Month: June 2016

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had a big breakthrough on my current novel. Basically I realized that the massive amount of research needed for the novel could minimized if I just changed the point of view. This was so much of a breakthrough, that the story took over my life for a couple of days.

At first I had the usual problem. My story would not let me sleep until I wrote down some notes. It kept this, and me, up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. With the notes properly typed, I was finally able to get to a fitful sleep.

I thought that would be it for a while. I made plans to to work on the novel a little at a time with the goal of having a first draft ready in late spring of 2017. That may still be the date, but the novel is definitely fighting it.

Starting early this past Saturday morning (June 25, 2016, for those keeping score) the novel took over. Just a couple hours of work, I thought. The novel had other ideas. I was able to take breaks, run errands, eat, sleep, and shower, but everything else for Saturday and Sunday was writing.

By the end of the day Sunday, I had twenty-thousand words of my first draft complete.

Surprisingly, my fingers weren’t even sore. I was in need of exercise and my eyes needed a rest, but everything else was fine. I actually survived.

If I could do this quantity of writing on a regular basis, I could get to a rate of novel production similar to Stephen King (no comment on the quality at this time). The important thing is that I could see how a person who is a professional novelist can be productive.

At this time, I still have my “real job” to deal with. That means I do have other things I need to accomplish this and the following weeks, so I probably can’t devote the same amount of time as I did over the weekend. If, however, I can get five more sessions like last weekend, that would add up to a novel’s worth of words. Again, these are all first draft words, so a finished novel is still quite a ways off. I also only have about a month and a half before I have to return to my full-time teaching gig, and that will slow me down.

The first novel is currently looking for an agent. If I can get the second novel done before the middle of next summer, that will be two in the series complete. The notes and general outline of the third novel are complete, so writing will have to start next summer. The fourth novel in line has just notes at this point, but I’m including setup pieces in the current novel so there will be continuity and expectation. If I can pull off the fourth novel the way I want to, it actually leads to a world of notes that I’ve been compiling since junior high school, all waiting to be written as books.

All of this assumes that the not-sleeping thing won’t kill me first.

In my first novel, which I’m still shopping around, there is a character named Reverend John. Though he is a minor character, his position in the story is important. He is so important that he is the focus of the follow-up novel. I struggled with starting the second novel because there is much that I don’t know about how law enforcement would deal with someone like Reverend John. Then it occurred to me that Reverend John wouldn’t know any of that either.

The reason this is important is that it means that I can change the viewpoint slightly and not have to worry about becoming an expert on law enforcement or their investigative techniques. A smaller understanding of the appearance of those techniques will serve well enough if the action is only seen through John’s point of view. I would only need to know the greater detail if I was going to tell the story as it happens to one of the officials involved.

That’s not to say that I won’t have to do some research. If the behaviors are off in an appreciable way, readers in the know would be thrown off and likely to say something. That small amount of research should be adequate to give a character-tainted reporting of the action. Now that this mountain has been reduced to a molehill, I can get started on my narrative and that pesky Reverend John can get out of my head.

I think this will have to be a tool I use when approaching other fiction writing tasks. If there is a roadblock in the form of a lack of expertise on my part, and I don’t have the appropriate expert handy for questions, I should see if there is a way to tell the story from the point of view of someone who shouldn’t know any better. It may not always be an option, but it is nice to have that in my toolbox.

As part of directing more of my energy toward writing, I’ve also been looking more at reading. To that end, I perused my local book store for authors who were current and seemed to be having some commercial success. That’s when I stumbled across the books of Stuart Woods.

There were several shelves of his books, and many of them are in series, of which he has about five. I finally found his novel called Choke (Harper 1996). It tells the story of a tennis pro and old detective solving a murder or two. That’s the part that had me a little leary, but I decided to give the book a try.

The reason I was reluctant to read the book is that I’ve never really liked crime fiction. This is a leftover reaction from younger days when I found that the mysteries were rarely that exciting or complex. My young mind could not connect with the characters so I didn’t really care that someone was killing them off. Given their language, and the language of the narrators, murder seemed okay.

To my great surprise, I started reading the book and could not stop. Really, the book is just over four hundred pages in I read it in one night. The writing grabbed me quickly and kept me going. I was impressed; so much so that my next fiction reading excursion is Mr. Woods’ novel Under the Lake (Signet 2011).

I immediately went into analysis mode to figure out what it was about this writing that kept me reading. The only other author to do that to me was Donald Harstad, who also writes crime fiction, but he’s an old deputy from my native Iowa, so I could more easily relate. I tried to compare the two.

The great thing about Harstad’s books is that the author has full knowledge of his complex world of characters and he can keep them all straight. The narrative voice is that of an old deputy, so it comes from the author’s own experiences. By having a complex world where all the people of the fictional county have clearly defined relationships, the reader begins looking for those relationships and the crimes take on a more personal aspect. Again, I may have been biased because the stories take place in a fictional version of my backyard.

The novel Choke, on the other hand, has none of Harstad’s characteristics. There are many viewpoint characters depending on who is in the individual scene. The story takes place in southern Florida, a thousand miles from my backyard. The characters have professions and personal histories with which I could not connect. Why was I so interested?

As far as I can tell, and I’m seeing more of this as I start reading Under the Lake, is that Mr. Woods is very good at not telling the reader anything useful. He does tell the reader a great many things, but always stops just short of giving the details of the situation. That teasing seems to form a very effective carrot on a stick.

When Choke ended, the last of the details emerged, and that was very satisfying. Persevering through the book paid off, making for a very pleasant experience. It’s easy to see how Mr. Woods has been able to get over sixty books published. I look forward to reading more of his work and, frankly, trying to learn to do what he does.

One of the questions I have is: will this sort of technique be useful in fiction that is not crime oriented? The whole point of the crime thriller is that it contains a mystery to be solved. If one is not going to solve an actual mystery, could the thrill of finding clues carry a story forward or would it just add frustrating complexity? Since most stories center on a main character overcoming an obstacle, one could imagine that trying to find a solution would be a sort of mystery.

Another question on my list is: would this work on something far shorter than a novel. In a novel, there would be time to drag out the details. How far can a short story be dragged? Again, there is a fine line between a useful technique an annoying one.

Regardless of the answers to those questions, I believe that I can learn much from Mr. Woods. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to devote more time to his works.