Novel Update

Not much to tell. I'm quite a few scenes into the novel now and every scene has fallen into place pretty much as planned. I seem to be developing an interesting process. I'll write a scene over the course of two, or at most three days. Then I'll spend a day or two resting and thinking about the next scene. I have to push myself to go ahead and start writing again, being always certain I'm not ready. But I usually am ready. The scene turns out fine, or even better than I expected. I haven't really taken any wrong turns.

My Hero and I are getting along swimmingly. I like him a lot. He's even more endearing to me than I expected him to be.

I've had only one real surprise: My villain made an unexpected appearance early in the story. I'm glad he did; it helped the plot along and makes the story more interesting. I've been reading about plot development, and one key rule is to let the villain drive much of the "second act", to borrow a term from screenplays and drama. I can see why. The villain's activities provide a huge opportunity for dropping herrings and threads of mystery.

Anyway, it's bed time, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's work, and what could be a better sign than that?

What's Going On

I live. And write. That's pretty much it.

'Course, I'm also eating, sleeping, and doing all the other stuff that makes writing possible. Once in a while, I do get out for some fun, too. This afternoon, my partner and I rolled down our sea kayaks and spent some time on the water, first time this year. It was a sunny day, lots of birds, not many people out. Got to see a golden eagle for the first time. He/she was being chased by two angry balds. Nice. (Nice for us, I mean. He kree-shreed about it a lot, whatever that means.)

But I spent the first half of today writing, and it turned out to be one of my best days in a week, that after having written fifteen straight manuscript pages over three days last weekend.

So, yeah, it's going alright. Maybe at this rate, I'll have a novel in draft by summer. It'll be my second, but this one's going to be way better than the first.

Novel Update

Enough talk about vacation. It's time to get back to work.

So I spent a few days trying to figure out how to get my mind back in the groove, which is to say, how to get my novel going again. I tried toying with my notes for a while, but the words still wouldn't come, so I finally decided to go back and read it through from the beginning. I was hooked. If this were a real book, I would have stayed up late reading it. What a relief.

Tomorrow I'm going to try something I haven't done for a while. I'm writing a dramatic scene in which two characters are at extreme odds. In fact, the first wishes to torture the second, and the second wishes to kill the first. They know this about each other, but owing to some unique circumstances, they have to pretend to be civil. So I have a unique challenge: to make the characters say and do one thing, but mean and intend something entirely different. One of my better short stories employs this technique, but not to such an extreme degree. Should be fun.

Once Upon a Time

The time has finally come. The players are set, and today I move my first pawn.

My novel has a rich and interesting back-story, so I have decided to start in the past — pre media res, if you will. For weeks I've been trying to find a way to weave this back-story into the narrative, but finally I've just given up and decided to tell the whole story chronologically. I'll either discover that this was the right move, or I'll find out where my story really wants to begin. Either way, there's no use staring at a blank piece of paper for more weeks on end.

Besides, I'm excited about these earlier events and want to write about them, and as I said in this long post about my progress as a plot writer, my mind seems to want to think about my story this way anyway — that is, visually and by just diving in and exploring the territory, especially the characters.

Though I do have the bones of a plot, I'm planning on letting my characters have the final say about it.

My partner, who has about 17 U.S. patents and has proven himself to be very capable of being creative at will, tells me that this is the process of keeping your target fairly wide in the early stages of being creative. It's still a target that you choose — don't get me wrong about that — but it's wide enough that you actually have a reasonable chance of hitting it as you proceed through all of the unknowns that lie ahead. I think he's right. So far, my attempts to lay down a very specific, step-by-step plot at the outset has felt like a kind of rationalistic exercise for me, because it requires a certain kind of omniscience about a terrain that I haven't yet tread.

Anyway, I'll let you know how it goes.

Expect light blogging for a while — possibly a long while — especially if my story takes flight. Or maybe I should say, if it catches on fire.

Novel Update

I owe it to my readers to provide some kind of status report about my work, since you've been so patient.

I mentioned the hero of my current novel in this recent post. Well, he's still alive and kicking; I haven't given up on him and he hasn't given up on me. To the contrary, we've become pretty good friends over the last few months and I'm reasonably confident that he's going to have his adventure after all.

If only I could tell you more about him. Unfortunately, writing isn't like painting in the sense that I can't offer tantalizing views of my progress the way Bryan Larsen does over at Rational Art. It would be perilous for me to describe the background of my story or even to mention the theme. Doing so would be like trying to bring a pre-term, unborn child out to look at him; you can't really put him back in the womb. (Besides, most pre-term story ideas sound stupid and unconvincing.)

Here's a safe hint: The story is set partly in an imaginary portion of the PNW. The rest is set, well, somewhere far, far away. And my hero? His name is...a secret. (It happens to be thematic.) I will tell you only that he has a very hot disposition. Beyond that, you'll just have to settle for some comments about my progress.

My goal with this novel has always been to learn how to plot, and that is what I'm doing, though not very efficiently nor even very gracefully, which is perfectly fine with me. I expected this story to present all sorts of trouble along the way. After all, one learns by taking on challenges and overcoming them.

I've been patiently probing the plot and the characters, which has started to pay some dividends. In one sense, the story has grown more complex, and in another sense, stayed rather simple. By complex, I mean that I'm beginning to see a web of actions and circumstances that are at times intriguing, mysterious, and—I hope—suspenseful. By simple, I mean that the overall story remains true to my original idea. Even better, the basic action-line of the story remains straightforward much the way the central plot of Lord of the Rings—getting Frodo Baggins from the Shire to Mordor—runs through all three stories despite the many conflicts and subplots along the way.

The situation hasn't always been this good. I've taken several wrong turns, both with the story and with how I approached the novel-writing process. Novels seem to provide endless opportunities to make wrong turns. Sometimes I wonder how anyone ever figured out how to get from "Once upon a time..." to "...happily ever after." If only someone would invent a compass for novelists, but then again, there aren't very many good maps of the terrain, so what good would a compass be?

And that brings me to the final subject of this update: I'm learning how to better avoid some of the details early on, to get out of the way of the story, and to let my muse have his say. Am I going New Agey? No, I'm just dealing with reality, which means: I'm looking for the right mix of planning-with-a-light-touch coupled with the freedom to let my brain do what it does best. This is how I already write my short stories, and I once read an essay by Edgard Allan Poe in which he asserts that most writers need to work the same way when they write novels, else they'll fail. I can attest to the wisdom in his claim.

My brain is highly visual. This makes me good at rendering scenes but not nearly as good at planning them. I have to be careful not to ignite the visual part of my brain, which is my muse, before it's time, else my muse takes over and the planning process gets trumped. So I skirt around the periphery of my story in a kind of phantom dance with my subconscious, first getting a hint of an idea, then checking it against my overall plan, and quickly backing off when the images start to form too clearly in my mind. Right then I have to say to my muse, "Get back behind the starting line; I haven't fired the gun."

I'm sure that after having written several novels, not only will I know better how to stay out of my muse's way, but also my muse will begin to accept some of my direct mental processes in the early stages—or so I hope. Until that time, your continued patience with my progress is much appreciated.

P.S. I just finished another short story. It's something like high fantasy, which I only now realize I haven't written before. (Tolkien is high fantasy; Rowling, Dinesen, Shelley are not.)