Confining the Mess
One way or the other, I will be starting Novel Number Two (Henceforth referred to here at NN2) in the near future. I’ve discussed the possibility of using Nanowrimo to get a head start on it before. I’m closer to making that decision now, (I have to be, November is getting closer every day.) I’m leaning towards doing it. But even if I don’t do it, starting this next novel won’t be far off from this moment.
Whatever road I take on the first draft of NN2, a few things are for certain:
1)I won’t be editing the first draft until after it’s completed and left alone for at least a month. That could be next spring or later.
2) The first draft will in many ways be lousy. As are all first drafts.
My hope, and my plan, however, is for this first draft to contain less that is lousy, than did the first draft of Flowers for Dionysus. Every first draft may be shit, but that doesn’t mean each successive first draft can’t have less shit than the previous one did.
Look, a rough draft is always going to be, well, rough. But having written at least a first draft of a novel several times now, (There have been others. Flowers for Dionysus is just the first one I opted to take further), a few things have started to sink in. When I outlined the first half of NN2 earlier this year, I was already keeping in mind the type of things that were either cut or changed most frequently from the first draft of Flowers. What I put down for the first draft of a novel may be sloppy compared to the final version, and it will probably have scenes I don’t need. But I pride myself on comparably good first drafts.
You see, my first drafts, if I may compliment myself, tend to be equal to the quality of most writers’ third draft or so. I won’t engage in hubris and say any of my first drafts are publishable, but from the stand point of story structure and general prose, I have a bit of a leg up in most first drafts. So much do I think about, experiment, outline and ponder a manuscript in my head before I put down the first official word, a lot of clean up has already taken place. A “mental draft” if you will. I still do a lot of pantsing once I start the rough draft, but a large amount of planning has already gone into the piece before I begin.
Given the amount of planning and thought I give to a manuscript before I start, I avoid a lot of common first draft pitfalls. The pitfalls I do fall in, I catch in the revisions. So on top of all of this pre-planning, I’m expecting myself to avoid pitfalls I fell into the last time. I insist that I learn something from the process. And I think that I have. So if I fold that gained knowledge into the NN2 first draft, I should be able to avoid more pitfalls now than last time. Right?
That’s my hope, anyway. As much as I agree with Hemingway, and all of the other people who insist the first draft is the worst, I can’t help but desire to minimize the mess I leave behind in subsequent first drafts of future manuscripts.
Sometimes being sloppy on purpose is what we need to get to the bottom of a plot point. Great literary discoveries can be made when we let ourselves be messy, and I don’t intend to deprive myself of that experience. (That’s the main reason I adopted a “no-edit” policy on first drafts as I am writing them.) I simply hope to keep the mess confined to one room, as it were.
Then again, every novel is different, and all of these hopes expressed here may fly right out of the proverbial window by chapter two of the rough draft.
Minor Issues in My Fiction
I realize you’re bound to take with a grain of salt any assessment I make of my own writing. While I maintain that a writer can in fact evaluate his own work, (often being more of a critic than others are of it), I’ll understand if you are skeptical. But a writer spends more time with himself than anyone else, so he must learn to trust his own judgement to a degree, or perish. (In a literary sense only, of course.)
That being established, I have come to notice that in my fiction, minor characters, or at least supporting characters, are easier to work on.
The initial assumption is that because such characters are present in the work for fewer pages, they are de facto easier because they require less work. In some ways they do require less time to work on, but I won’t say less thought. A lot of thought can go into minor characters, in fact. The “support staff” of your novel has an important job to do, after all, and blowing off such characters within your fiction will eventually come back to bite you in the form of a lousy manuscript.
So, minor characters still require a willingness to think. Yet still that thinking is less laborious for supporting characters. Why?
I have my theories. The main one being that with a minor character, (especially one into whose mind the narration never enters), I’m more acutely aware of the importance of dialogue, mannerisms, and action. To use the tired old expression it becomes necessary to show and not tell when it comes to these minor characters. The way they’re seen by others is all the reader will have to get to know them.
Take my current work in process, Flowers for Dionysus. In it, I visit the minds of five people, to various degrees, throughout the story. (Best described as an urban fantasy. Probably.)
As I wrote it, (and as I revise it), I have the added duty to make the reader understand what each of these “point of view” characters is perceiving. What they are thinking and how it makes them feel. That of course must be balanced with showing them do things that are consistent with who they are, and having them say things that will reveal important details about them. They are key to the movement of the plot, and so each is this big huge important thing that simply must work or the whole thing is sunk. (See what I mean about writers being their own sternest critics??)
