Writing Progress: Week Ending January 28, 2012

Another highly productive week of writing is behind me.

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 3,241 words

Grand Total: 3,241 words

Once again, my progress for the week was well-distributed across multiple writing days, demonstrating the fact that if I have the time to write, I can, in fact, write.  And these last two weeks I’ve been able to smuggle a lot of time across the border, so to speak, and I’ve been really productive.  The reverse will sometimes be true, I expect, in the coming few weeks  – because Dear Wife and I will need to focus a lot of our limited time-resources on planned House Projects, the current phase of which we want to finish roughly by the midpoint of February.  Pursuit of these joint-2012 goals – which are otherwise irrelevant to this blog – rank higher in importance, and I’m excited for this work to get done.  But nevermind that.  What about the writing, you ask?

Well, as I reported last week, I missed my self-imposed deadline for completing my prep-work for “Book of M” again.  I still haven’t finished the outline (at least… not as of the end of last week).  But I’m really quite close – in the last 10% of the book close, or so I think.  When last I visited with my characters, I was pondering the plot problems presented when one airship is reportedly significantly faster than another – and yet to have the final climactic moment happen at the prescribed time and place, I needed said second, faster airship to catch up with the first much more slowly than it’s speed would indicate.  In other words, the first, slower airship needed a bigger head start.  I’ve thought about it since then, and come to what is probably the answer as I realized that I still had one major plot thread that wouldn’t be adequately resolved in the final climax – I needed to resolve it first, and doing so would probably resolve that relative airship speed dilemma.

Anyway, that’s a bit specific with regards to the plot.  But you get the idea.  I’m right on the cusp of outlining out what happens in the climax.  And the great part: I have some idea exactly what that climax is.  When I started this outline, I really wasn’t sure where I was going to end up.  I had a few inklings, but no firm idea.  Now… I’m pretty sure I do know.  So that’s some big progress.  And while I’m truly excited to start the next phase, I do have that nagging voice in the back of my head that’s telling me: this is really good, but it’s not great.  You’ll have your work cut out for you in revisions, that’s for sure.  First I still have quite a bit to do, though, if I want to finish this by month’s end, and finally, finally start writing that first draft…

That was my week in writing.  How was yours?

Writing Progress: Week Ending January 21, 2012

Well, I had a really good writing week, and all-things-considered, I’m feeling pretty good:

Book of M:

• Background Notes Wordcount: 3,495 words

Grand Total: 3,495 words

My progress for the week was pretty well-distributed across several good writing days – despite having several other days off due to other ongoing committments.  And I made good strides toward my goal of finishing this outline process by the 25th – i.e. by Wednesday.

At this point, I anticipate that I’ll miss that deadline/goal.  But not by much.  I’m still learning, at this stage, about what I can accomplish in a given time period, and about how fast I actually write.  This will have been at least the third time I’ve missed a self-imposed deadline on getting the prep-work for “Book of M” done so I can start the actual draft.  This time, though, I’m really close.  In my outline I’m at approximately the 50% mark, or just a little short of it, for the novel. 

I’m guesstimating, of course, because I’ve reached a very murky part of the plotting for this novel.  The weird thing about this story is, since the very beginning I’ve had a very clear vision of how this story starts, and that vision has only gotten clearer.  But I’ve never been entirely certain where it goes from there.  I had a small catalog of scenes and goalposts in my head, but no connecting thread.  The hard work I’m doing now is sussing out that connecting thread to see where it leads.  So I still don’t know how this thing ends.  I’m finding out as I go.

I suspect that means, as I reach the end of the outline, that I’ll actually have to go back and revise some elements of the outline earlier on.  Actually, I’ve done that already – going back and adding notes about things I want to show or foreshadow at earlier points in the story.  And that’s before I’ve gotten past the halfway.

As things progress, I’ve also become aware of two peripheral things: (1) I’m really in love with this world.  It feels rich and alive to me.  That’s probably consequent to the long time I spent writing out it’s whole history. (2) I’m really worried about the direction of the plot, as a whole, and about the potential reader’s attachment to main character.

Addenda to “From Whence Greatness?”

Yesterday, I told the story in which I developed my theory of the key ingredient in a great story: that of “relationships” between characters.  But there are a few clarifying points that I’d like to make.

First, a definition.  When I refer to “relationships” as being key, I don’t mean the word in the colloquial sense of a “romantic relationship”.  Heck, it doesn’t even have to be a friendship, or any other positive relationship, for that matter.  When I talk about “relationships” between characters, I mean that there has been a level of personal interaction between characters which is the genesis of an emotional response between characters.  In other words, stuff happened between two characters, and because of that stuff the two characters may have come to like each other, love each other, hate each other, bore each other, become jealous, and so on.  The feelings needn’t be mutual, either.  In fact, relationship dynamics can be so much more interesting when they aren’t perfectly congruous.

