Dissection and Deep Hurting

Last week I managed to set down one of the stories I wanted to write in August, as well as a detailed outline for the other. The outline felt good, but the first pages of the story did not feel good at all. Things went better as the days went on, and ultimately I finished a first draft on Sunday, but I think the don't wanna instinct that keeps me from writing for long swaths of time is the muscle memory of those first few pages and how lousy they feel.

I did something with this story that I don't remember doing before: opening it, word by word; flaying it, like a coroner performing an autopsy. (This is kind of a gross metaphor, but honestly, it's so apt that I don't want to find another.) I wrote pages and pages and pages - the first draft is nearly 9,000 words - of excruciating detail about the observations and sensations of my main character, rather than saying only as much as I needed to and moving on. The latter method is the way the final draft is supposed to be, omitting needless words, but I suspect that peeling back the skin so gradually, and picking up and describing every last organ, is going to help me finish with a better product. I'll have more good stuff from which to pound out the final (hopefully far shorter) version.

It was a fascinating process, too. To expand on the gross metaphor (sorry), exploratory laporoscopy is the way I usually do it: make a quick incision, poke into these characters' world, take a few notes, and leave. But with the patient on the dissection table and all the time in the world, I can discover so much more. Subcutaneous layers. Pores and capillaries. Getting the writing done as fast as possible jibes nicely with my habits, but this story didn't go that way, and it was much more rewarding for that.

One of the good things about drafting in longhand is that I have no real idea how much I've written, so I don't start getting nervous about how long (or short) it's going. One longhand page is often about 250 words, but that varies so much in reality that I can't do a real estimate until I transcribe. The pressure's off that way. I don't really get anxious about going over 10,000 or whatever until the longhand part is over.

I'm experimenting with another way of writing that's pretty much exactly the opposite of the advice I got at Esalen. Pam told us that metaphors are generally wiser than we are, and that grouping seemingly unrelated ideas together often results in thematic coherence that we can't see until the work is finished. She and other writers (Faulkner? can't remember) say that if you set out to write about An Idea, what you'll come up with is the most boring, forced, creatively devoid work possible.

Yet all the work I've produced that I like best (and that readers have considered most coherent and finished) has started with me knowing exactly what I'm up to before I begin. An essay I wrote that connected the societal value of women's safety with a personal anecdote about my apartment complex, an essay I think is really quite good -- I didn't start drafting that until I had both ideas in my notebook, until I had connected them and taken some notes about them. Even while drafting, I kept my mind on that connection with every last word I wrote and tossed out the stuff that, while good, didn't fit.

When I focus hard on the Idea behind whatever it is I'm writing, I come up with coherent work, whereas if I just try to set shit down that seems okay, I come up with multiply threaded work that, when followed to its logical conclusions, just collapses. Writers I admire say to trust inspiration, to write on through to the other side and find coherence in the process of revising. I'm working on a story right now where I did that, and I've had to pitch the draft entirely and start over with an outline (perhaps as I should have done at the outset, eh?) rather than do something that resembles revising. It's made me miserable.

The trite conclusion here is that every writer works differently, and what makes your creation process go smooth might make somebody else's halt completely. Another possible conclusion is that next year I'll be in this space talking about how outlines don't work at all for me anymore and freewriting is the only way to go. Ah well. I just want to draw attention to the idea that no writing advice is perfect for everyone. Not even mine.

Let Not the Swamp Consume You

I managed another 1,000 words on KUFC (for those of you just joining us, it stands for Kickass Urban Fantasy Chick) yesterday, in between work. I also wrote several pages of notes. I set down all the different plots in the book and explained their shape from beginning to end; although they all overlap each other and I consider them all part of the same thing, it helped to have them all drawn out. I'm now up over 20,000 words in the main text, which means I am officially past the beginning and into the middle.

The Great Swampy Middle (or GSM) knows no fear, no mercy, no regret. It doesn't come after you. It darned well knows that you're going to come to it. It knows that you're going to be charging along, sending up the spinning plates, ripping out the strong character introductions, planting cool bits into your story for the future, and generally feeling high on life. And just then, as you get all that fun opening-story stuff done, it pounces. And suddenly, you're staring at a blank word processor screen trying to figure out how to get your story through the next paragraph.

And it laughs at you. It laughs and dances on the ashes of your enthusiasm. It knows full well that you are going to be its bitch from now until you somehow finish the book or else give up in despair and slit your wrists with the edge of one of those index cards you're using to try to figure out the rest of the plot. It rejoices and dances around a primal bonfire, howling its glee at the uncaring stars.

Yes, Jim Butcher, thank you for the extremely accurate depiction of what lies ahead.

