Perils of the Writer: The Slow Process of Getting the Ball Rolling

¡Feliz día de los muertos!  We're now in November, which for some writerly types, means NaNoWriMo, aka Nation Novel Writing Month.  If you aren't in the know, participants pledge to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of November.  This translates to writing approximately 16,666 words a day.  Back in the early days of writing, I participated, but I don't anymore, since every month is Novel Writing Month, and at this point in my life, a pace of 50K a month for 12 months is not something I could ever hope to maintain.  Writing at my own pace is just fine by me.

In my opinion, NaNoWriMo is an excellent exercise in terms of process, in learning how to write a novel... but not one in terms of results.  The novel you write in one month won't be a particularly useful one, not without significant editing.  Briefly: I think it's a wonderful way to crank out a trunk novel.  One of my trunk novels was, in fact, a NaNoWriMo.*

But exercise and process are important, especially when it comes to getting started.  Getting a novel started is, for me, a very slow and deliberate process, in that the path from conception to writing actual text can take quite some time.  I sometimes make the metaphor of my writing brain being like a kitchen, with various projects on front and back burners.  But then there is other stuff in crockpots on back counters, slowly stewing away for years until they are really ready to work.

Phase One: Conception.   
This is, more or less, the Big Idea phase of things, where the thunderstrike of a Shiny New Story smashes across your brainpan.  It's usually the broadest of brushstrokes: Steampunk Airship Flying Through Alternate Universe Texas!  Secret Telepath War In Manhattan!  Abducted Human Wakes from Hibernation Sleep on a Dying Ship Full of other Abducted Aliens!  Cold hard truth: 75-90% of projects never get out of this phase.  It's always a bit fun and exciting, but it's also easy to mistake that Fun and Exciting for "And now I will write the book".  That never works, at least for me.  Though I suspect that many people-- at least non-writers-- believe that this phase is all you need to write the book.**

Phase Two: Setting.
Once I have an idea, I need to build the place where it unfolds.  I'm a worldbuilder, it's what I do.  For me, this phase is all too crucial: it's about placing the gears that will power the engine behind the story.  This phase can often be the longest, because it is filled with working and reworking things out. If it doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense to me, then the center doesn't hold. Case in point: when I initially conceived my Space Opera Setting, back in 2002, I created some initial star maps with colonies and alien homeworlds and such and so forth.  But as I first tried to write, this signal of WRONG WRONG WRONG across my brain was jamming things up.  Why?  It took a while to realize, but I finally hit upon it: the stars of these colonies and alien worlds, while being in close proximity to Earth, had nothing to do with actual stars close to Earth.  Back to the drawing board.

Phase Three-A: Characters.
Phase Three-B: Circumstances.
I put these two together like this because they tend to go hand in hand, but I can't honestly say which one goes first.  Both things are crucial to figuring out what the actual story is: what's happening, and who it's happening to.  It's a strange, intertwined process that, frankly, I haven't quite mastered.  Trying to craft circumstances without knowing character at the center can yield something soulless and mechanical.  But crafting characters without really knowing the story can make an unholy mess, where you end up with numerous people standing around with very little to do.  The best solution I've found is to, at this phase, focus on just the core characters and the ripe circumstances that initiates things, and let it flow from there.

Phase Four: Outline
Now that I've worked out the key elements, who, what, where, when and (to a degree) why, it's a time for a big helping of how.  Of course, I use my Twelve-Part Structure as a base, writing out about a paragraph for each part.  With that finally in hand, THEN I can start Actually Writing.
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*- I gave it significant editing afterwards.  It's still a trunk novel, and that's what it deserves, frankly.
**- This is where those, "I've got a great idea for a book, so you write it and we'll split the profits!" pitches come from.

Worldbuilding: Mapping in 4-D

There's a neat little video out there that shows the various political shifts in Europe over the course of a thousand years.  It's the sort of thing you have to be something of a map/geography/history dork to really get into, but, hey, here I am:

Now, this highlights a startlingly obvious points: the politics of a map change over time.  A LOT.  The question is: does your worldbuilding reflect this?

