National Novel Writing Month Again

That's right, two more days.

I'm cheating this year. One of my previous years' novels needs a complete rewrite from the ground up before it's viable, so rather than start something wholy new, I'm just going to do that. Some of the things I need to do urgently, in the next two days are: get rid of every single placeholder name, of which there were like twelve, including "Expendable", whose story ends unsurprisingly; work out some of the peripheral worldbuilding so that I have a wide range of groups to draw characters from- the story is second world, but it's set in a city that I want to have a cosmopolitan feel, and that means multiple ethnicities and naming conventions.

Honestly, despite the fact that I know where this is going, that I've done a revision outline, that I'm infinitely more prepared this time around, that I'm a better writer than I was last time I tried this, I still feel really intimidated by this thing. I don't know how people go into long form with this crazy excitement. I think that probably has something to do with the fact that I deeply enjoy reading short stories.

But, you know, if I ever want to make a significant amount of money writing, a novel is the thing to do.

(Honestly, if I ever want to make a living as a writer, the thing to do is a series of novels in which the main character has a lot of unrequited sexual tension with at least two other parties. And ideally at least one of them is a vampire. And then they all have complicated sex starting three books in. Which sounds like it could conceivably be fun, but the problem is if I write that and enjoy it less than I would some "loftier" thing, there's still a chance that it won't sell worth a damn and I'll just have five books of vampire sex I can't unload onto anyone. And who wants that?)

Sorry, that got a bit rambly.

Anyway, off to make a list of names. 

Preemptive Debriefing

Don't worry, I'm keeping my shorts on. This is about National Novel Writing Month.

I'm calling it, I don't expect to win this year. I'm planning to finish between 40 and 42 thousand words. So I'm not going to get a T shirt this year, but I am going to get about 40,000 words, so that's nice. This is my third year to do national novel writing month, and I do feel like every year I get a little better (though every year I also try to do something more ambitious than the past year, so I also feel like I fall slightly farther behind my goal each year. Live and learn).

This year one of the main problems was nailing down the tone. I was trying to write something that was both funny and horrific, and deciding on the measure of each was difficult. It took me a long time to get right and the sections where the tone felt off kept sapping the willingness to continue out of me, even though I knew it was something I could tweak in editing. Tone was an issue last year too, when I had more than one moment of paralyzation trying to figure out if I was writing a mystery or an adventure that happened to have a murder macguffin. I hereby resolve that in the future, I will deal with this before I start writing a book.

I also had a little trouble getting the characters down in the first chapters, and the result was me fumbling around in the narrative dark until I got my feet under me. Like the year before last, I had a good picture of the main character in my head, but it did not translate well to paper (by contrast, last year's two main characters were not terribly fleshed out and flowed out well). Both of the main characters I had done more advance work on in order to make them more complex ended up feeling, especially at the beginning, both terribly static and less complete than I would have liked- I was spending too much time trying to get them right according to how they were in my mental plan for the novel. I don't think this necessarily means I need to discovery-write characters, but I do think I need to approach them from a starting point of a more focussed characterization to get things started, then build outward from that through actual steps in the plot.

I could have outlined better, and I say that despite a pretty thorough plot outline. This time around I was trying to write a pretty complex story in terms of plot, with a lot of betrayals and reversals and the like. I did a lot of work on it before hand, but I still hit points while writing where I went "wait a sec, that doesn't actually work". This has happened in every book so far, and I'm not sure what to do about it, as I've already taken steps to correct for it. I guess just keep at it.

I have been reminded how much help it is to talk things out. For various reasons, most having to do with work scheduling, I didn't meet with my national novel writing month group for most of the month. I've also tried to avoid discussing specifics with people I intend to bother to beta read the manuscript. Those times I have sat down and talked out problems with the novel, it's not only usually solved them, it's reinvigorated me for the writing. Apparently, this is a necessity for me for longer works. I will keep this in mind next time.

I need to sit down further in advance next time and work out universal rules for magic and religion, as well as make maps so I'm confident of both distance and direction when my characters are running for their lives. Distance is an especially big one that's come up in every single novel I've written so far. I suspect this is one of those things where no matter how much you plan you're going to end up writing a spontaneous scenario that you hadn't done the calculations for, but I know I can do better than I am.

So that's it. While I don't expect to get my 50,000, I certainly don't consider it a waste. Every single one of these things has been a learning experience. And honestly, without them I don't think I'd have had the gumption to start a novel at all.

So how did y'all do, what did you learn, and what novel writing wisdom do you have to impart?

Happy National Novel Writing Month, internet.

Can't Blog, Gotta Write

Sorry guys, there's trouble on El Rancho National Novel Writing Month. More blog posts later.

Well, It's Now Midnight

National Novel Writing Month Go!