One of these central characters is Tanya. Her spirituality is a complex one that has led her to certain places, and I struggle to make sure the reader is aware of that spirituality, without slipping into “tell” mode. It’s a delicate balance, and on the fourth draft I’m still not sure if I’ve struck the cord I want with Tanya yet.
Tanya has a 17 year old brother, named Kurt. he isn’t a central character. Kurt doesn’t experience any of the fantastical elements of the story. He’s just Kurt. A theatrical lighting genius that’s working the community production around which the plot is based. He wears a fedora, likes to torment his older sister (of course), and is one of the most dedicated people in the production. He manages this while still being at times an obvious goof-off.
Every time I wrote a scene with Kurt in it, I had a good time. Not that I didn’t enjoy writing the whole novel, but the times when I was writing Kurt seemed more effortless than other times. Sometimes when a scene wasn’t going anywhere, I’d throw Kurt into it and the gears would start turning again. He is seen through the eyes of four out of the five main players at some point in time.
Kurt adds flavor to the proceedings. He reveals facts as needed, but is otherwise pure personality. I must show you everything I want you to know about Kurt because, again, the narration never takes place from within his mind. You never read what he is thinking directly. You have to take his word for it. One of my test readers said that by the end of the novel she was noting that certain actions were “a very Kurt thing to do.”
Which is perfect. When a reader sees Kurt doing something and can categorize it as a “Kurt thing”, I have done my job. In all my revisions, I have rarely had to rethink Kurt.
I will concede that more is riding on the writing of the five POV characters than on the writing of Kurt, and that pressure may be one reason writing the main characters is sometimes more arduous. But I can’t help but think that if I could have injected all of the joy of writing Kurt, (and Mort the Bartender, and Ben the freshman) into the central characters, they too would seem more real, more fun to write, and more satisfactory.
Now I have over the last few drafts improved upon the “Big Five” drastically. I have become happier with them as time goes on. But their importance still casts a bit of a shadow over the proceedings. The minor characters have been shining bright from the very start.
What can I take from my approach to minor characters into my approach with the central characters? “Show don’t tell”, yes. I hear that one all the time and so do you. Easier said than done with a character whose thoughts must be understood. Should I perhaps write just the actions of the central characters first, ignoring their thoughts until later? Remind myself that each central character is but a minor supporting part in someone else’s story? I don’t know. I confess it’s a bit of a quandary for me.
I’m not worried. Like I said I always get to where I want to be, or at least closer, with my central characters. It just takes a lot more sweat and stress than it does with the minor ones. Who knows? Perhaps in the end it has to be that way. Perhaps central characters are, by their nature, the most stressful part of a story. It’s possible I’m looking for a reprieve where none is possible. I chose the writing life, and this may just be one of the aspects of it. Or at least one of the aspects of my personal journey through my fiction.
But it would be nice if I could change the balance between minor and central character enjoyment just a tad, wouldn’t it?
What about you? What’s your relationship to your supporting cast? Are they easier or more difficult for your to construct? Let me know.
Failure? Keep It To Yourself.
We aren’t supposed to ever talk about our failures.
Actually, I should qualify that statement. We’re never supposed to talk about our failures, except as part of our eventual success story. We can then mention how many times things fell apart, or blew up in our faces, or never got off of the ground. We can do so as part of our success story because it is in the past, and people think it’s quaint or even inspirational to see how badly or how often the now successful individual at first failed. Edison and his light bulb. Lincoln and his various electoral defeats. The list goes on.
I suppose once in a while there is an exception granted to those who are mentioning how much wiser they feel because of their failure. What fantastic insights they received from not making it. And not making it. And still not making it. What wonderful people they are to be able to never do anything right, and yet still take something away from all of the experiences. Even if they haven’t attained their definition of success, (and each person’s own definition is allegedly the only that matters), we can admire how open minded they are towards failing.
It’s when people have done nothing, or almost nothing but fail, and are hurt by this which pisses people off. It doesn’t matter if somebody has tried to land a job 100 times in a row only to fail. If they are not happy about the “learning experience”, the conventional wisdom is that they should keep it to themselves. If someone has for years remained almost totally alone because most of their friends ended up shallow, and deserted them, a person isn’t supposed to be hurt. Or if they are hurt they are not supposed to tell us about it. Or blog about it or tweet about it.
