Jan
02

State of the writer: New Year, New Approach…ish

I’m not doing New Year’s resolutions this year.

The difficulty I have with them is that constructing useful ones is quite challenging because of the time scale is relatively large, habit forming is a slow process frought with distractions and breaking them can lead to levels of guilt bordering on the religious. (What..? Just me..?) There’s a strong part of me that feels any attempt to form habits concurrently is doomed to failure. I’m going to have to put this coffee down to eat chocolate and keep typing, aren’t I?

In any case…

If I were to describe most of the resolutions I would like to make, they all revolve around writing and fixing the issues I mentioned in my end of year post:

- submitting
- avoiding redrafting endlessly
- becoming distracted
- getting rid of that terrible stop/start project judder that characterised the majority of last year

I believe there’s a root problem underlying all of these issues which is that I’ve not really adjusted the process I use to write to fit my lifestyle. I’ve noted before that my instinct for writing is very much born out of my preferred reading style, that is I like to binge, writing in long sprints until my brain fizzles to a stop. This works well for short stories under 4k in length when I have plenty of time but kind of sucks for novels. The approach has some major obstacles:

- It requires me to keep an almost impossible amount of story information in my head, which means other activities fall by the wayside.
- The number of drafts required to approach readability is higher as draft 1 is essentially a basic outline, draft 2 is structural, draft 3 is structural based on feedback and so on.
- I have a natural inclination to get bored and distracted the longer the process runs.

In short I need to work smarter.

With this in mind, I’m experimenting with a much more detailed approach to story plotting to see if this allows me to produce a more readable draft, faster. My hypothesis is that this approach will:

- better suit the demands of a challenging day job (which I like) by requiring me to carry less of the story in my head while still being prepared;
- allow me to generate ideas further ahead without having to compose entire drafts satisfying my need for variety while preventing large gaps between projects;
- mirror professional pitching where you can’t really not produce an outline and allow me to make smarter choices about what I do next.

My hope is it will also be a bit quicker.

I didn’t just conjure this out of the ether. There is some evidence from my experience on Forever that this approach is more effective. For example, it was only when I got really detailed in planning out the end of the draft I managed to finish the book.

That said, I can’t really afford to experiment at novel length on something this fundamental, the time cost of getting it wrong is simply too high and so I’m experimenting on a short story with the added bonus that it buys me enough time to work up an outline for the next novel*. I made good progress on the short story plan which definitely made a difference today when I came to start. I was able to begin writing with very little preamble but the confidence that I had a story that worked and that’s when I enjoy writing the most: when you can turn the internal editor off and just go. Seems to be the internal editor can’t talk with an outline in his gob. Who knew..?

This working smart seems to offer rewards. I may introduce it to other things…

It’s not a resolution though. Oh no. :)

*I think this is probably where I see any short fiction I work on fitting in the future as it’s a more economic way of experimenting. Like I said, I haven’t been working smart.

 

 

 

 

Dec
31

The year that was…

2011 is done. Shit. Insert sands of time cliche here.

There are lots of reason to dislike 2011: financial meltdowns that roll on and on, riots, large swathes of the world still embroiled in conflict, large swathes of the population still living in abject poverty that we seem increasingly too self-involved to do anything about. Ho hum. I mention these in passing to remind myself that, really, the low points I experienced weren’t anything really.

Pass the whisky.

Writing wise…2011 was a bit of a mixed bag for me…

- I recovered my spine and moderated my first panels at Eastercon.
- I wrote a new book (technically I rewrote an old idea but it was from scratch so it counts. It does to. Shut up.).
- I revised said book (and learned the perils of Not Planning Enough).
- I read a bunch of awesome books.
- I met new people.
- I renewed acquaintances (and made a fool of myself in front of someone I admire a lot but…well…that’s a running theme on this here blog, besides, the author in question has been good enough to keep talking to me).

But…

- I didn’t submit enough.
- I didn’t read enough.
- I didn’t play to my strengths.
- Stuff got in the way, which is not an excuse but something to overcome moving forward.

Of course, none of that really matters to me because I got married this year and it was fantastic. That’s what I’ll actually remember*. :)

I hope 2011 was equally memorable, in a good way, for all of you. May 2012 rock for all of us.

* Self indulgent but true.

Dec
05

State of the Writer: Planning

Let’s see: a writing update. When last seen I had just completed the 2nd draft of Forever.