(my name on the site is "leslianne" if you want to find and friend me)

National Novel Writing Month Pre-Briefing

I guess it's possible that's just a briefing.

Okay, so, National Novel Writing Month (I refuse to use acronyms where avoidable, and I particularly refuse to use the method of shortening that involves just taking the first syllable of each because, damnit, that produces infantile gibberish I won't be any part of. Unfortunately, as you can see to the right, it's on everything.)

This is my third year doing the national novel writing month thing. Before I started this, I was terrified of novels. I thought, Jesus, it's hard enough to make a character consistently interesting for 5,000 words, how on earth am I going to keep them for 100,000 words? I knew it was a different type of story, of course, but I still fretted, especially given that I'm prone to writing quite short, even within the short story format.

So for my first shot I leaned heavily on the snowflake method and I shot for a Young Adult Fantasy with a blind protagonist point of view (which was something I had tackled fine in a short story, but was more of a challenge for a novel). I learned a lot. It got away from me a bit at times, and frankly I introduced one of the main characters way too late in the story, and he ended up becoming one of many minor helper characters. While I did hit the word goal, I did not finish the book. It's not terrible, certainly, all things considered, and there are bits of it I still think are quite good writing, but I don't anticipate going back to it soon.

My second year I thought, hell, I've grown and matured. I don't need a scaffolding. That was not entirely correct. I also shot for a genre blend where I'm not very intimately familiar with the other genre format: mystery. In the end, the book had kind of a big identity crisis over whether the murder discovered in the first chapter was a mystery or a macguffin, and really it's the latter. There was also an issue because the two viewpoint characters would not have had access to a lot of the upper echelon locales, and trying to narratively ram them into every place I wanted to show in order to have them overhear every plot point I needed strained credulity. I eventually quit doing it and broadened the cast of viewpoint characters to get a broader, less forced view of things. I also needed them to be missing information in key scenes. I actually ended up backwriting an entire character in order to have someone familiar with the world on a scientific level give information my characters could not have obtained by themselves. I actually got to the end of this one, with a handful of notes of scenes I needed to go back and write from different points of view. I still think it's basically good, though I acknowledge it needs a lot of work.

This year I'm back on the outlines. I'm going through the snowflake method again and it's been really helpful, especially when I get to a point where I have to go "wait, how and why could that possibly ever work?". So far I've pre-solved several plot holes. I'm really liking how it's going. I feel like the main character is more in the thick of events, so that makes the perspective easier to handle. I'm actually quite excited about this one, and I feel like the preparation has been good. I also feel like I'm bringing a lot of lessons from the first two books with me.

I know six other real life friends who will also be doing the national novel writing month, plus the regular crowd online. It should be a bang up month.

Vivisecting Fiction

I have been accused at times of being overly analytical in my approach to writing- and all art, really- to the point that some people I know have trouble understanding how I haven't ground the entire process down to a joyless, exacting formula. For my own part, I don't really understand how they can possibly roll up their sleeves and set out into that far creative country without any idea where they're going or how they're going to get there. For me, an awful lot of the joy is in my apprehension of the process: figuring out how things work with each other and feeling giddy about the cleverness of the artist, and my own cleverness if I'm the one assembling a piece of art. If I like a movie on DVD, I'll often watch it straight through a second time with Director's Commentary on. I'll put my nose right up to an impressionist painting to look at the brush strokes and if it's a moment where I don't have a tight reign on my own enthusiasm, I'll say things like "do you see this? Do you see what this guy did? See this thick smear of red down here in the water, under the trees? I would not have thought of that, that's brilliant!" For me, it's the same in prose. I'll go back over a sentence and savor metaphor and word choice like they were made out of climax-flavored chocolate. I get the sense some of my more artsy (non-process oriented) friends have this feeling only in terms of gestalt- that they look at the whole and marvel at how it's more than the sum of its parts.

I have a project I'm beginning to work on where there's a specific effect I want to achieve, so I've spent the last couple of hours picking apart a work I thought did it well- making a scene by scene outline, noting out all the macguffin-juggling, paying attention to the careful way things were built up. I think I learned a lot from the exercise (in part I learned it's not precisely how I wanted to do things, but it sparked a few new ideas).

I've heard people say that after they start writing, they can't enjoy other people's books because they're too aware of what the author is doing. I've never had that experience, but then again, I enjoy learning new tricks, so for me the story and the process sort of run side by side as two discreet forms of entertainment. It certainly doesn't hurt me to be able to say "that character is going to die in this next scene because the hero has rejected the call to action and we've already seen foreshadowing with them hopping down into a grave" or whatnot. As a reader/viewer, you're SUPPOSED to notice those things, you're just generally not supposed to notice that you noticed. I don't mind having it at the conscious level.