Nobody wants to be around a gloomy person, says the enlightened set. We all get lonely. We all have friends abandon us. We all suffer. It’s what you make out of it that counts. You won’t attract positive things into your life if you let people know the negative.
Dust yourself off, wipe the blood from your nose, stand up straight and keep going. Even with the knife lodged firmly in your gut, there are plenty of people out there that have no gut to be stabbed. Be thankful you can feel the excruciating pain of being stabbed. Especially if in the back by loved ones. Because then you are fortunate enough to become aware of the fact that they didn’t love you in the first place. You didn’t need them in your life anyway. Now go read the cliche’ ridden Steve Jobs commencement speech for the 457th time.
In short, when people are not successful it is all their own fault. If they can’t see that and want to take a few moments or a few days to be upset about their lot in life, they can fuck off because they are harshing everybody’s mellow.
How wonderful to be so bullet proof. Especially when those dispensing that advice are sitting in the brand new car they can afford because of their dream job which they obtained by happening to smile at the CEO of the company in an elevator that got stuck long enough for them to deliver the pitch of a lifetime that they had been rehearsing just that morning. (Oops, sorry. I forgot that luck has zero do to with getting what we want.)
As a society, especially the current generations, we avoid people who are struggling like we avoid a stumbling drunk with a hacking cough in the subway station. We simply cannot risk that either their sadness or their inability to catch a break getting onto our clothes and contaminating our life. Like that drunk, surely it is the fault of every failure that they are in the predicament they find themselves in. And if it isn’t, we don’t want to hear about it, because that might mean we have to experience something that is out of line with our “up by the bootstraps” wet dream we have been selling one another for years and years.
The fact is people get beat down, robbed, fooled, abandoned, betrayed, deprived and demonized to the point that it’s impossible to obtain anything they want or even need. Often for no better reason than they interfered with some positive-thinking guru’s trajectory and had to therefore be shuttled off into the obscure corner of, “not trying hard enough” and its neighbor in the dark warehouse of denial “they’re not thankful enough.”
We must keep going. We must keep trying when life doesn’t work, of course. But does anyone consider any of these possibilities:
1) A person can get to the point when they have tried, with a smile plastered on their face, every last option of which they are aware, and have no idea what to try next.
2) That it is natural to be angry, sad, depressed and afraid once they get to that point, as well as to express those feelings to other people.
3) Expressing those fears to a willing audience may just be the thing that turns them around. That audience may have that one bit of advice they didn’t seek elsewhere.
Yet we don’t get that benefit of that assumption. Because we mustn’t ever, EVER become discouraged about out failures. Actually, nobody ever actually fails in the first place…I keep forgetting that.
NaNoWrimo? Advice Sought.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on a decision I need to make soon.
November, as many of you know, is National Novel Writing Month. They call it NaNoWrimo for short. As the name suggests the point is to start writing a novel on November 1, and have at least a 50,000 word rough draft by the last day of November. It doesn’t have to be an entire story arc. You just need to have 50,000 words written only in the allotted time. (That is to say, not having begun writing before November.)
You are allowed to have an outline of a novel before November, however. Just no prose. I had no outline the first time, just a single idea. I had a bit of an outline the second time. That was a few years ago.
NaNo helped rid me of my need to edit as I write. I can now, as I did with my current novel, write a rough draft all the way through without revisiting it until it’s finished. I’ve never returned to finish the novels I started in my two NaNo experiences, but I still have them.
Flowers for Dionysus, my current WIP, is in its fourth draft. I set a schedule for myself that required the fourth draft to be finished by December. However I finished it about three months early. Having completed two drafts this year, it was always my plan to let the novel sit throughout the holidays, and let people read it before I began the next revision sometime early next year. Only now I have a much larger chunk of time left in 2012 to let people read it, and to let it sit a while, than I initially thought I would.
I am, nonetheless, going to stick with that plan. So I know I won’t be editing Flowers for Dionysus any more this year, regardless.
Earlier this year as some test readers read the previous draft of this novel, I began outlines on my next novel. We’ll call that Novel Two. Thus far I have about half of the plot outlined. Though I would never write two novels at once, I had every intention of starting Novel Two sometime next year, now that Flowers for Dionysus is in the later draft stages, and is no longer being “hard written” if you will. It’s being fine tuned. In other words, I feel I can polish later drafts of one novel, while creating the first draft of another.
Enter NaNoWrimo.