Back in 2006, Butcher offered terrific advice on his LiveJournal about how to avoid the GSM. I read it yesterday (thanks to Matt) and decided to take it to heart. I got the sense that the mini-arc was something he used in Storm Front, and I remember feeling like the structure of that book was a little wonky. (Also, after you read it: I always thought that the LoTR plot actually divided, with no set of character goals more important than the other. Hence, Frodo/Sam Ring Quest is equal in weight to Aragorn & Co. proceeding eventually to the Battle of the Hornburg. Although the retrieval of Merry and Pippin is supposedly a mini-arc, none of the rest of their quest would have happened if they hadn't gone that way and had to end up in Rohan, so I have a hard time seeing it as a mini-arc.) So I decided not to go with that. Instead I'm planning a Big Middle, which will be an emotional peak for my MC and possibly a hell of a scrap as well. Later on we'll have the big dramatic choice of the climax.

The GSM is what happened to me to a very great extent on the Greenland book and to a lesser extent on the time book.* In both of those, I knew what I wanted to happen in the end, but only very vaguely, and I didn't exactly know how to fill up the 50,000 words or so of the middle in order to get to the end and write through what would happen. Stephen King had reassured me that writing with an outline wasn't necessary for all writers, so I thought my instincts would lead me through to the end. SADLY, NO! I still think that outlining to the last detail isn't necessarily a hot idea for everybody, but having more than a vague idea of what will happen is, I suspect, better.

So that's what I'm doing. I know what's ahead, more than vaguely, even if I'm not sure how each chapter will be worked up. I hope this is a sufficient happy medium and not just me lazily coming to the realization that outlines are necessary for me.

Last night I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater, thanks to Fathom Events, and it was pretty cool. There were trailers shown before the movie "hand-picked by Tarantino from his private collection" - one for a 70's movie with John Cassevetes, Britt Ekland, and a very worked-up Peter Falk called Machine Gun McCain; one for Scarface; and one for a Hong Kong movie with a much younger Chow-Yun Fat (Chow-Young Fat?) called The Killer that I kind of want to see. Trailers were also shown for all of Tarantino's other movies, and my favorite of his (and one of my favorites of all movies) is Kill Bill, the first part of which I failed to see in the theater. So that was cool.

Pulp Fiction itself was a fun thing. That movie is new to me every time I see it, despite knowing chunks of it really well, and Matt and I talked afterward about how nothing else has really been made that resembles it, even 18 years later. (Except Tarantino's own movies.) Unfortunately we were sitting on the same aisle as a group of guys who enjoyed reciting lines along with (and sometimes prior to) the characters. Oh well. It was still worth going. There were a couple of younger folks sitting upwards of us who'd cosplayed as Vincent and Mia for the occasion. I could say an awful lot more about Tarantino here, but again, not the point of this blog.

Opera again tomorrow. December's punishing opera schedule will lead to a lighter January and ever more culture in my brain, so I'm soldiering on. Sallying forth. Pushing forward. Happy Friday.

*The time book = the [non-]horror book. I am tired of writing that punctuation over and over, so henceforth it is the time book.

Painting Within a Tended Field

It frustrates me how easily I give myself over to Yes This Is The Answer. When I find a solution for something, even if there's no chance it's sustainable, I tend to be all I AM THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE I FOUND THE ANSWER HUZZAH!!, and then I feel very foolish when whatever it is falls apart upon use in the long term.

Lemme splain.

Remember how I talked about hating to outline? All that still holds true. But there's a lot to keep track of in the KUFC book, a sort of A plot/B plot construction (global plot, personal plot) and some other people's plots that have their own arcs even while our heroine is blissfully ignorant of them. Plus the unfamiliar universe, plus a number of odd characters, plus a backstory, plus being certain that I'm self-styling instead of just plunking the prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis. (Sidebar: the Greenland novel was even more complicated than this, and I think if I'd had an outline, it wouldn't have turned out such a damn mess. For revision, if I ever fucking revise that book, I plan to create an outline and edit it, and then edit the book.) So but for this book I thought I'd do what I usually do and make copious notes in a pretty journal to the side of my desk. That wasn't enough, it turned out, because after I'd written my prologue, after writing pages of notes about the universe, and even after a few hundred words of Chapter One, I still didn't know what happened next.

So I wrote Chapter One on a new page of my notebook and scribbled what I already knew about it: I was going to open with action, with my heroine freerunning, doing what she calls her night work. I thought that was all I knew about it, but then I wrote down what I needed to establish about her, and what I thought was likely to happen to her in order to establish this stuff. Suddenly, more ideas were flowing: little details about the universe, character names and traits, something essential and very interesting about her background that reshapes things a bit. None of this amounted to what anyone would call an outline, because it was just notes and the majority of it stretched way beyond the first chapter, but it gave me a grounding for what I was going to write, which meant that I had a more structured and yet somehow more innovative first chapter when I got down to business on it.

