Tag: writing process

Seams Impossible

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It was a fun week off, but tomorrow I’m back to work on that least enjoyable step in the creative process: editing. I’ve edited a novel before, but man … looking at the edits ahead of me is a little bit like staring down the craggy peaks of Everest. This stuff ain’t gonna be easy.

I’ve taken the conventional wisdom for editing perhaps too much to heart, giving myself plenty of time in between drafts. Ideally, they say, you want to come back to your work as a new reader would come to the story, divorced from any cuddly feelings the author might have for this or that character or plot point. In my case, it’s been something like nine months since the ink dried on the first draft of the story I’m about to tackle. And the parallels between a nine-month fermenting process for a story and the time it takes to fully cook a human baby (yeah that looks a little wrong as I sit here and re-read it) are probably too obvious to list.

So: the characters in the story are likely to appear pretty fargoing foreign to me, especially given that I seem to recall introducing some pretty massive shifts in their development about forty percent of the way in. Likewise the plotting, since I’m fairly certain that my past self left a note to my future self to rewrite most of the beginning of the story with a different character as the protagonist. Oh, that Past Me. How easy it must be to come up with these tremendously bold ideas when you don’t have to do any of the legwork. Wouldn’t it be cool if your antagonist were a sentient pile of roaches instead of just a really nasty dude? How about if we set the entire story in an underwater hidden city? Or maybe the story all stays the same, except that now every single character speaks a different language? This guy, I tell ya. Just because he’s pouring the magical unfiltered story-gunk out through his fingers, he thinks he can suggest just any old thing.

Of course, without those crazy ideas — not the dumb ones, mind, because you can’t go diving down every rabbit hole to see what’s at the bottom — the story feels rote, uninspired, like a cardboard sandwich slathered in gluey mayonnaise. Some of the rabbit holes have to be explored, and that’s what the second draft is for: turning down the side streets that you noticed in the first draft but didn’t have the time for. Abandoning the main thread of the story you found yourself telling and hacking into the newly discovered jungle of the story you could tell.

And then, of course, comes the real work: the part where you look around at all the strewn and scattered bits of story, littering the floor like so much discarded fabric at a dressmaker’s, you collect the bits that look the least objectionable, and you start sewing.

So: may my needles stay sharp, may my plot threads not fray, and may my eye for fashion be clear. It’s going to take all that and more to get through this one.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Endings and Beginnings

Pavowski2 Comments

Writing only works if you devote yourself to it, day after day, week in and week out, month after agonizing month. You park yourself in front of the screen again and again and again, wondering every day if what you’re doing is going anywhere, or if it’s coming to anything, or if the pieces you’re punching out of the drywall will ever fit together in a shape that fits known geometries or not again. The words pour out and pour out; some days it’s all hey this is pretty fun and cool and exciting whee I’m weaving stories and making magic like a rainbow-skating elf and other days it’s like it’d be easier to self-castrate than type a single word, why do I do this to myself, I have invented a new masochism.

By necessity, I find myself not thinking about the finish too much. In the beginning it’s too far; I might as well be thinking about the end of the Trump presidency for all the good it does me to think about the end of my project today. In the middle it’s a torture — I know it’s getting closer, but like a mirage floating over the horizon, it just never seems to get any closer. And at the end, the nearness of it is distorting, like a haze of summer gnats flittering in your face — close enough to touch, yet dancing just out of reach.

Instead, I watch the ground under my feet. Follow the path where it leads, occasionally stop to check the map, and mostly just focus on not getting stuck in the mud or wandering off into the undergrowth. Think about today’s 500 words today, worry about tomorrow’s 500 words tomorrow, and as for yesterday’s 500 words? Forget them, lest ye be sucked down in the quicksand of self-satisfaction or devoured by the litera-demons that hound your every step. Eyes always ahead — but not too far ahead. Sure, there’s a prize out there in the shape of a finished story (well, “finished” is more like it — you still have to edit the thing, after all). But the real prize is another day walking the path, another day weaving stories out of nothingness, the next 500 words that you haven’t written yet.

In this way, a novel gets written. In this way, a story gets told. In this way, another 8 (or nine? or maybe ten? Who even knows, this journey warps spacetime worse than a singularity) months pass. In this way, another cast of characters struts and frets its hour upon the page.

And then, holy carp, one day you’re working away — faithfully, dutifully, painfully hammering out your daily words, when the fog lifts. The trees thin out. The mirage resolves itself.

The loose ends of the story are tying themselves into neat little knots, your word count is knocking on the door of that 85,000 mark, and you realize: it’s almost over.

On the one hand, it’s gratifying as hell — you’ve worked away these months, not knowing what, if anything, it was all going to come to, and now you can look back at the trail you’ve blazed. It was all leading somewhere, after all: to this moment, right here, this patch of virgin earth under your battered boots. The sun seems to shine a little brighter here; the rain passes a little quicker; the breeze is a little sweeter. It’s nearly over. Mission accomplished. C’est finis. (Are those even words? They feel like they might be words.)

But there’s a dissatisfaction, too; equal and opposite to the fullness of accomplishment. The story’s not done yet, not really. You’ve blazed the trail, but you have to go back and mark it out so that your readers can follow you down it. And that’s a lot of work ahead.

canyon-1209287_1280

But more so than re-treading this trail you’ve just carved — which will be its own adventure, no doubt — is this: Here you stand, in the midst of the wilderness. The ending point for one journey. And the starting point for the next one.