Given that November is now more free for me, and given that one is allowed to use an outline for NaNoWrimo, should I use NaNoWrimo and that outline as a launching pad for the rough draft of Novel Two? I have some concerns.
My previous two NaNo novels were a means to an end. I created them to rise to the challenge of NaNo, but have done nothing with either one of them since. I fully intend for Novel Two to be the next official novel that I see through to the end. Revisions and all. Does starting it during NaNo run the risk of trivializing it? Would I be sacrificing the true dedication I have to this idea to the gimmick of NaNo? Does my next “official” novel deserve an unencumbered, more casual time frame during which I write the rough draft? Given that I refuse to even look at the rough draft until it’s totally finished, can any section of it written for NaNo be as solid as a rough draft I would write in my own sweet time?
Or on the other side, would it be like hitting the ground running, infusing the project with a certain vigor it may not otherwise have if I started it at my leisure?
I’ve never used NaNo for a project I knew was to be important later on, so in a way it will be like doing it for the first time. A new challenge, which everyone says is good for the writer. And of course, once NaNo is over, I can proceed with the rest of the narrative at whatever pace I like.
I should also mention that for a moment or two I have been tempted to write yet another stand alone piece just for NaNo this year. To act as a buffer between my current draft of the WIP, and the start of Novel Two. I’ve not discounted that, but I am reluctant to inject a whole new novel length narrative into my mind before starting on Novel Two.
So, readers of this blog, (many of whom are writers), what do you think? Should I use NaNo to launch Novel Two? Or should I take a more leisurely approach as I did with my first novel?
Ty’s Big Old Box O’ Writing
Over the weekend I had to empty my bedroom closet so my brother-in-law could get in there and fix the hinges on the door. (As of this writing, I have yet to put all that crap back, but that’s another matter.)
Among the temporarily relocated objects were a series of lidded plastic storage bins. Each holds a specific type of stuff, and two of them are dedicated to my previous writing. There’s one for fiction and one for non-fiction. I hadn’t been through either of these boxes in a while, so while they were drug out, (they are such a pain in the ass to bring out into the open from the closest), I took a survey.
Most of my life I’ve been an essay, letter to the editor and scholastic writer. And in recent years a blogger. The idea of making a concerted effort at fiction as well is one that has only taken root in the last couple of years.
Or so I thought.
Imagine my mild surprise then when I surveyed both boxes and found the fiction box contained far more stuff than the non-fiction. I unpacked battered notebooks, forgotten journals, random scripts and hastily bound computer printed pages and came to realize that even before I took my fiction “seriously”, I had spend far more time on it in the past than I gave myself credit for. Of course I knew in my mind that I had done some things before the current novel, (now on the fourth draft), but until I saw it laid out on the floor in front of me, I didn’t consider just how many characters, worlds, stories, and prose I’d brought into the world.
Here are some of the things I uncovered in the “fiction box”:
-The first and second drafts of a novel that actually predates my oft talked about work in progress. 200 or so typed pages. I worked on this one for the better part of a summer and autumn years ago. It’s a modern adaptation of the story of England’s King Richard II. (A story most famously told by Shakespeare, from whom I borrowed quite a bit. Shakespeare was to me what Holinshed was to Shakespeare himself.) I still maintain this story could work, and I may go back to it some day.
-Staying on the Shakespeare train, I found an early (and heavily red inked) draft of a movie adaptation of King Lear. Unlike the Richard II project, where the language and setting were modernized, the intent of the King Lear movie was to cut and rearrange scenes from Shakespeare, but still keep his language, and his setting. I had hoped to make it this distant-feeling cheap footage fly on the wall black and white kind of deal. I was going to shoot in and around local small woodsy areas. The notebook with the printed script is stuffed with notes for future drafts, scene changes, brainstorming. It fell through, as most of my multiple-person creative projects do, when I could find zero interest from others in trying to make it happen.
-The second draft of a screenplay called MONARCHS IN THE AISLES. I don’t know where the first draft of this is, but I know this second draft that I found, coming in at 93 pages, was far shorter. At roughly a minute per page , this movie, if it were ever to be shot, would be about an hour and a half long.
The movie was based on a concept I had been dying to put into fiction for years. A misadventure based on some of my own experiences in college theatre. It took forever to decide what medium was best for the story, and even once I decided, I never took it past this second draft. Never quite flew. But I worked on the script for the better part of a year. All wasn’t lost, though. I plucked the protagonist from this movie out of the script, went forward in his life ten years, and made him the center piece for my current novel. He even briefly makes mention of some of the events included in the abandoned screenplay.
