Oh, For the Love of Plot! (a NaNo update from my wife)

[After one week of NaNo, my wife wrote up an update about how she's doing. She's doing fine in all actuality, although she doesn't always feel that way. She says things, now, as she's sitting and staring at her monitor, that make me really laugh. Things I think but never say because there was no reason to ever say them before. Of course, many of those things have to do with how much of a distraction the kids are, but, sometimes, it's because I've asked a simple question like, "Would you like anything while I'm in the kitchen?" Fire bursts forth from her eyes and smoke billows from her ears and she says something like, "Can't you see I'm trying to write?" I'm considering installing lightning rods before she starts calling down lightning strikes when people speak. So, yeah, for me, it's been interesting to see her actively displaying these things that I generally keep clamped inside. But, really, she's doing fine.]

Wow, I’m so frustrated with my plot. Right now, I don’t have a clue where my story is going, and I'm not sure whether my plot is completely bad or only mostly bad. Well, that’s not entirely true; I sort of know where it should end, and I sort of know where it starts, and I know some action needs to happen in the middle. I’ve also written a couple of pretty kickass scenes. I’m in love with some of my characters (OK, most of them). People have died (I haven’t technically written that part yet but it’s in the plot plan). Hey, it’s a space opera, someone’s got to die.

The thing that is frustrating me is that while I know how I want the characters to develop, and I know what the bad guys are up to, I don’t know how to get all the characters in place and involved in the plot. This explanation of the problem doesn’t even make any sense; how is my plot going to make sense?!

Something that I think I’m good at is the idea of character development. That is not to say that I’m good at writing characters who develop, just that I can describe a dramatic arc in which a character develops, e.g., “Hamlet starts out not a bad fellow, drives himself and everyone else crazy, then dies and takes everyone with him. The End.” (Synopsis not recommended for deployment in a for-credit English class. I haven’t actually read Hamlet in like 25 or more years. Use at your own risk. Warning: Hot coffee may be hot.)

Andrew has been really helpful and accommodating. He reads my stuff when I ask him to, and, otherwise, he doesn’t bug me. He points out that my use of commas is bad (thanks, babe!). Since he’s not wrong, that’s fine. He appreciates the funny bits (what few bits there are in, you know, space opera where people die and stuff), and points out to me where there are potential plot discrepancies or problems. That last part is a very good thing, but usually I have already thought about them and have explanations that I’m working in. In our normal life together we actually tend to talk a lot about plot problems in the media we watch/read together, so I think I’m pretty practiced in this area.

For all the problems I’m having, my word count is pretty decent. I should be hitting 15k today and by the time you read this I may be over 16k, so I'm keeping up on what I need to do. I was able to do more than 8k over last weekend, but writing on work days is really problematic. I blame the kids. They are old enough to not to need to bother us all the time, but they seem to really think they need to. Argh. It’s like they don’t want me to write the definitive space opera of our century, or something!

Right now, I’m working on a plot outline to try to get things straightened out a little so that I can move forward again. It’s hard trying to write when I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to be writing, know what I mean? I do hope I can keep some of the stuff I’ve already written, for example the scene where the badass soldier heroine kills a bunch of monsters and has a couple of really sweet lines. If I can’t keep that scene, I will probably cry. Currently, the plot outline looks like it could be an episode of Glee, only with less fabulous fashion and no singing or dancing at all. So basically take out everything that makes Glee fun and only keep the depressing high school drama parts. That’s my plot. Clearly it does not have enough space explosions or assassination subplots.

I’m also not great at dialogue. In person I’m a good conversationalist and pretty much always have a snappy rejoinder or snarky aside ready, but that sort of thing depends on having a conversational partner. My dialogue efforts haven’t quite yet descended to the level of:

“I’m bored. What do you want to do?” she asked.

“I dunno. What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I asked you first,” she said.

“So what, I asked you second,” he said.

“Shut up. I’m bored. What do you want to do?” she asked.

But I make no promises.

It does seem easier to write out dialogue without putting in speech tags and setting stuff at first. It comes out faster and more like an actual conversation that way. So that’s a thing I’ve found helpful.