There is a bad tendency, especially in fantasy, to have the map of the world essentially be: this is how it is, and that's how it's been.  Empires stand for 10,000 years, locked in stasis.  Any changes over the course of history are singular and tied to key events.  No tweaks, no shifts, no growth.

Of course, I understand this.  Doing a full world map (or, even crazier, a full sci-fi map of however many stars to however many light-years) is a lot of work.  To then document even FURTHER the shifts over the course of time is a daunting task, and one you have to be somewhat obsessive to do. 

Which means I try to do it. 

On the Druthal maps, it's a matter of broad brushstrokes and a few generalizations.  For example, far east of Druthal is a nation called Lyrana.  Over the course of history, that land has also been part of the Tyzanian Empire, and the Pagari Nations.  Now, "Pagari Nations" is collective term for a number of city-states in that area.  There were something on the order of fifty different Pagari Nations, but I don't really need to know the details of which were which or what exactly went on between them.   A notation of the area as "Pagari Nations" and that they were fifty-some odd city states at a bronzeworking level of technology that had ever-shifting alliances, wars and trade is all I really need to know.*

Sci-fi mapping is a bit more interesting, because you have two big factors to work in: which planets have intelligent life, and when those civilizations achieve FTL flight.  It's all well and good to note that, distance-wise, two different species might claim a certain planet as a colony.  But if you add in one species has a hundred year headstart on colonizing... then "might" goes out the window.  Am I crazy enough to create a spreadsheet crossing each intelligent species to various technological milestones in order to chart exactly when each one achieves interstellar flight, and then calculate the spread based on that?

What do you think?

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*- One could argue that, given as of now all my stories take place in Maradaine, and modern Lyrana barely has an impact on it, let alone it's deep history, that I don't even need to know that much.  But I like to.  It's how I am.

Perils of the Writer: The Uphill Slog

Earlier this week, John Scalzi wrote about finishing his latest project, The Human Division. The part that interested me the most in this post was this bit on the process of writing it:

 For process fans, the first words of The Human Division (which eventually found themselves incorporated into Episode Three) were written on January 11, 2012, at 2:37pm. The final words were written on October 23, 2012, at 12:02am. Most of the words were written in September and October; there were a fair number of words written before then but a lot of that got chucked.

This makes me feel better, personally.

Part of it is the fact that it took him ten months to write it.  It makes me feel like my timetables aren't so terrible.  But the more comforting aspect is how back-end heavy the writing is, because I've found my experience is the same way. 

OK, for the way I write, a typical Novel Rough Draft clocks in around 80,000 words*, and that takes about eight-to-ten months to write.  I would like it to go faster, but, you know, LIFE. 

But this is how it goes:
First 10,000 words (or so): Sprint of awesome excitement.  Cranks out like gangbusters.  Yeah, I totally can DO THIS.  Writing sessions of 1000-1500 words.
10,000-20,000: Whoa.  OK.  This is actually a bit of work now.  Losing that pace.  Need to figure out some stuff that I thought was perfectly clear.  Writing sessions of 500-1000 words.
20,000-50,000: The Long Uphill Marathon of Pure Pain.  Nothing is working.  I can't do this.  WHY DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?  My outline for this part is woefully inadequate.  I HAVE NO CLUE HOW TO GET FROM POINTS A TO B TO C HERE.  I'm a moron.  I hate this book and my characters are stupid.  A 500-word writing session would be a PARTY.  This part takes MONTHS to get through. 
50,000-60,000: The uphill evens out.  Pieces click together.  The path is becoming clear.  500-1000 word writing sessions.
60,000-end: Downhill sprint.  The end is in sight, it's just a matter of getting it all out through my fingers.  2,000-3,000 word sessions. 

Right now, Way of the Shield?  Still in the uphill.  I'm getting through it by reminding myself that when I was writing Thorn, Holver Alley and Maradaine Constabulary it went exactly the same way. 