-A folder filled with about a dozen pieces of flash fiction I wrote according to some exercises in a book I once checked out from the library. I had started to correct and proof read some of them, but never completed the edits. Except on one of them. One that always was my favorite in that collection. I have over the years gone back to that one and tinkered. Most recently back in the spring when I submitted it, (in longer form than flash fiction) to the writers salon of which I am a member. They liked it. I think I’ll go back over some of the others and see what’s there.
-A three page story, printed on an old dot-matrix printer from when I was a freshman in high school. It was an English assignment. I took the events and personalities of the presidential election of that year and shrunk them down into events within a small high school’s student government election. I got an A.
-A speech. Actually a eulogy. It’s a eulogy for an anonymous homeless man that a character, whom I called “Thomas” delivers to a half empty church. I didn’t know if it was part of a play, a movie, or what, but the speech was in my head, so I wrote it. It’s long. Given the fickleness of the current publishing industry, it would never make it in a novel. A newcomer like me could never sell it in a movie script. There is an outside chance that it could survive in a play, if the rest of it were well written. But for now it remains a single long monologue by a character without a play.
-Two remaining copies of a one-act comedy I wrote for a contest called On Second Thought. Once again based on Shakespeare, it’s the story of Brutus and Cassius deciding to call off the assassination, because they don’t think the conspirators are competent. It didn’t win. Didn’t even finish in the top ten of 20 scripts. (Though I have felt for years that local contest, honestly, was a fix, and always has been.) I tried to direct it in a festival at a local theatre, but once I couldn’t find enough people the first day they threw me out of the festival without giving me a chance. (Typical of that theatre. Never liked that bunch.) This one may yet happen one day…though most people miss the jokes.
-One of the more unique things I found was a composition book containing rather detailed notes on a fantasy world I was building. When I started it, that’s all it was. I’d never tried world building before, and I guess it isn’t technically fiction because there is no narrative. Still I drew maps, (badly), named regions, determined the weather, commerce and tone of each. Wrote a broad, general history of the place. Established forms of government. That sort of thing. I never went into the kind of detail many people do with such exercises. But I did end up making use of the world. I used it in…
-Nanowrimo. The only digital presence in the box was a CD that held the drafts of both my Nanowrimo attempts. (Successful ones I might add.) One of those drafts was a fantasy novel that took place in the world I had built in that notebook. My understanding was you are allowed to create a world for your novel before Nano starts, you just can’t begin the actual story. I got over 50,000 words done on time, but the story was at best only half finished. I think I had some interesting ideas there though. If I ever decide I have the strength for an epic story, I will go back to that one.
The other Nanowrimo winner on that disk was actually the first one I wrote, in 2007. I’d say that story is about 80,000 words at this point, and the story is about two-thirds complete. A political drama about a president and vice-president. Not a thriller, just a dramatic story within that sphere. I have pondered going back to this a few times. Never did, but with some work, it might have the makings of a literary fiction. Perhaps.
-Two skits based on the Harry Potter universe. (If Rowling or her people read this, and want me to turn them over, fine. Seven pages total between the two unpublished skits.) A friend of mine’s mother ran a bookstore years ago, and asked me to come up with two Harry Potter skits that some of her friends could perform for the kids waiting for the midnight release. I came up with two cute ideas, and sent them off. I wasn’t there to see them performed, but the friends enjoyed them, and I am told the kids thought they were fun as well.
-A short story I wrote one boring rainy day in college. I went all meta, and wrote a story about a guy in college looking for inspiration to write a short story. He never finds it. I don’t know if there’s a future in that one or not, but it was fun to see it again.
There was some other stuff in there as well, but this was the bulk of it. What I took away from it all, (other than I need a safe to keep all these paper copies in) is that though this current novel, and the crop of short stories I have written and submitted in the last two years seems like the beginning of my fiction attempts, they really aren’t. They say one has to have written a million words before moving to the next level of writing. I don’t know if total the box contains a million words, but I do know it contains proof that I have been exploring this craft in a manner more intense and for a greater number of years than I realized.
Writers must always learn. That journey is never over. But when I look back at how much fiction I’ve already written it’s clear how long it has been a part of what I do. No, my writing career is not, by any metric, where I want it to be right now. I am not sure how to get it there, either. But knowing how much I have been able to create, (though not publish) reminds me that when I really want to, I can put the words down and have something to work with. That, of course, is always the most important step.
Ty Unglebower 