All problems aside, I’m going to keep going at it. That’s how you do this, right? You just write. According to Chris Baty in No Plot? No Problem, the 2nd week of NaNo is the worst for feeling like a failure, and if you keep at it then you are sure to find a way to work through your problems and make the word count. If all else fails, I can bring in a computer to explain the plot for the reader. That reminds me, my plot needs some ninja pizza delivery guys on motorcycles.

[All of which reminds me, a couple of nights ago, she was sitting there at her computer and suddenly declared, "This is hard!" I might have chuckled, but all I could really say is, "I know."]
[Oh, if you don't understand that last bit about the computer and the ninja pizza man, see this post.]

The Long, Dark Tea Time

[with thanks to Douglas Adams]

From a blogging perspective, I think that's what November is, the long, dark tea time. For one thing, it is so dark. Getting up at 5:30 a.m. is never fun, but it's even worse in the dark times of the year when it's still pitch black an hour later when the rest of the family starts getting up and even still dark at 7:00. No, I'm not having tea, but maybe that wouldn't be such a bad idea? I don't really know. Hmm... maybe, I'll have to try morning tea to see if that helps me get through the mornings.

Of course, that doesn't really have anything to do with blogging.

And I don't really like tea.

November is the long dark for blogging because of NaNo. At least, I'm pretty sure it is. If I was NaNoing, I know I wouldn't have any time for any kind of blogging. Or eating. Probably sleeping, too, except for what would happen actually on my keyboard when my head would crash to the table from trying to pound out 1700 words a day. I do know that I saw a dip in blogging activity last November, so I fully expect that to happen again. Still, that may not be all bad. Fewer blogs being posted on will give me more time to do my own writing as opposed to keeping up with blog stuff, so the fact that everyone else is bent furiously over their keyboards may not be a bad thing.

Of course, the drop in page views does make a blogger uncomfortable. You know, other bloggers. That kind of thing doesn't affect me at all. Nope, not me!
heh

Speaking of being in a dark place, Tib finds himself in a dark place with the release of Part 8 of Shadow Spinner. And let me just say, there is no tea involved.

"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark" is available today, Monday, November 5 for FREE! It will also be available Tuesday, November 6 for FREE! As an added bonus, "Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow" will also be available on Monday for FREE! As a double added bonus, I'm throwing in "Part Three: The Bedroom" for FREE! also! Look at that, three FREE! chapters all on the same day. Go check out what kind of long dark Tib has gotten himself stuck in.
And click the "like" button!

Speaking of Tib, you should pop over to ~*~Whatever~*~... today. I'm being featured over there and answering a rather unusual question. Go check it out! The whole thing is something called "pimp my blog"... I'm not really sure if I'm the pimped or the pimper. Is that a thing? Anyway... Click the link and take a read.

Now, this part has nothing to do with the long dark except in how it can seem like such a long dark time when you're first starting out in writing. The struggle to write at all (especially for all of you NaNoers out there), the struggle to find an audience, the struggle to keep going when it feels like no one is listening. The long dark struggle. But, really, this has nothing to do with that. In my effort to highlight older posts from when this blog had virtually no readership, I'm bringing up this old thing: The Dream vs the World. Go check it out. And don't forget, just because it's an old post doesn't mean you can't still comment on it.

One other note:
I have a special project I've been working on. I'm hoping to have it out before the end of the month as it is somewhat seasonal. Okay, it's completely seasonal. Stay tuned for more!

NaNo: The Crazy Idea That Got Away

[Note: As I mentioned some time in the recent past (I don't feel like trying to figure out which post that was, right now), my wife is doing NaNo this year. It was kind of a spontaneous decision, but, then, that's how she often does things, and the best way to deal with that is to grab on and go along for the ride. To put it in writing terms, she would be the pantser of the family while I'm the plotter. Except that that's not quite true, but that's how it often feels and, probably, looks from the outside. At any rate, her decision to do NaNo was... well, I'll let her tell you about it in her own words.]

So I got a Kindle Fire for my birthday earlier this month. This was a present from my most excellent husband (the owner of this blog) and our kids. Some things to know about me and Andrew: We're not early adopters, ever; I'm actually kind of a Luddite (despite being a data analyst for a large corporation by trade); and we both grew up reading copious quantities of physical books. Thus this gifting of an electronic device on which books can be read is a big leap for us. But he made the leap, I think, because he's got a wife who does love to read and he just thought it would be nifty; also because after 15 years together he's still not really sure what kind of jewelry I like. [Actually, I wanted to get her something that she would use and enjoy on a continuous basis, and, as much as my wife likes the idea of jewelry, she rarely wears it. And she's always complaining about how the books I want to keep take up too much space, which is a valid argument for the size house we live in.]