I’m in the process of doing a short tidy pass before handing the manuscript to my first couple of test readers. This should only take a couple of days (cold not withstanding).

While the draft is out being knocked around by readers I plan to write draft zero of my next novel. I’ve been making idle notes on this one for a while, they’ve accreted into the start of a world building document and the threads of a basic plot. I’m hoping to have started this in earnest next weekend.

I’m pretty much focusing my efforts at novel length now as most of my ideas seem to be occurring at that length, the learning curve is a bit steeper, and I have quite a few half baked short stories on my hard drive that need revising. I plan to do something with these in the spaces between drafts before I start any new ones.

Mood: cautiously optimistic.

Nov
20

Heinlein’s Rules

I finished the second draft of Forever today.

It’s been a difficult slog and a pretty tough year writing wise. Somehow I lost my way and by chance I was recently reminded again of Heinlein’s rules. I have determined to note them down here, in my study and my notebook so that I do not forget again. I have added four of my own. A pep talk to myself (you in this case is me). If they help someone else: fantastic.

Do these and you will get better:–

  1. YOU MUST WRITE: Sounds easy but you fall foul of this when you forget time is finite but when you remember you CAN do it. For example, recently despite working 51 hours you wrote 14500 words. You DO have time. It is your CHOICE.
  2. YOU MUST FINISH WHAT YOU WRITE: I actually think in the beginning this is easy. People will say it’s hard but they’re probably smarter than I am. It’s once you’ve done a few stories, met the hordes who also want to get published and realised it isn’t easy this gets hard. You have to finish it to tell if it works. You have to finish it to fix it. You have to finish it to get it published.
  3. REFRAIN FROM REWRITING, EXCEPT TO EDITORIAL ORDER: Your biggest SIN. If it hangs together as a narrative. If it reads out loud OK. If your test readers enjoy it. You’re done. Move ON.
  4. YOU MUST PUT YOUR STORY ON THE MARKET: You know the deal here. Until a) humans evolve telepathy b) they also develop telepathic search engines no one is going to find your story by chance and offer you money for it. You’ve got to HUSTLE. Get it out there.
  5. YOU MUST KEEP YOU STORY ON THE MARKET UNTIL IT SELLS: Yes, you’ve been rejected. So has everyone. It doesn’t make you special. Everyone has to keep plugging away and so do you. GET ON WITH IT.

Some additions of my own:

  1. YOU MUST BE PRESENT: You must allow yourself enough time to have thought about what you intend to write before you begin. Simply being present at the desk is NOT enough. You will just fall into the trap of phoning it in. This will kill your motivation when you read back through the piece and realise it’s flat.
  2. YOU SHOULD WRITE EVERY DAY: Your ability to be present is greatly improved by repetition. It’s not the amount. It’s the frequency and the quality.
  3. READ EVERYTHING: You can tell a professional fiction author in five minutes of conversation. They’re the best read person in the room, even amongst a brood of readers, and not just in the area they work in. Only editors and critics overtake them and rarely in my experience. 
  4. YOU SHOULD WRITE WHAT YOU WANT: Writing takes a big time commitment. It doesn’t really matter what your goal is. Pick ideas you think are fun, make the intellectual challenge to make that readable to as many people as possible – regardless of how out there the idea is – and go at it that way. Trying to be clever, commercial or such as a starting point doesn’t work and you’ll struggle to finish anything.
Nov
12

State of the writer: nearly there…

Let’s see: when last seen I was just getting over my Energy Crisis.

In good news, I’m pleased to report that my energy levels have held where they were in the first half of the year and, consequently, good progress has been made on the second draft of Forever. You will note I don’t say I’ve finished yet, I refer you to the title that grows ever more ironic with each passing day. The muse, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. It matters not: I have to press on, it’s do or die time.

I may be over-egging it a touch…

In any case, what I’ve been doing is a substantial plot change to the third act in order to remove a somewhat superfluous plot loop that would have made the book longer than it needed to be. This has made the manuscript much tighter than before but has left a ragged tear and so I’ve been repairing this cut with a full revision to the penultimate set piece*. Really without going into massive spoilers I have to leave that explanation at that level of cryptic technical detail. I reckon I’m probably about two weeks of hard graft from a finished draft. Fingers crossed.

