Another Week Eight update!

Just a quick post to let you know that I'm still plugging away at the shapeless, ever-growing mass of words that is Week Eight's challenge. 

Because things have been hectic for me (two jobs, domestic responsibilities, social commitments, holidays, birthdays, Dragon Age: Origins...), I've had to find a more flexible way to write in the few spare moments I have. So when I'm home, I'll type up what I've written longhand and then try to write past that. When I'm away from home, however, I'll try to write at least two sentences from where I remember leaving off.

This wasn't a deliberate stroke of genius so much as simply what happened one day, but the end result was that, over the course of a week, I ended up accidentally rewriting the latest passage of the story. Later, when I discovered my mistake, I was actually able to combine bits and pieces of both into a paragraph that was stronger than either previous version. Voltron-style. I had been stuck on that paragraph, and somehow this process allowed me to find an intuitive way past it.

So anyway, it's coming along, and as a reprieve from longer works (and even longer waits between works), I think for Week Nine I'm going to try a microfiction week wherein I burn through one prompt a day, Monday–Friday. This will be a good excuse to build some momentum back up, and also to get some of the truly stupid prompts I've been avoiding out of the way. 

How's it going for you?

"Talent = Work + Desire + The ability to smell shit in your own work."

From The Rumpus, some great advice for younger writers... or any writers, really. But for some reason this at the end spoke most to me:

Like any other writer I fantasize about sitting in my well-lit office eight hours a day, contentedly transcribing this on-going dialogue I have with myself as fat checks are pushed through the mail slot, which my lovely creative professional husband will take to the bank to deposit on his way home from picking up our darling, well-behaved children from soccer practice, after which we will sit in some patch of freshly cut grass and express our gratitude that we are so lucky to be a family supported entirely by income from the arts. But children, we know, are not always darling and well-behaved and lovely creative professional husbands often forget to go to the bank and it’s rare that anyone can write for eight hours a day and fat checks are mostly found elsewhere.

[...]

There is no endgame. You must be alive at your desk and know that it will not always be pleasant (though sometimes it will be) but pleasantness is not the point. If you love to be challenged, then your desk is your oasis of challenge. And remember you are a writer for the process of writing first and foremost.

(Read the rest here!)

My fantasy is, incidentally, very similar to this one, except that my wife will be picking up my darling, well-behaved children from their Dungeons & Dragons game, not soccer practice.

Week Eight progress: So it turns out that I'm crazy

Writing is hard.

I have been plugging away at, as promised, a short tale involving a major character from a fantasy series I may or may not ever write. Trying to find both character and world when you haven't decided much about either has proven to be... well... a challenge. Here, for example, is the first paragrah of the rough draft:

When she was much younger — a child of four or five — Kyra had been, actually, a princess. Not the princess, of course: that was [Name] of [Name], the only daughter of [Name], who had been king over [Name] most of his long life. His passing took Kyra and her family out of the line of succession. Used to be they received an allowance from the crown each year (“a stipend,” her mother called it… it was an allowance, Kyra knew now; just enough coin to keep them and several other small houses just like theirs from raising a small army and pressing their rights), but that all ended with King [Name]. Because of the [Treaty of Something] drawn during the [Times of Somesuch], a rival family was able to assert their claim to the throne and, in so doing, force Kyra’s parents to learn a trade and spend the rest of their noble lives working for their stipends. 

Likewise, I find myself having to ponder currency, how townsfolk aquire their water, whether or not there is a town guard and why, etc. etc. And then I have to stop myself from stopping, and just throw in a placeholder for the sake of not losing momentum. But the story is at a place now where all these decisions I have delayed will actually inform what the protagonist can do, and I've felt overwhelmed and stuck. 

So a few nights ago I decided that I hated the story, hated the world, hated having to write in a setting I don't know yet. The next morning I talked with my girlfriend about making it more modern — transposing everything into our world or something very similar to it. This seemed appealing. Then, in the shower, I resolved to just finish the tale I'm writing right now, post it to this blog, and move on to shorter things until I'm actually ready to attempt a larger work. Maybe just focus on writing plays since that seems to come easier for me?

And then, during my lunch break, I re-read everything I've written in my story to date and kind of... liked it...? And I figured out what happens next — a quick way to keep the story moving and avoid getting stuck in procedural.

And now, after having read one-half of the first draft, littered as it is with placeholders and weird dead ends, I'm thinking that I need to stop thinking so much, that what I'm writing — though the words are not coming easily — is actually going somewhere and I should just surrender myself to that. 

So that's what I'm at. And because I don't want to limit your first impression of this story to "[Name] of [Name], the only daughter of [Name], who had been king over [Name]," here is the following paragraph:

Her mother took it hardest, and never ceased instructing Kyra in courtly manner, even years after her first blood, though of course there was no point anymore to heraldry, to curtseys, to being coy and demure. They were commoners now — even before they were “deposed” (again, her mother’s words), their claim was not the strongest. Kyra never was going to sit on that throne; now it was just official. Her father took soon thereafter to the bottle with great enthusiasm, squandering whatever royal savings they had on wine and wenches. Gambling, too. One night he must have taken his chances on a game he couldn’t afford, because the next morning Kyra and her mother found him at the door, cold, his throat sawed open.

Consider yourself teased.

The daily routines of famous writers

From Brain Pickings, a treasure trove of daily writing routines from famous writerlies:

[Susan Sontag:]

I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I like the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and scrawl all over that. And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and directly on the typewriter, until I don’t see how to make it any better. Up to five years ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After the second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don’t retype the whole manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of hard-copy drafts from the computer.