I was both thrilled and intimidated by this gift. Thrilled because it's for books! and intimidated because, it seems, you can do a lot of other stuff with this device, like play games. Or surf the web. Or check email. Or...I'm not sure, it may even have a ray gun inside it somewhere. And I sort of hate to figure out new devices and how to use them (see Luddite, above) and determine how much money they will cost me in an ongoing sense. (Though I admit that having a portable ray gun would probably be really handy, but I bet the per-ray charges are insane.)

After my initial moment of "whoa, what," I did do some exploring and found out a fabulous fact: Our local library system does e-book lending, and it's nearly as easy to do as just surfing Amazon and one-clicking on whatever you like (after you physically visit the library, pay your late-book fines, renew your card, and spend a couple hours surfing the library website looking for ANY e-book that isn't already checked out).

So yeah, after one-clicking, I ended up with a book titled No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. There's very little explanation for why I checked this book out, other than the fact that out of 1000 or so e-book titles in the library this was almost the only thing that even remotely appealed to me and was immediately available. (Seriously, I would have even checked out 50 Shades of Gray, but it was checked out AND had a wait list of 40+.) I wanted some instant gratification on my new e-book mechanism, and this was it.

Let me be very clear at this point: I did not check this book out because I seriously thought I wanted to write a novel. Ever. Especially not during NaNoWriMo this year.

See, this is a substantial difference between Andrew and me. He has always wanted to write fiction, and I have always known that I do not and will not write fiction. That's not to say that I'm not a writer and not a good one, because I actually am. In college I could easily write a substantial paper overnight, without revisions, and get a B or higher. (The fact that I could usually get away with such terrible procrastination is why my overall GPA wasn't generally great.) But nearly all my writing has been done in the service of completing school and then being competent at my job. (You wouldn't think that the job of data analyst requires good writing skills but it actually does. No one's better at a bullet-pointed list than I am.) I've never taken a class in creative writing, and I didn't study more literature in school than I was strictly required to do.

I started to read the book and it turns out the story of NaNoWriMo--that is, the history--really drew me in. Basically it started out as a ridiculous thing for a group of friends to do. No one thought that works of great genius or amazing craft would be turned out; rather, it was a crazy creative thing to do for the hell of it, together. It sounded like a lot of fun. [It also wasn't originally in November, which I found interesting, and none of thought that it would become what it has. I mean, they weren't thinking about the future of it at all. It was a "let's do this right now kind of thing that became a tradition and then became a THING.]

After the history of NaNoWriMo, the rest of the book was mostly about the hows of accomplishing such a ludicrous, wild goal in the space of a month. Which, to boil it down, is "keep going and don't stop." (Now you don't have to read the book, but it's actually a pretty entertaining and quick read and possibly helpful to anyone who struggles with their Inner Editor or with writing paralysis.) Chris Baty managed to make the task sound like something which even I, the non-writer-of-fiction, am up to.

The upshot of it is that somewhere in the pages of the book I became convinced that I might as well try to write a novel. I do have a lot of story ideas in my head. I don't know whether they are good story ideas, but according to Baty that doesn't really matter; it's OK to write un-original crapola and it's OK to not care about "getting published." It's OK to write pulp fiction with no redeeming social value or great-novel aspirations. It's even OK to suck at spelling and grammar, at least for this first draft. (Spelling and grammar are a couple of things I un-suck at with writing; however, I'm also aware that they don't encompass fiction writing. And I managed to misspell grammar both times I typed it just now, of course.)

So yeah, I haven't ever written any fiction, but I have these things going for me:

-- I am a well-educated and thoughtful fan of sci-fi so I can probably not hack it up too badly. That is to say, I can do better than Galaxy Quest levels of science and there will be no chompy-crushy things in the middle of my space ship.

-- I write extremely quickly.

-- Spelling and grammar are not an issue for me.