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*- For me, the Rough Draft tends to be underwritten, and the final draft comes in somewhere between 90-100K.  I find it suits me better to step back and figure out what needs more depth, rather than overwrite and figure out what fat needs to be cut. 

Neural Traffic Jam

The challenge of the creative mind is sometimes being overwhelmed with ideas.  Only so much can get out your fingers at any given time.  The challenge of focusing one the Project At Hand is sometimes those other voices can jump in like Kanye.

Forebrain: OK, next scene in Way of the Shield...
Way of the Shield Brain: (quietly) I think we need a scene with the antagonists planning their next move, and...
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: HEY! I THINK THE Q-NUMBERS ARE WRONG!!
Way of the Shield Brain: ...so, in that, they....
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: I SAID THE Q-NUMBERS ARE WRONG!
Forebrain: Wait, what are Q-Numbers?
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: Q-Numbers are a statistic I just made up measuring the density of intelligent species in a region of space.  And I think you have them wrong the further you get away from Earth.
Way of the Shield Brain: But we're supposed to do...
SPACE OPERA BRAIN:  NUMBERS ARE WRONG!  FIX THEM!
Forebrain: OK, let me do some math and figure this out...
Way of the Shield Brain: But...
 Forebrain: This will just take a second...

(An hour of fiddling with Excel and equations later...)

Forebrain: Huh.  The ratio of species per million cubic light years IS totally off out there.  Well, now I should...
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: FIX IT!  MAKE MORE ALIEN HOMEWORLDS!
Forebrain: Right, but...
Way of the Shield Brain: We want to get at least a few hundred words...
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: FIX IT! FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT NOW NOW NOW!!!!!

(2am, many hours later, with some hundred-plus alien homeworlds in the 150-ly radius sphere from Earth added.)

Forebrain: There, happy?
SPACE OPERA BRAIN: You didn't name the non-star-travelling alien species at all.
Forebrain: You really need to shut up. I'm tired.
Way of the Shield Brain: I'm cold and lonely.  Why have you forsaken me?


This is the downside to being obsessive about maps.  I'm apparently incapable of just going, "Here Be Dragons" and letting it be.  I have to define it, even if I may never actually use it in anything I write. 

(That said, the rest of the weekend actually was very good for Way of the Shield.  So don't worry too much about that...)

The 21st Century Epistolary, and the Importance of Correspondence

My weekly schedule has recently shifted around a bit, and it actually makes posting the Thursday blog a bit easier, as I now spend my Thursday mornings in a lovely coffee shop with a riverside view.  It's good writing inspiration: both a change of venue in general, as well as being in a public space.  The idea that people are watching me helps keep me on task.  Is that strange?

I had been thinking of late about the Epistolary Novel, and it's place in modern fiction, especially in terms of genre fiction.  It's a form I've always been intrigued by, because of what it allows the writer to do: establish multiple, concrete points of view, in a format that allows the characters to spell out events exactly how they felt about them.  It lets the writer establish a concrete timeline of not only when events occur, but when characters get a chance to reflect upon them.  The writings are, specifically, those reflections.  And since events are shown deeply in character point-of-views, the story is presented in facets.  It's up to the reader to figure out that greater whole from the facets.

Now, some might say that "letter writing" is a lost art, and thus you don't see the Epistolary Novel in the modern age.  But I would argue that between email. blog posts, Facebook updates and our other forms of modern communication, the opportunity for crafting a modern Epistolary is ripe.  (Hell, the Community episode "Blankets and Pillows" did a great job, while satirizing the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, of showing just that.)

Many years ago, in the wild west days of the Internet, I had the idea of doing an "Electronic Epistolary"-- essentially a story-via-website, where the reader could choose their own path on how to read something: journal entries by character, chronologically, or in whatever manner suited them.  However, at the time, I was not a writer of discipline, and it never came together.  I currently have some ideas for restarting that, at least as a worldbuilding exercise.

All of this made me think of how important of written correspondence, even in email form, is for the modern writer.  We tend to be a solitary lot, but at the same time, we need that stimulation of dialogue with each other.  Heck, check out this letter that Robert Heinlein wrote to Theodore Sturgeon when he needed help brainstorming a story.  And I know from personal experience that my long-standing email correspondence with my old friend Daniel Fawcett has been vital to my writing.