Make no mistake, finishing a novel is a sweet, sweet feeling. But it’s not a fullness that lets you sit back and unbuckle your belt like you’ve just polished off five pounds of Thanksgiving turkey before you slip into a tryptophan coma. It’s a fullness that scatters like ice from the spoon (I stole that simile from somewhere, but I’ve no idea where), that leaves you hungry again the moment it clears your palate.

There are more trails to blaze, more strange and wonderful characters to meet, more dangers to face, more MacGuffins to MacGuffin.

And though this particular page may be full, you can already hear the next blank page calling.

What else can you do but answer?

Simmering my Brainmeats in a Fragrant Crockpot of Creative Doubt

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My Flash Fiction from last week is enjoying a bit of success over at terribleminds.com.  So good, in fact, that I stand to win a free e-book off the back of it (yay free stuff!).  That thread is here:  Three Sentence Stories.  And it got me to thinking, which is a bad habit I have.  Because I love these little Flash Fiction challenges; I take great pleasure jumping into them with both feet no matter how difficult or ridiculous or outside of my comfort zone they may be.

If you’re going along with this post, you might want to check out my series of stories from last week, because I’m stewing over them right now.  Simmering my brainmeats in a fragrant crockpot of creative doubt.

Writing the last one — I should say the last set, since I expanded on the topic and wrote way more than I perhaps should have — was instructive, because the development of the stories was so strange to me.  With only three sentences to tell a story, I agonized for the weekend over what story I could tell, what characters I could bring to bear, what possible development and twists I could effect within such a short period.  My first story was good but fell into my typical vein of the dark and somewhat horrific account of a more or less mild-mannered somebody taking part in senseless violence.  It’s a little bit of a motif with me, I’m afraid, and I’m just not sure how effective it really is.  It wasn’t bad, but the moment I wrote it, I realized just how much of a step into an old shoe it was, which is why I decided to write another one.

So I rebooted, kept my central idea and parameters, and brought in new characters, new conflicts.  New perspective, new story, new twist.  And v2 was better, I think, though it still fell in the same dark, depraved vein of the first.  But twisting the idea in my brain felt refreshing, so I tried again.  If the first story was a cruise down a familiar highway, the second was a short detour on a quaint exit ramp for a franchise burger.  A bit different but nothing incredible.

So for the third go-round, I decided to take a hard left into the ditch.  Rather than characters, I characterized inanimate objects (more or less), let them talk and explore human emotions and ideas, and … end up at the same dark murderous place.  Hmm.  The new take on characters was like a fantastic little food truck discovered set up around the corner from my office.  Totally new and exciting food in a familiar and comforting setting.  I knew I was getting warmer.

On the fourth go-round, I struck gold.  I re-imagined the central idea once again, personified an inanimate object and used my scenario to describe a situation that happens every day.  Not an earth-shattering revelation about everyday, just a little thought experiment on what might be happening when the vending machine at the end of the hall rejects your dollar.  Somehow, it felt like gold.  An ostensibly ridiculous premise with an endearing (at least, I think so!) character whom you don’t expect, giving an unexpected perspective and staying light and upbeat.  So it was a bit out of my comfort zone, a bit funny, a bit ridiculous, and very much me.  As I was writing it, before it was finished (yeah, that quickly, even before I could finish three sentences), I could tell it was the best one.  That “magic” was happening, that crazy feeling where you feel like you’ve tapped into the magical mind-juice of the universe and your pen (okay, your keyboard) is acting as a conduit for the timeless universal stories that speak to everybody.  You know, a good writing session.

The fifth attempt felt a little forced, so I pulled the plug after that one.

So, to reflect, I wrote one story in my usual vein, a second with one foot out of the vein, a third with an eye on a different horizon, and a fourth that struck out toward that horizon and — by all accounts — seems to be resonating with folks who read it.  So now, I’ve got another prompt in front of me for the weekend, and I’m all in my own head, wondering if I need to write three junk stories before I get at the “real” one.  For that matter, I’m working on an extended short story and boy oh boy, does it feel awkward and forced.  Like I’m in touch with the central idea, and I’m enjoying the premise, but I can tell as I’m writing it that I’m not telling the story the right way.

Do I need a few crap attempts at the topic to “clear the pipes” so that I can get down to writing the story that I want to write?  If so, how far do I have to carry those stories out?  When I wrote Rejected v1, it felt like a pretty good story to me, but in retrospect I can see that it’s awfully derivative.  The current version of Powdered Chaos, at about 30% completion, already feels crap.  Do I need to carry it to is conclusion before I take another stab at it?  Or, having written about 4000 words on it already, can I legitimately realize it’s crap and start over without crashing my creative process?

In short, just what the hell is my creative process anyway?  This is seriously bugging me, and it’s bogging down my writing hard while I’m trying to carry my momentum through this lull before I jump into editing Accidentally Inspired.

Need to figure this out.  Anybody else have anxiety like this about your drafts?  How do you attack it?  Do I just write the crap to clear the pipes or do I resist the urge to waste time on the crap and hold out for the good ideas to strike?