Very stupidly, I presumed that this little bit of outlining had created momentum that would sustain me into Chapter Two. Which it did not. I wrote about a third of Two before I had to stop and go back to the notebook, and scribble through what was going to happen next and why. Then I came up with even more ideas: ways that her personal life was tied in to some of the intrigue of the book, characters who were going to appear sooner rather than later, other characters who weren't going to show up until later and the devices that were going to drag them back into her life. Before even writing it, I fixed what would have been a major mistake: drawing the A plot into the heroine's story too soon.

Everything feels much more orderly. I don't feel restrained, as if I'm doing the prose version of this:

Wait! I know! It's a giraffe! 

But more like I'm running around in a field that has been carefully bordered and mown. Tended, sure, but not unnaturally limited. Plus, I can always jump the fence. While writing Chapter One, I shifted gears to create a character who hadn't been part of my plan, and she's going to be useful.

The work I've ended up with is so superior to what I could have written, with so many more little cables wiring itself to the rest of the book, that I feel...just...grateful, and wholly stupid for not doing this with other projects before now.

I know I'm going against the advice of absolutely every writer I've ever heard of (and surely thousands I haven't), but writing every day doesn't seem to work out for me unless I'm a) short-storying or b) barreling headlong toward the end of a project. Everyday writing on a novel makes me feel resentful of and bored by the work instead of fascinated by it. I feel like I've got all the stuff of my life in the evening (dinner, Matt, movies, relaxing) on one side of a seesaw and writing on the other, and it seems unfair that writing is always heavier. Thus far on this book I've been writing every other day (sometimes with an extra off day in between), and the work has seemed much fresher for it. Sometimes I'll sit down with my notebook on the off day, and sometimes I'll do the notebook thing before writing that evening.

(This all sounds a lot more orderly than it is; a routine has still not been established. Yesterday I spent all morning at errands and didn't get to my job until 2:30, which meant that there really was no evening, just a shower and some Skyrim-watching and bed. Today I'm dawdling in the morning and I don't know if I'll get to anything but dinner at night, although I do hope it's a writing night.)

THE POINT IS, to make this into a Solution, the idea that outlineish note-taking in my notebook is the way that I'll write from now unto death, is wildly premature. And yet I'm thinking Yeeees, This Is The Answer. This is how I outline. See? Problem solved. Now I can be a writer.

It's so exasperating to do this, because I'll trumpet and crow about whatever solution I've just come up with, be very self-satisfied, and then find that this method doesn't work at all for the next project or the next stage of life. Back in my early 20s, I thought the way I wrote was to write completely nonstop for a few weeks, eating, sleeping, breathing the work, and then at the end of it I'd have a novella. That notion was born partially of being in my early 20s and having fewer other responsibilities, and partially of the creative machine being a very different thing then than it is now. A few years ago, it was trudge and slog and write through the pain, and I thought that was effective. (That might have been delusion rather than changing circumstances.) Now it's this notebook/every other day thing. And I'm sure in a few years it'll change again.

It's just like my job-hopping. It gets embarrassing telling your family members at Thanksgiving that you have a different job than you had last Christmas. Again. And telling them that no, you still haven't had any more stories published. Yes, you've changed your method of writing for the 18th time, but you're sure this time you're really on the trolley and nothing will ever change again, so when you're asked about it next year, you'll be able to say yep, that's still the way I do it, I'm confident and secure and totally not a wishy-washy idiot.

Um. Got a little sidetracked there. But I stand by it: I do feel like a wishy-washy idiot sharing these methods and then being like no, I had to tear down that building and build another one four inches away from the first one. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in the currency of personal pride, but it'll definitely be worth it. After all, I've written seven thousand whole words now! Totally worth it.

In unrelated news, I thought we had black-chinned hummingbirds, and then I thought they were Anna's hummingbirds, and now I seriously don't know. Half the hummingbirds native to this area seem to have greenish backs and red throats and dark heads, as these do. Whatever; they're full of pep, and I love watching them. When I'm actually on the patio, in my reading chair, I can hear them going ttttthhhhhhhhrrrrrrrRRRR as they zip by.

Background Effort

Friday night I wrote a few hundred words, and got stuck on the name of a fictional government program which I couldn't manage to invent. Matt and I went out to dinner* and I complained a lot, at first about not being able to find a rhythm when I'm still in the thick of inventing a world I don't yet know that much about. I hadn't even figured out which decade I wanted to set this in, for example, and although I don't think a lot of detail like that is going to be mentioned specifically by characters or narrator, I still need to know it. I didn't know whether I should try to outline beforehand and then write, or whether I should write with big gaps and then go back to rewrite later, or whether to write a few sentences, stop what I was doing to make world-building notes, and then try to get back in the feel of what I was writing.