When I write, I often start with a very fly be the seat of my pants approach when I'm setting up my initial scene, but things like try-fail cycles and chekov's gun are always there, just below the surface of my consciousness. You can see the ripples in the mental water as they roll beneath. (In talking to my friend about process, I once called it Chekov's Gun Rack- if you put in enough details and you can remember and reincorporate them later, it doesn't matter which one ends up being your plot detail and which ones are your setting or motiffs, as long as you make sure you pull one from the rack and fire it.) For quick stories, I know the forms well enough that it doesn't have to be conscious, but for anything ambitious, more and more I find myself outlining and thinking about form.

Far be it from me to say you have to do it one way or another, if you're naturally inclined to be less analytical. But I do think, if you're not sure, it's worth trying to sit down and think about WHY things work. I know for my own part, it ends up saving me a lot of trouble and frustration later.

Private Person

I took a creative writing class back in college. All of us were assigned poems and all but four of us were assigned short stories. The remainder, which included me, were assigned "creative nonfiction"- that is to say a narrative presentation of something true from our own lives.

What I wrote was a rather loose narrative of sitting at my keyboard, having had an incident of genuine personal revelation that was truly important to me, and all of the reasons I had no intention of writing it for the class. It got a mixed reaction from the other students, but the teacher liked it, so I suppose that's alright.

I've been thinking about it for a number of reasons, though the immediate catalyst was reading other writers' blogs and watching them share things so heartbreakingly personal that I would hesitate to discuss them with the best of my friends. And here they were, flinging them out into the uncontrolled void, to land on who knows what sharp rocks, to be exposed to the unknown elements of other people's minds and hearts. I was jealous, mortified, exhilarated, and I think a little ashamed.

Part of the reason I think it's all knotted up in my mind is that that specific honest emotional component is something I had genuinely loved about those writers' stories, and I think it's something that's often missing from mine. And I don't think there's a good way to fake it, which means I would need to open myself up to the weird distant intimacy that comes when you really put yourself out into your fiction. I'm not really comfortable with that, except in very specific ways. I think the thing I'm least willing to share with people is joy, honestly, and I think it's fair to say that my writing comes out a little darker and more hopeless for it. Joy's a funny thing sometimes- light and delicate as a soap bubble, and while it's probably tougher than I usually give it credit for, I have a terrible tendency to hoard my little joys to myself, for fear that others, not understanding, will mishandle them or mock me about them. I'm generally quite a happy, upbeat person, but if I were a house, I would tend to entertain on my front porch, and most of my back rooms would be tightly locked.

In life and in writing, it's something I probably need to work on.

Novel-ish

My writing group has decided that March will, for us, officially be national novel finishing/editing month. I'm not entirely looking forward to how much work it will take to bang this thing into shape, but it's nice to have people you're going to see once a week to ride you about it.

On Fantasy

Genre is kind of an arbitrary thing, and it's at once useful and wasteful to talk about. They tend to be broad umbrellas, but at the same time, there's a pattern and a set of reoccurring themes that people gravitate towards.

While I write dark fiction, I consider myself more of a fantasist than anything.

Ultimately, I think the strength and the attracting factor of the genre is the dynamic tension between the real and the unreal. We live in a world that can be described by science. We understand cause and effect. We have a mental library of observations and learned formulas against which we measure what is likely to be true. We're creatures of the real.

But we can imagine something outside of that.

It's probably fair to say to a certain extent that all fiction is fantasy. If a character is hit by a Mac truck, simply saying so isn't enough. You need to describe your hypothetical truck with the trappings of the real: weight, force, velocity, mud on the tires, candy wrappers in the cab, and so on. But the trick, the magic, and the fun of fantasy, in my opinion, is taking those trappings of the real and hanging them on something purely imaginary. It's not enough simply to say there was a unicorn. Putting something unreal into a story displaces the world around it like Archimedes' gold into a glass of water. You can test the validity of its composition by how it affects the real and measurable things around it. What is the smell of a unicorn? Has it ever had to put its horn through a wolf to defend itself? What does it eat? Where does it rest? What are the consequences. How is what we would expect of the real world changed logically by its presence?

There are dozens of admixtures of reality and whimsy that fall under the genre umbrella: the surreal, where the familiarity of dreams and the re-blending of everyday and fantastic symbols makes up for the strange internal logic; the allegorical, where things that cannot be stand in for things that are; the mythological, where the accumulated weight of history, folklore, and tradition lend credibility to fantastic claims; the romanticized historical; the scientific gone wild; and so on.

For my own writing I tend to lean heavily on the surreal and mythological. It's still important that things feel real, even if it's primarily accomplished by identifiably human characters having understandable, real-seeming reactions to the impossible.

National Novel Writing Month Debriefing

I was pretty behind coming down to the wire, but after one month of writing I have 50,000 words of a sort-of novel.