So, here's my proposal: write to me. And I don't mean, "Hey, how goes?"  Write to me about what you're writing, your concerns, ask me questions about my writing.  Start a real conversation, and I'll do my best to respond in kind. 

All right, back to the word mines.

Monday Melange: Protectors, Aspiring Writers, Space Maps

Various busy things happening today and all week, so some brief things:

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There is, apparently, only one copy of The Protectors left in stock at Amazon.  I'd like to think this means sales have been phenomenal, but it's more likely that they didn't have too many in stock to begin with.  Either way, go get it!  It's loads of fun. 

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My friend Abby has launched her webshow, Aspiring Writers.  So far, I beliee she only has one episode, but more are on the way.  Worth checking out.


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If you follow me on twitter, a bit ago I mentioned having a new idea on how to make the Great Big Space Map.  So far, it's been working, though it's still a Work In Progress.  Still, I find mapmaking a good creative exercise when words aren't quite coming together.  It helps get the juices flowing, and they really have been of late.  But here's a section of it as it starts to come together.  Slowly but surely...

Next Big Thing

Rebecca Schwartz tagged me in her Next Big Thing entry.  So here are my answers:

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?
    It's called The Way of the Shield, though the title itself is a work in progress.  I've also got a short story brewing that, right now, I'm calling "Hard Vacuum Coyote", but that's still in its nascent stages.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?


   That's actually a complex question.  The main drive of it was to explore a place where traditional fantasy-- kings and knights in armor and such-- and modern, complex social structure overlap and clash.  There is an old order of traditional warriors, and young men who still want to be a part of it-- but in a setting that has more in common with 19th Century London or Boston.  What role can that old order have-- as well as the traditional nobility-- in a society with a standing army, city constabulary and elected officials?

3. What genre does your book fall under?
  It's fantasy, though I'm not sure of the subgenre.  Political/action fantasy?


4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
  You know, I never like thinking in terms of actors-- certainly not famous ones.  Because more often than not, the best choice is someone who doesn't bring too much baggage to the table.  I mean, if you asked Suzanne Collins when she was writing Hunger Games, I doubt she would have even been aware of Jennifer Lawrence.
  (That said, at 6'3" with a puppy-dog honest face, Liam Hemsworth from Hunger Games wouldn't be a terrible match for Dayne.)

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?
   Disgraced warrior returns home to find himself neck-deep in political scandal, assassination plots and revolution.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
  Agency. 

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
   Again, a complicated question.  I first conceived of the book back in 2008-- when I also came up with Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary.  All four are in the same setting, but as separate "book one of a series" concepts.  I wrote Thorn first, with the idea that I would do Shield second.  But then Holver Alley felt right as the second, and the Constabulary as the third, with Shield getting pushed back each time.  I didn't get properly started on it until March 2012, and even then, it's been in fits and starts, as other things (such as minor rewrites of the other three) took some of my attention.  But it's still being drafted, hopefully finishing the rough draft by the end of the year.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
  I'm not sure.  In genre, the closest thing I can think of would be David Eddings's The Elenium-- for the knightly orders and the politics.  But there are a lot of out-of-genre influences, so it ends up being the small junction in a Venn diagram of The Elenium, Les Miserables and The Pelican Brief.  That's a strange combination.  I'm sure there's a spot-on in-genre comparison that I'm ignorant of.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
  Daniel J. Fawcett has been my long-term brainstorming partner, and so a great deal of my inspiration comes from hashing out core ideas of the fantasy genre and worldbuilding with him.  Pure and simple, the city of Maradaine (and the rest of the world around it), as well as the characters that inhabit it in all four books, would not be what they are without his input and influence.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
  I'm challenging myself on this one with my first attempt at a solid romantic subplot.  So if that's the sort of thing you need in your fantasy books, it'll be there.  But if you need guys with swords hitting each other, there's that as well.