms for big portions of the book -- several chapters in one, several chapters in another, etc. There are about 6 -8 switches total.
Up until my accidental switch to present tense, all of the book, on both realms, had been narrated with the same past-tense technique. ("The hero discovered this and decided that.") But I've been thinking that the changes in realm could be signaled with a change in tense. When the characters are in the castle, I would use past tense, and when they go into the forest, I would use the present. ("The hero discovers this and decides that.")
One advantage would be to heighten the distinction between the two realms. Another is that it would clarify for the reader where we are in time and space. Another is that the change in general and the use of the present tense in particular in those spots would reinforce some of the thematic structure of the story, but, again, to explain that I would have to give away more than I want to.
So, I'm experimenting with that. I wrote the rest of the section in the present tense. Even though it has the advantages I listed, I'm not sure I'm crazy about how it sounds. I have a theory that the present tense gives up some subtlety of meaning that the English language is capable of, and this material I've drafted feels that way to me a little bit, though it's hard to put my finger on exactly how.
Also, if I'm going to do this, it will mean a lot of tedious revision in about a third of the book changing all the saws to sees and wases to ises and saids to says. Just doing that for the 10 pages I already had done in this section about bored me to death.
So we'll see. This book has bigger problems that I need to figure out, so I'll be stewing on this in the meantime. In any case, it shouldn't affect any more of the drafting, because I'm past the last trip into the forest. It will affect rewrites and revisions.
As a reader I have an aversion to the use of the present tense in fiction. I feel like it is often used as a gimmick to generate cheap energy through a sense of immediacy when vivid and singular writing in the past tense would do that more authentically. Sometimes when a writer uses the present tense it feels like a patch up to disguise the shortcomings in the writing such as there not being any active verbs, probably because the writer doesn't really know what's going on in the scene. Perhaps they've failed to get in touch with it.
There are plenty of counter examples and many many novels I've enjoyed that are in present tense -- usually pulling me in before I've had to become aware of technique. So, probably the most accurate thing to say is that in my opinion present tense is a technique that can have an interesting effect but that is overused. (I also feel that same way about first person -- that the technique is sometimes used to hide the shortcomings in the story behind a clever voice. I could go on forever about the neglected virtues of the third person, especially the third person limited.)
So I usually rely on the plain vanilla techniques of past tense and third person, my present project included. But . . . when I was drafting the other day I found myself slipping mid-scene into the present tense. Where is that coming from, I asked myself.
It actually happened during a parenthetical remark in the narration that explains some context about what is going on in the story. When I thought about it more closely, I realized that parts of this project might actually benefit from switching between present and past tense in an organized way.
To explain this I might have to give away more of my story than I usually like to do on this blog. How do I put this? Let's just say that in the abstract that the story takes places in two different "realms" in terms of time and space. Think of it as inside the castle and out in the forest, to use the romance model. The characters move back and forth between these different realms for big portions of the book -- several chapters in one, several chapters in another, etc. There are about 6 -8 switches total.
Up until my accidental switch to present tense, all of the book, on both realms, had been narrated with the same past-tense technique. ("The hero discovered this and decided that.") But I've been thinking that the changes in realm could be signaled with a change in tense. When the characters are in the castle, I would use past tense, and when they go into the forest, I would use the present. ("The hero discovers this and decides that.")
One advantage would be to heighten the distinction between the two realms. Another is that it would clarify for the reader where we are in time and space. Another is that the change in general and the use of the present tense in particular in those spots would reinforce some of the thematic structure of the story, but, again, to explain that I would have to give away more than I want to.
So, I'm experimenting with that. I wrote the rest of the section in the present tense. Even though it has the advantages I listed, I'm not sure I'm crazy about how it sounds. I have a theory that the present tense gives up some subtlety of meaning that the English language is capable of, and this material I've drafted feels that way to me a little bit, though it's hard to put my finger on exactly how.
Also, if I'm going to do this, it will mean a lot of tedious revision in about a third of the book changing all the saws to sees and wases to ises and saids to says. Just doing that for the 10 pages I already had done in this section about bored me to death.
So we'll see. This book has bigger problems that I need to figure out, so I'll be stewing on this in the meantime. In any case, it shouldn't affect any more of the drafting, because I'm past the last trip into the forest. It will affect rewrites and revisions.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Tough week
Well, I guess the lesson of the last week is about the need for perseverance. When in doubt, just sit down and keep battering away.
So much of this work is resisting the intellectual impulse. Knowing when not to try and fix and understand and repair but just to keep building mud pies and float along on innocent, ignorant faith.
I think I'm at a crucial moment in the story where all the inherent weaknesses mixed in to the foundation cement stones at the very beginning are revealing themselves in seemingly catastrophic cracks as I near the climax. I can't bring it to a satisfying resolution so much as reveal how the "it" has all along been a muddled patchwork man dressed up like a real person.
That crucial moment can make me freeze up. The inclination is to try to find the right combination of putty and paint to make it all seem to work, but I know in my heart that isn't going to work, so I sit around fretting and doing nothing. Or trying to think my way out of the problem.
That's how most of last week went. Finally I remembered the core lesson -- just sit down, give up any agenda or expectations, and start writing something. The goal isn't to finish but to produce something. Don't expect it to work, and if you're lucky it will reveal a path to what could work.
And I think that's what I've got. I write about 6,000 words over 6 days of working last week. (Up to something like 63,000 now.) And what I wrote is near total crap. But that little bit that isn't total crap is my trail of bread crumbs out of this mess. It's the hint of the deeper emotion and deeper theme of the story. If I develop it, it will mean a million changes in what I've written already.
But the work so far is necessary to get to this point. I want it to go like a flowchart, like the perfect to do list. That's an idiotic delusion. Maybe this will end up coming to me 10% faster than the last book, but it won't be fast. Especially if I can't recognize these roadblocks as such and hope that I can think my way past them.
I have a first "zero draft" of my so-called "false peak" chapter. It's shit, but that's a better problem than being stuck.
So much of this work is resisting the intellectual impulse. Knowing when not to try and fix and understand and repair but just to keep building mud pies and float along on innocent, ignorant faith.
I think I'm at a crucial moment in the story where all the inherent weaknesses mixed in to the foundation cement stones at the very beginning are revealing themselves in seemingly catastrophic cracks as I near the climax. I can't bring it to a satisfying resolution so much as reveal how the "it" has all along been a muddled patchwork man dressed up like a real person.
That crucial moment can make me freeze up. The inclination is to try to find the right combination of putty and paint to make it all seem to work, but I know in my heart that isn't going to work, so I sit around fretting and doing nothing. Or trying to think my way out of the problem.
That's how most of last week went. Finally I remembered the core lesson -- just sit down, give up any agenda or expectations, and start writing something. The goal isn't to finish but to produce something. Don't expect it to work, and if you're lucky it will reveal a path to what could work.
And I think that's what I've got. I write about 6,000 words over 6 days of working last week. (Up to something like 63,000 now.) And what I wrote is near total crap. But that little bit that isn't total crap is my trail of bread crumbs out of this mess. It's the hint of the deeper emotion and deeper theme of the story. If I develop it, it will mean a million changes in what I've written already.
But the work so far is necessary to get to this point. I want it to go like a flowchart, like the perfect to do list. That's an idiotic delusion. Maybe this will end up coming to me 10% faster than the last book, but it won't be fast. Especially if I can't recognize these roadblocks as such and hope that I can think my way past them.
I have a first "zero draft" of my so-called "false peak" chapter. It's shit, but that's a better problem than being stuck.
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