Category: writing

I haven’t had much time for writing lately and it started to show. I can feel it in everything else I do. There’s an extra level of crankiness, like when my blood sugar is low or when politicians talk. I know I have to take time for writing, but sometimes life is extra full of other stuff and you have to keep postponing the narrative. That’s when you risk it taking things into its own metaphorical hands.

In my day job, I teach at a small college. My subject is software development and I have really great students. Because of that, I put a lot of effort into preparing materials and giving good feedback when I grade. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time. Especially in a term like this one where I have one new course and one course that has new curriculum.

Saturday night, I sat grading. I knew I needed to get it done. My students depended on me to give them prompt feedback so they can adapt and learn. The grading kept getting harder, though. About nine o’clock, I could grade no more. My muse had gotten me.

I opened up the novel I am supposed to be rewriting and started in. I figured a little prose would help take the edge off. It probably would have too.

At five in the morning, my aching fingers and constant typos told me it was time for bed.

That’s right; my writing madness had driven me through the night.

Obviously, this is a sign that I need to make more time for my writing. It would be that work-life balance that people go on about. Since I was able to do go through about half the planned changes to the novel in just one night, it probably wouldn’t be too long before it was ready for the resubmission circuit again.

The alternative is that, one day in the not too distant future, they will find me in the fetal position, staring into the distance. The only sign of mental activity shown would be the furious flutter of finger movements as the remains of my subconscious typed out glory on an imaginary keyboard. As fun as that sounds, it may not be my best option.

I received some agent feedback on the first ten pages of my novel. Though it stated that the writing was generally good, the story introduced by those pages was not enough to catch a reader. I found the input to be very helpful and insightful. Best of all, it immediately illustrated to me something I knew to be wrong but couldn’t put my finger on.

Back in my Old Writers’ Group we discussed the concept of a story having too much “front porch”. I don’t know the origin of the phrase, but it had a clear meaning. Basically it means that you have supplied too much supporting story in front of the exciting part of your story. That’s what I did with my novel.

Even though my checklist told me to watch out for this particular problem, I hadn’t seen it. My guess is that I was just too close to the work. The exciting and fun part of the novel started many pages in but my story started with earlier events that the reader would eventually need to know. It was like starting a murder mystery by telling why the killer did it and then walking through the details of the murder.

With this new insight, I’ve started the rewrite of my novel. This time it starts at the critical conflict. The reader will learn about those supporting parts at the same time as the main characters. I think this will make it a much stronger novel and make it more fun for the reader. With any luck, it will also make the first ten pages more attractive to an agent.

Having seen this now, I’ll have to make more effort to watch for it in the future. When I look at my diagramming, it tells me where the conflict happens. If I have too much before that point, I know what I will have to do. Wish me luck.

I cranked away at my second novel, and things were really flying. Over a couple of weeks, I was almost halfway done with the first draft. The image of the final scenes was clearly fixed in my mind. Then, everything came to a halt. Between that ending and where I stood was a massive chasm. My story had no way to get from the mid point to the end.

My hero is very well developed. There is a character arc. All of his growth and such area all laid out in great detail. In this particular story, the main character was never a problem. His destiny stood tall and demanded that I write the story in the first place. That story just required some bad guys to move it along. The details of that movement eluded me.

Fortunately, a storm arrived in my area, and I love storms. I made quick drive to one state park to watch lightning. On the way home, I took a forty mile detour involving a stop at another state park. There, I sat in a shelter and listened to the rain while scribbling in my notebook.

The drive gave me time to ponder my novel. It occurred to me that my bad guys were not well developed. I knew who they were on a superficial level, but I hadn’t created their world. Without that world, they had no motivation. That’s what was missing.

The scribbling defined the world from their point of view. It gave complexity and depth to them. More importantly, it gave them a good reason to go after my protagonist. Once I knew why they engaged in dastardly deeds, the deeds themselves lined up to happen. Those deeds built a bridge across my chasm.

There’s no way to know if the story will work. I still need to write the last half and all the appropriate revisions. There’s still the matter of not having an agent for the first novel yet. It was a good lesson for me that, if I’m not sure where my story is going, I may not understand part of that story’s world.

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.