This puts my plans for the rest of the year somewhat out of whack as I had planned to write the first draft (a somewhat easier task) of a new novel by year end. I’m unlikely to hit this target now but I want to at least have started one and so I was pretty excited to have a reasonably well formed idea land in my head as I walked to work the other day completed with a concept that is considerably less research heavy, not to mention lighter, than the present piece. I’m going to start the world building once I’m a bit closer to the end of this piece but my mind keeps noodling on the idea as I dash from place to place in the final sprint to Christmas.

Really the upshot of the state of this writer is, for the first time in along time, I’m cautiously optimistic.

That can only be a good thing…

* Yes. I applied a four-act structure in a moment of madness but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Aug
02

Slow Bleed

Don’t worry, I haven’t injured myself.

I’m still thighs deep in the editing and revision stage of Forever, gradually pulling this awkward beast under control, and trying not to mix my metaphors too much. My present concern is, because it’s contemporary fantasy, how fast to go with the transition from “normal” to “bizarre” while maintaining the right amount of tension around the invading “weird”.

In the case of Forever, I’ve paid quite a lot of attention to the things I like and dislike about contemporary fantasy. I dislike when characters from the real world crossover and very quickly act like their new reality is  normal. I’ve tried as far as I can to avoid a very rapid switch in favour of a slow bleed of weird but, in shortening the book, I’ve had to adjust this a bit to prevent the last act being too concentrated. I think the pace works better but it’s still a risk that I will lose the sense of strangeness I want. It’s an uncomfortable compromise.

In the past, I confess, I thought writers that made too rapid a switch were just too keen to get to the strange. Now, I suspect that the fast switch is often the result of wanting to highlight other aspects of the story and having limited space. The real test for my story will be when it goes to my test readers.

I really do like trying something different with every story, precisely because you get to find this stuff out along the way and utilise tricks you’ve learned along the way. For example, in reducing the word count I am employing lots of tricks I learned along the way doing oodles of flash fiction and how to imply “off-camera” action and relationships. Mainly, I just love learning new stuff and how to put books together. What can I say? I’m a book nerd. :)

What’s the biggest writing assumption you realised was wrong?

Jul
22

Life and other problems…

*taps screen* This thing on…? Good.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Generally, I think you’re not meant to apologise for your blog going dark for long periods of time but I’m not convinced this is actually the best advice because it assumes readers don’t notice. My audience is small but I think you do notice if I’m not posting. The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have spotted why: I’m getting married in a few weeks.

Juggle bitch, juggle…

For all my productivity hacks and obsessions with wringing every ounce of productivity out of the day sometimes there’s just too many balls in the air. For the last few weeks it’s been a case of head down and plough on as details were finalised for August, the pressure to deal with the pre-summer hols work stepped up and I tried to keep going on new material. At last it’s starting to feel like this is quietening down to a sensible level again now. As ever with these things, I think I’ve learned some lessons.

Timelords are fictional…

As much as I might like to pretend I can keep going like the energiser bunny the truth is, like everyone else, I run out of steam at some point. One of the frustrating realisations during this period was that I’d been running at full whack for so long that my overall capacity for Getting Shit Done started to drop. It’s like driving a five gear car and having fifth gear suddenly taken away from you. There are only 24 hours in my day, I can moan about it all I like or I can work with it and adapt.

Write smart…

For me this probably means I need to write shorter books. The Scarred God racks in at 140k, Forever (in its current mid draft state) has bloated to 156k (too big and, if I continued as is, would be even bigger on completion). This means that redrafting becomes a massive task, particularly as I don’t seem to be able to stick to prescriptive outlines, and I find I suffer from severe project ennui after about 100k. At this stage with my novel length work I am more bothered about improving on each project than submission which compounds the need for fast turn-around. I’m planning to aim for the 100k mark in future as, for the stuff I write, this seems to be happy medium between the desire for slightly bigger books in fantasy and being able to turn round a project in a sensible time frame.

Reducing Forever…

In the case of Forever I’ve opted to take the chainsaw to parts of it. I don’t have time to plough on and then edit down. I need to produce a tight draft as soon as possible in order to move on to other things and, depending on my view of the feedback, have a chance of using it for the purposes of either getting an agent or a deal. Given it’s contemporary fantasy it’s just too long for its market. Cutting down is, in my view, markedly easier than grafting in new material as, particularly at this length and this early draft stage, there are often chapters that clearly don’t work and a tendency to have a scene for almost every transition. I think it’s probably harder if you want to change the plot arc but I don’t, I just want to make it much tighter, and so it’s about cutting out the fat and using the skills I learned writing flash and short stories to imply what’s happened off the reader’s mental eye. I’ll probably do a post on how I approach this next week.