Oh, I guess I should say I'll be writing a sci-fi novel. I was planning on writing something that could be described as "dystopian near-future sci-fi" (nothing like Hunger Games, okay), but yesterday I decided to switch to something different. A new idea, just because it feels more fun. And Baty's advice in No Plot was to write something I'd enjoy writing, so I'll be going for something more space-opera. I'm tentatively calling it All Suns Go Dark. (That probably should have been "tentatively titling." I told you I'm no author.)

Wish me luck. I'll update in the middle of the month if Andrew lets me and I haven't thrown in the writing towel by then. Anyone else doing NaNo or something equally ridiculous right now?

[I do want to say that I have been trying to get her to write something for years. She does have good stories, and I envy her ability to write quickly, a skill I do not have. Assuming she is still working on this, there will be an update in the middle of November sometime.]

How To Breed a Better Writer

First of all, realize that it's very hard and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. -- Douglas Adams

 I love that quote by Adams. I don't love it because of what it says about writing; I love it because of his relationship with writing, that being that he was sometimes locked up by his publisher to make him, you know, actually write. Writing was almost always the last thing he did even though he seems to have spent his time bursting with ideas.

Adams is, in my mind,  the only good reason for NaNoWriMo. That's how he wrote. Tied to a desk with the command, "Write this now. No, right now!" I think it was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that he wrote in about two weeks because he'd been locked in a hotel room with someone to make sure that he did things like eat.

If you like Douglas Adams and you like Neil Gaiman, you should certainly read the book Don't Panic by Gaiman about Adams. What better pairing could you have?

But all of that is kind of beside the point... but not really.

The results of a joint study between Yale and Moscow State University (yeah, in Russia) were released last week that shows that there is "a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing." (the whole article is here) Basically, if you want to be a writer, have parents that are writers.

That explains why my kids are so good, I suppose. At writing, I mean.

But I actually want to jump back up to what Adams said: "Next, you have to write something."

See, that's the important part. It doesn't matter how "good" you are if you never do it. So, in that case, the person that didn't get any special helpings of talent from his/her gene pool but sits down and determines to write and, then, does is way better off than the person that has the best "writing genes" in  the world but never picks up a pen. It's like the potential energy of a ball held in your hand but never thrown. What does it matter?

Going back to Adams: he had such vast stores of potential energy, but most of it went unused. In the end, he only wrote a handful of books, brilliant books but a very few nonetheless, because he couldn't make himself sit down and do the work. Maybe, if NaNoWriMo had existed then, and he'd only spent that one month a year writing, we'd have more books from him.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, my wife has decided to do it this year. She's hoping that having two writers in the family will genetically and environmentally spur our children on to further writing. Especially our younger son who has started this brilliant story (you can find "The Language of Nythos" in Charter Shorts) that he is reluctant to carry forward. My wife is a good writer, too, and writes in a way I wish I could: quickly. Words seem to flow out of her, and I have to pull each and every word out of my head like grass burrs out of socks (or the bottom of a bare foot). But there will be more on all of that later.

My other thought about this study, which focused on the actual writing, is what it has to do with story telling in general. Like oral story telling. I think there must be a link at some point, but they weren't looking at that, so they have no data on it. It makes me wonder, though.

At any rate, if you want to be a best selling author, it does help to be related to one (as the study seemed to indicate) but not because that means you're good; that just means you have an easy in. As Adams said, for it to be anything other than badly paid, you have to be extremely lucky. I'll add: or work extremely hard. I suppose, in the end, that's why Adams didn't have to write more. He hit on the "extremely lucky" with his first real project, but he had lots of experience with the "badly paid" before that. Maybe, if Hitchhiker's had only done moderately well at first instead of what it became right away, we would have had more from him.

NEWS!

The House on the Corner is being featured today over at Author Andrea Pearson. You should go check it out.

And the news I know you've all just been dying for!
Today only!
Parts 1 through 5 of Shadow Spinner will be available for FREE! today, Monday, October 15. What a jackpot! If you've missed any of the parts, today is the day to pick them up! Well, except for "Part Six: The Man with No Eyes," but that one will be free later in the week. At any rate, follow the links below and pick up your FREE! goodies! Make sure you tell all your friends about it. Really, do that. I'd really like to break into the top 20 on the contemporary fantasy list, so send everyone you know. Oh, and, yeah, because I have to say it: be sure to click the "like" button if you haven't done it already!

"Part One: The Tunnel"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Five: The Police Car"