As to the state of the project itself, I feel like there's a good novel in there. Somewhere. There are basic plots, characters, and situations that hold up, and if they can be shuffled into the proper order, attached to a good solid outline, and buoyed and buttressed by extra scenes that do some of the exposition and world building duty, it could really be something decent. My monster creation currently has members of itself that are nothing more than naked bone, and some where rich, fatty flesh is hanging like tumorous overripe fruit off the thinnest little phalanx. I'm not entirely sure about the pacing either. But I'm a little surprised, honestly, how much I really do believe in it.

Ultimately the frustrating difference for me between short fiction and a novel is how much more needs to be in focus in a longer work, and how much each of those things needs to hold up to scrutiny. If you want to write a short story in which a waiter fights off zombies with his server tray before eventually managing to sling them into a conveyer oven, all you really have to get across is that your character is a waiter and there are zombies. What's important is the immediate situation, not why he became a waiter or where the zombies came from. The size demands that the peripheral details have a soft focus and don't distract from the matter at hand. But in a longer work all those things become important, because without them your focus points seem detached, lifeless, and unbelievable. It feels like the difference between being able to throw a killer fastball and being able to juggle. I don't think they're really the same skill.

My plan from this point is to finish out the rough draft of the main plot, then put it down and read a good novel, in the rough vein of what I'd like mine to be, paying some extra attention to structure and supporting detail. Then I need to come back, reread what I've written, and make a detailed outline and novel bible (I need, for example, to nail down some distances, solidify my ideas for the city police force, and remove and correct a number of placeholder names.) Once I have an outline plan to work from, I can fill in extra scenes and tweak the pacing and events until they're solid. Then I can give it a pass for the beauty of the language and then, it ought to be a book.

National Novel Writing Month Part Two

I'm going to be perfectly honest, I have fallen behind in national novel writing month. I principally blame a lack of discipline on my part, but if I'm going to suffer to let myself make excuses, I've also been very busy with school.

Here nearing the halfway point, I've come to a couple of conclusions.

I managed novel writing much better when I had a detailed outline and a clear picture of the tone I wanted for the work. While I think some good things have come of my ineffectual puttering about, I've stalled myself out on questions like "what is the central conflict actually?" "Do I want this murder to be the central focus or more of a macguffin?" "Who are my characters and what motivates them?"

Even when I had an outline I'd tend to go off script when the inspiration struck, but I always knew where I was going, and I rarely just stared at the empty page and felt lost.

I've also been going to the live meets, and that's just amazing. I tend to be a bit on the shy side about my writing (which I know is a stretch from someone who blogs about writing, but I've written some genuinely terrible things, as I believe I mentioned, not in terms of quality, but in terms of blood, gore, and random horror). Even with good friends I often don't talk about it unless directly cornered. Because what would I say, really? "I wrote a space abortion story I'm really proud of, want to read it?" I'm getting better about this, and actively trying to let people know what I'm doing and what I think, but there's always that initial reluctance.

Except at these writer's meetings. I got into this room full of women who shared an enthusiasm for the same thing as me and suddenly, bam, just like that, no awkwardness, no fear, and we were talking just like old friends.

Even if the novel's a total wash (I don't think it is, in fact I'm sure I can catch back up), it would still be worth it if I can keep in touch with a few of these folk.

National Novel Writing Month

I'm participating again this year in National Novel Writing Month (I refuse to shorten it. This is my thing and I don't intend to force it on anyone else, but I don't like acronyms or neologisms.) I'm ahead of schedule at a little less than 5,000 words and working to build up a buffer.

There are people who are opposed to National Novel Writing Month on very reasonable grounds: that it encourages sloppy writing, that it facilitates people slacking on writing all year long and then trying to make up for it in one burst, that most of what comes out of it is utter drivel.

I think that's all more or less true, but my experience with it has been incredibly positive. I write faster with the deadlines, and before I began national novel writing month last year, I was paralyzingly afraid of diving into a long-form work. I'd written dozens of short stories- more than the word count necessary for a novel and a half- but I was completely unconvinced I could sustain characters or ideas over the time it took to tell a novel length story, not to mention working out the logistics of the more complicated plot and interaction a novel required.

Even though my first try had serious problems, I found myself really enjoying the kinds of subtle character growth you can't get outside of long form. The format of the challenge, fast, furious, and messy, encouraged me to get past my anxiety about not being good enough- one I had more or less gotten over in the format I was comfortable with.

I think if one wants to be good at any pursuit, it's important to push the limits of what you think you can do, to stretch outside the safe zones where you're comfortable. I think National Novel Writing Month, whether the novel results are ultimately worthwhile or not, pushes writers to grow, and as such, it's got my thumbs up.