None of these seemed like a very good idea to me. I loathe outlining. In the past, it's stifled and stymied me, and it always feels like wasted work. Stuff that's going to be thrown out later. But writing with gaps sounded like I'd wind up with an incoherent voice and muddled themes, and writing in herks and jerks sounded like a terrible experience likely resulting in poor work. Between them, outlining and note-taking first seemed like the best answer. But OH I did not want to.

Matt, who has a paying creative job, told me (in the kindest, gentlest terms) that I needed to be more realistic about the problem of doing work that was going to be thrown out. He said that in his job, probably 75% of what he comes up with - beyond spitballing; like stuff that he works on for days or weeks, and fully creates, and is usable - is thrown away and never used. Ow, I thought. He insisted that what was remade instead was better work, and the previous work being lost was something he got used to over time.

Other friends have tried to tell me that outlining, and previous drafts, and pages of notes that end up not fitting in to your work, are not wasted. My friend Dave, a visual artist, told me that it took him a long time to iron out how he felt about doing practice drawings. He said he had to "learn how to be OK with things that weren't great", a phrase that really resonated with me. Instead of seeing gesture drawings as earlier versions of something better and more complete, he began to see them as self-contained things.

I remember being in a writing course at a community college some years ago where we were assigned to write a little self-contained scene. There were instructions for the scene that I can't remember now, but I hazily suspect that the purpose of the exercise was partly for our practice, but mostly for the instructor to get an idea of our abilities. I wrote a scene about a woman in a convertible that was falling off a cliff. I still remember a detail I wrote about the song she had in her head. I did something between tossing off and doing my best on that scene, seeing it as an assignment for which I had to meet expectations, but not as something I'd ever integrate into other work. It didn't have to be a sonnet, but it did have to have some rhyme and meter, so I wrote appropriately.

It wouldn't harm me if that scene got snapped up by the black hole of the universe and I never saw it again, and it doesn't bother me that I spent an hour or so on it. It served its purpose.

I'll endeavor to see outlining and notes the same way. I just feel so inadequate and silly when I look back at notes that I made prior to the last finished project and see that I forgot the spirit of half of them and didn't use most of the rest to inform the project. It feels wasted. But it's not, it's just background effort that gets my head in the right place to set forward the best and most integrated effort I have.

My resistance reminds me a lot of my pack-rat instincts. Nothing can be lost! No creation can ever be discarded or forgotten. It all has worth and value. I think part of what Dave was trying to tell me was that the worth and value is in his sketches' very discardability, that he can practice with them and then throw them away, and the intangible benefit of having done the work (and also having been able to let the work GO) is what he gains, not the tangible benefit of the drawing's existence.

In any case, last night I did some outlining that led to some freewriting that led to some amazingly awesome ideas for this book. Ideas which I doubt I would have come up with if I'd kept floundering along in Chapter 1. So I have a little egg on my face there. Maybe I'll alternate nights with writing and note-taking. (The idea of actual outlining, with the high-school format of I. A. 1. a. etc., makes me shudder, so I'm planning to just kind of...freewrite a lot.)

By the way, Matt recommended that I look at Jim Butcher's blog for suggestions about how to put a book together. I've just skimmed it so far, but Matt's right - there's a wealth of information on that blog. It's here. Some of what Butcher talks about is stuff that I tend to feel my way through - either like a natural or like a moron, depending on your point of view - but if you feel helpless before the maw of Story Cthulhu, it sure looks like a life raft to me.

And Finally, I made a small pinboard over the weekend of inspiring images to put next to my computer, and it makes me very happy to look at the collage of it. I hope to make it a rotating series of pictures, rather than the same ones all the time the way my previous near-desk collages have been. If I leave them up forever, the pictures lose their power. I thought it might be fun to put one of those images into my blog every now and then and say a bit about it.

This is Marlene Dietrich, whom I think may have had the best legs in the history of legs. (She's photographed here by Milton Greene, who also took some of the most famous pictures of Marilyn Monroe.) The vague texture of the background next to the sharp texture of her hair, and the movement in her left hand as she pulls up her stocking, are only a few reasons why I love this picture: I also love the little wavepoint in her shoe, and the fact that you don't see her face but you know that this is a woman of world-changing charisma. And the unbelievable length and lines and curves of her gams. She's never been one of my favorite stars, but this is definitely one of my favorite pictures.

*In fact, we went to Black Angus. I'd never seen a Black Angus on the East Coast, and knew it only from a scene in The Simpsons wherein Bart mercilessly insults the joint, leading Matt and me both to a) hear that scene in our heads every time we drove by, and b) wonder what the food would be like there. I was a bit gleeful to have the opportunity, but disappointed to find it was neither particularly bad nor particularly good. Decent Sysco food.