Feb
12

State of the writer: Need to push it…

I appear to have inhaled January. Most careless.

I’m trying to review my progress with a bit more care and attention than I did last year to avoid feeling like large chunks of the year have just slid away like wet cake. When you have lots on – day job, friends, LIFE – it’s easy for things to slip. Rather than lose energy beating myself up about it, I’m trying to create systems that work for me. That’s what I’ve spent this weekend doing.

The good news for me is that January proved unequivocally that my best time to get work done is before work. Early starts enable me to have time without distractions, maintain forward momentum, feel positive that I’m in control of the project and stops a tough day disrupting everything. I can bank that. It also convinced me that thinking about my writing in a more structured way – I’ve always been a bit seat of the pants about first drafts – really does help.

I’m still not entirely sold on the merits of detailed outlining but we’ll have to wait for the end of this draft to really be certain.

The bad news is that things still got away from me towards the end of the month as deadlines loomed on other projects. The impact of this wasn’t as severe as last year because I am much better at recognising the signs and I have a number of hacks to maintain progress on the composition front from minimum word count to twelve sentences*. However, it does mean that all the other things I really need to start throwing into the mix get lost: submitting material, revising and thinking about what I’m doing further ahead than arriving at my desk.

This situation was brought home to me at the SFX Weekender when I saw how long ago it was since Stone got put out there and I considered the number of completed, unsold, stories on my hard drive not to mention the two novels festering there. I have every intention of trying to get an agent and publisher in the second half of the year. I need to pull my finger out and put my money where my mouth is. I also need to stop with the cliches. :)

Time to crack on!

* I think I picked this up from Adam Christopher’s blog but I can’t be sure. In any case, it’s for the nights when you are really flagging and so you just write twelve sentences. Enables forward momentum and rest. Use sparingly.

PS – Incidentally, if you haven’t read Stone you can still buy Issue 14 from Murky Depths here. Though if you’re strapped for cash there’s a wealth of my flash available right here, a reasonable range being: Pixies, After the Rain, Territory and Blink.

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.

 

 

 

 

Mar
27

Here we go…

The second draft of Forever is underway now.

Everyone tackles redrafting differently but I thought my method might be of interest to other writers and the handful of interested readers who like my stuff. It’s a variation on my short story process but with a few extras to help orientate myself round a much bigger canvas and I still haven’t done lots at novel length. Your mileage will vary, here goes…

My first drafts are pretty raw, I try to let myself be open to where the story will go within the practicalities of holding the tale in my head. By the second draft I must know where I am going or the whole things fall down and so my approach is much more structured:

- Read Through
- Figure out what the story is about (not always what I thought when I started if I had any idea)
- Scene analysis: Every scene goes in a spreadsheet, my notes from the read through are combined and I go through the structure of the book with a tooth comb, marking where major revisions are needed, new scenes and cuts.
- Structural pass: I go through the manuscript removing all the guff, add any new scenes, and remove any pacing issues I can see.
- Character pass: I go through the main characters arcs, check dialogues is distinct and behaviour consistent with clear progression.
- Research pass: I check any factual material has been represented correctly if appropriate.
- Line edit: I read the whole thing out loud to ensure the prose flows.

Then I pass it to my test readers. There’s lots of ways to do it, this is just mine.

I’ve just finished my scene analysis and am about to start the structural pass. Wish me luck.

May
23

Things I learned…

I started noodling on the idea that became The Scarred God in 2005, sat on a balcony in Italy, trying not to worry about my grandmother who was lying sick (dying as it happens, I didn’t know that at the time) in a hospital in Wales. The project was really nothing more than an exercise to see if I could write a coherent story at that length and a way of distracting me from how upset I was at what was happening at home.

Last week I finally finished the book.

In the course of writing it, I’ve learned lessons (mainly the hard way) about writing at this length and about how the process works for me. I’ve done one of these posts before, shortly after I finished the fourth (and what I assumed was the final draft), but these observations should sit with rather than contradict any of those points. I hope they’re of use to people.*

Here goes…

1. Writing novel length fiction is hard. Don’t take on a novel lightly, it’s not the first draft that is particularly trying (sorry NaNoWriMo’ers, it isn’t) but the work of redrafting, of polishing while maintaining enough critical distance, of making it good – that’s the tough marathon of minutia that wears you down. Make sure your novel is about something you find *really* interesting and are passionate about because you’ll be spending lots of time together.

2. Deadlines are important. It’s a long project, the need for drafts critical and the process of drafting one that eats time. You’ll always be able to think of new stuff that you can shoe horn in, new ideas will always occur mid draft, and the whole thing will go on forever. Set yourself a cut off point (draft wise and time wise) and stick to it. Bear in mind you need at least three drafts, more depending on how you proof.

3. You’re not Stephen King. Be wary of adopting other writer’s processes without tweaking them for your own circumstances and personality. It is unlikely that someone – however talented – can maintain a reasonably challenging day job, family life, and a novel length project without some planning, notes or even, dare I say it, an outline. Take what works for you, leave everything else.

4. Redrafting a novel is hard work. Don’t redraft your first draft while you’re writing it but equally don’t leave stuff you know to be wrong to “fix later” as you will be building the rest of the story on faulty foundations and the size of the fix will grow exponentially as you move on. This is a hard balance to strike but it is critical. Unless you have time to do full rewrites on stories running from 90-140k.

5. Have a safety net. Pick your test readers in advance, choose well and treat them right. They are the people who stop you becoming the literary equivalent of an X-factor contestant.

6. Don’t dwell. Start something else while the project is being test read, they always take longer than you think (rightly so) and you need some distance before you decide to make alterations based on feedback.

7. Length is important. If you think you might submit the story, if you entertain the notion at all, check the min/max word limit for the type of book you’re writing and try to bring your final draft in to this length. If in doubt write long and cut back as it’s easier to take out than put in.

8. Have fun.

* Note: I have no contract for this book, have a handful of publishing credits and make no claims as to the mileage others will get from it. I’m not trying to tell you what to do, just what works for me.

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