[…]

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.

I've been getting back to this recently—writing by hand, typing it up, editing that, typing that up, etc... I thought this approach to be a unique solution to my many writerly idiosyncrasies, but basically I have just been copying Susan Sontag's routine.

And I have never been Ernest Hemingway's greatest fan, but I love this:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

Read 'em all here!

Revision pro tips from io9

From an io9 article about how to tell if your novel's first draft is unsalvagable, some excellent ideas for revising your manuscript:

7) Put the thing aside for a few weeks, and then list the most powerful moments, from memory. Not the things that are great about your idea, or about your characters in theory. The moments that actually stick in your mind as moments. You wrote the thing, so if a moment sticks in your head as being especially emotional or intense, that's probably a sign that it's closest to the story you were setting out to tell. Once you've got that list, see if there's a story uniting those moments.

[...]

9) List all of the events in your book backwards, with "because" in between them. This is also a great revision technique. "The hero won BECAUSE she had the golden apple BECAUSE she spared a witch who gave it to her BECAUSE the hero felt sorry for the evil witch BECAUSE she herself had done some bad things BECAUSE she was misled into thinking a hero needs to be ruthless BECAUSE she was young and determined to prove herself." And so on. Do those "becauses" actually make any sense, when you run it like that? Do you care about that chain of cause and effect, as a basic skeleton? If any of those BECAUSE statements are like "because I, as the author, said so," can you fix that without the whole thing collapsing?

Read the entire article here.

Piers Anthony on growing up different

On the way in to work this morning, I listened to an episode of This American Life that told the story of a 15-year-old superfan of science fiction and fantasy author Piers Anthony. He had a troubled home life and ran away to seek out and hopefully live with his idol... several states away. It was a riveting episode, and there was a quote from Anthony at the end that really resonated with me:

"One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not, we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors, we're not that way from perversity. And we cannot just relax and let it go. We've learned to cope in ways you never had to."

The episode's transcript is here or (recommended) you can listen to it here.

Of course, who among us had a perfect childhood? We all have our wounds, but I found this inspirational because it came from a very successful and large-hearted guy who had once struggled mightily but found his way through.

I think I might run away to go and live with Piers Anthony...

"Being busy is good for your writing."

Words of writerly wisdom from Chris Baty—cofounder of NaNoWriMo—from his book No Plot? No Problem!, which I am currently reading in lieu of, y'know, actually writing:

You've probably heard the old adage that if you want to get something done, you should ask a busy person to do it. I've discovered that is acutely true when it comes to novel writing.

[...]

For me the moral of the story is this: A rough draft is best written in the steam-cooker of an already busy life. If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal. When, on the other hand, you have nothing to do, getting out of bed and washing yourself before 2:00 P.M. feels like too much work to even contemplate.

As Isaac Newton observed, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. When writing your first draft, being busy is key. It may feel frustrating at first, but having daily writing periods curtailed by chores, family, and other distractions actually helps you get the thing done. This is partly because the hectic pace forces you to type with a fleet-fingered desperation. But it's mostly because noveling in the midst of a chaotic life makes "book time" a treat rather than an obligation. It's a small psychological shift, but it makes all the difference in the world.

True story.

Boston Theater Marathon

Every year, the Boston Playwrights' Theatre puts on the Boston Theater Marathon—50 ten-minute plays staged all in one day.

And every year, I have had exactly one short play to submit. I wrote it in my senior year at Emerson, and have submitted and resubmitted (with minor cosmetic edits) that sucker several times over the past <shudder> decade, each time getting the nice rejection and sometimes even a handwritten note.

This is just a quick post to say that, this year, I will be submitting two new plays—slightly revised versions of Weeks One and Seven's completed challenges. Though it's seemed, at times, that I'm not living up to the challenge I've set for myself here on this blog, the ultimate goal was to get me writing again, and that it has done. So thank you for reading and commenting, and fingers crossed that one of these guys will get staged next May!

[And by the way, if any of you New England–area playwrights have anything to submit to the BTM, the deadline is this Thursday, November 15th.]

Use every spare minute to write

Author Kevin J. Anderson with some timely NaNoWriMo productivity tips:

Too often I’ve heard the lame excuse, “I don’t have enough time to do a serious amount of writing, so I’ll just [insert procrastinating activity] instead.”  Science fiction writer Roger Zelazny used to advise authors to “write two sentences.”  Not such an insurmountable obstacle.  You may really only have time to write two sentences; in other instances, though, those two sentences will lead to two more, and then two paragraphs; ten minutes later you’ll have a page done.  A free ten minutes is ten minutes you could be writing.  Two sentences will take you two sentences closer to finishing the manuscript.

Read 'em all here, here, here, here, and here!

NaNoWriMo!

November is National Novel Writing Month, wherein you are challenged to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. That's roughly 1,167 1,667 [thanks for the math assist, Nick!] words a day, every day. 

I will not be writing 1,667 words every day. I will, however, be starting the aforementioned novel-length work and hopefully using the momentum of NaNoWriMo to overcome my natural resistance to, you know, finishing anything.

My plan is to continue doing these weekly prompts, but instead of creating new characters and situations each week, they'll be used to inform a chapter or a situation from the novel. 

You can follow my progress here on the blog and also over at www.nanowrimo.org; my username is brandon.crose, and I'd love to see what you're working on!