Acceptance is serenity…

I’ve learned I just need to accept that sometimes I can’t get everything done that I would like to and so I need to accept that. It could mean the house is a shit tip for a few weeks, it could mean I need to blow off writing and other projects for the day and just go plonk myself in the cinema for a bit, it could mean I book myself into a conference that just serves as brainstorming time, and it almost certainly means that from time to time my blog will go dark. I think I’ve finally learned that I’m not willing to get stressed over this.

For those of you – rare few that you probably are – who want some more frivolous fixes of Neil you should probably head over to twitter and follow me there.

Jun
24

State of the writer: Plugging away

This is a short one. As am I.

The month’s been markedly more busy than I intended and so progress, while steady, has been slow.

By far my main focus is still the second draft manuscript for Forever. The structural changes continue to ripple through the rest of the book like a classic example of chaos theory. I flip between finding this annoying because of the delay and being quite pleased because it means the book does have a coherent structure because you can’t just move things round easily.

In the meantime, I have written some first draft short stories that I need to work on and I have begun some note-taking for the next book. I can tell that I am getting frustrated with the redraft of Forever because I keep getting the hankering to go do new stuff and normally I like to keep two projects on the go so that I can flit back and forth. I’m resisting at the moment because I would really like to finish the rewrite some time before the wedding.

The other, really useful, thing I have been doing is reading Tobias Buckell’s Nascence. It’s a fascinating book that details seventeen of his short stories that failed and describes why each story doesn’t work and what he learned from the process. I’m about half way through but I really am finding it useful as I go through my own redraft process because it’s making me stop and think about the reader.

That’s it for now. More posts soon.

Jun
02

State of the Writer

The second draft of Forever is going well, albeit taking a little longer than expected.

Slow and careful wins the day…

One of the principle changes I made early on in the drafting process meant that I’ve had to do some shifting around to graft that change into the rest of the story and rewriting this has taken some time. That said,  I do think the book is better for the new material that is replacing chunks of the first draft and the story isn’t really changing just some of the detail for what I hope will be a more believable arc. I’ve also had to adjust the pacing a touch.

For me, the second draft always seems to involve the biggest changes because that’s the point where I know I’m going to show it to someone else and, essentially, where I switch from telling myself the story to telling someone else. It’s an ambivalent period where the thrill of making a line, paragraph or chapter really zing is counter-balanced by the sheer length of time it take to complete the whole draft.

A change is as good as a rest…

To keep my sanity intact, I have been knocking round some short stories that I hope to send off over the summer. There’s something satisfying about writing an entire story in a morning or afternoon and having it polished in a matter of days. Shorter stuff is still a good way of breaking up the slog of a longer project and a useful way of keeping your name out there.

One last push…

That said, I’m having a concentrated focus this month to try to finish the draft if I can. I need to move on. Once completed I will have a week off before starting the first draft of my next project while my test readers chow down on Forever.

May
26

Ideas

Ideas can flash from anywhere.

I mentioned before that I was blocked on the idea front for a while and my relief that these are now starting to bubble up again. Thing about ideas is that you can’t control when they occur but that moment of clarity that it is a) an idea and b) has merit is magic, a proper pricking of the thumbs that is very distracting. Case in point, I had a really good idea for a short story while cycling home the other day, it occurred in a very short period of time from a visual prompt (someone crossing the road) through to me having a good idea of the whole thing.

I was lucky it was a straight stretch of road with minimum junctions because I wasn’t concentrating. Indeed, in the end I had to stop and get off to write it down because the sudden spike of adrenalin from the frequent “creative” driving in London kind of destroys any thoughts you are having and daydreaming on a bike is a recipe for disaster. I’ve also had ideas in the usual places: showers, baths, cleaning, walking,  driving, etc. It’s always the ideas that occur while in charge of moving vehicles that are the problem. I imagine the same goes for operating heavy machinery.

Sometimes the sudden strike of an idea is misleading, the next day you will look at the idea and think it sucks or you can see you’ve reinvented such and such a story from first principles. This is annoying but part of the course. In my case, in the cold light of a few days later, the idea seems to have some merits, I still like the pitch and so I’m going to have a crack at it over the weekend.

How about you? Where’s the most awkward place you’ve had an idea?

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