The second addendum is this: the relationship is not divorceable from the characters involved.  In other words, having “characters” with “relationships” will not save a story if the “characters” are not interesting, engaging, or otherwise worthy of our rooting interest.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been using The Redemption of Althalus as my touchstone on this point, because it’s the only fantasy novel I’ve ever put down unfinished – a dubious honor, I’m sure.  The reason I couldn’t finish that book?  While it had a relatively interesting premise, the entire cast of characters were card-board cut-outs of standard fantasy tropes with little or no variation from each other.  (One review on Amazon I read described the book as having exactly 3 characters who have been cloned multiple times and given different names and dress:  good guy, good girl, and bad guy.  I’d concur, except I’d say there’s really only one character who is cloned, and who’s name, gender, and assigned allegiance are the only variables.)  Althalus is my touchstone because the characters were so dull and unengaging.  Though there were several relationships between the various characters, they had absolutely no depth.  And however shallow the good guys, the bad guys were even thinner, such that throughout the book, we have virtually no concern whatever whether the good guys or the bad guys win, because there are no real consequences.  For the “relationships” ingredient to work, therefore, these relationships need to be between fully realized and engageable characters.

That said, this element alone may not be sufficient to propel a story to greatness.  But I still maintain that it is the one element that must be executed on well in order for a story to be great.  Other elements will still be necessary, but the specifics of those elements are not, in my mind, as iron-clad as that of interesting relationships between interesting characters.  To greater or lesser degrees, genre conventions may dictate a lot more about what needs to go on in a story: whether you need an exciting, never-before-been-seen new idea, or deeply intricate plots, or explosive dialog.  Some of these you almost certainly will need.  But you ignore characters and their relationships at your own peril.

Happy writing.

From Whence Greatness?

A post on the blog of T.S. Bazelli the other day made me think back to some thoughts I had a year or two ago about what makes a novel or a book great.  I thought this would be a great place and time to go back to those thoughts, re-examine them, and share them.

The question of greatness in books is one that can cause a good deal of contention among those who are well-read.  The erudite and scholarly may have the ability to pontificate on the relative merits and flaws of the great classics, from Tolstoy to Nabokov, from Shakespeare to Dickens and from Joyce to Fitzgerald and beyond.  (You’ll note how each of these is readily identified merely by their last names, as though nothing else is needed for their introduction.)  Well, I haven’t read a word of Tolstoy nor much of Nabokov.  I’ve read smatterings of Shakespeare and Dickens, nothing of Joyce, and only what they made me read in school by Fitzgerald.  The same could be said for any number of other “great” writers.  But, frankly, I’m not interested in scholarly or academic discussions of greatness.  I’m a young man who yearns to be a writer, himself.  So, what I’m interested in is the kind of greatness that churns out best-sellers.  The Stephen King kind of greatness.  The Dan Brown kind.  Or the J. K. Rowling kind.

And it was a consideration of Rolwing’s “masterpiece”, as it were – the Harry Potter novels, as though they need any introduction either – that originally got me thinking about this subject a few years ago.  I haven’t read King or Brown (though I’ve seen many of their movies), but I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series.  Now, this reading is but one datum to consider, but when I think back over the stories I’ve loved throughout my life – over nearly all of the books I’ve found most compelling – the key learning I gleaned from this consideration holds constant and true.  Let me take you back to the beginning, to where my thoughts on the topic began.

I had just finished one of the Harry Potter books, whether the fifth, sixth, or seventh I no longer remember.  By this point, Harry Potter was past being a phenomenon and had become the touchstone of a cultural moment.  By 2007 the New York Times felt forced to create a whole new category of best seller to which it could shuck the quarter-dozen Harry Potter titles that were clogging up its normal best seller list.  And as a writer, I wondered.  What made these Harry Potter books so great?  Why were they such a huge bestseller?  Why did so many people love these books?  And were there any lessons I could glean from them that I could apply in my own work?

I approached these questions from the point of view of one who would also write heroic fantasy stories of wizards and dragons and the fate of the world in balance.  And right away, I was able to rule all of that out as a factor in Harry Potter’s success.  Certainly, other tales have done spectacularly well relying on just those very themes: the Lord of the Rings comes as one clear example, and there are other great bestsellers (though none quite so best selling as Harry Potter) in the fantasy genre that rely still on these same themes.  Harry Potter is something of a bildungsroman, but so are many other fantasy tales.  There is a young boy destined to defeat the evil wizard.  He has a wise old mentor who is destined to die before the young boy can fulfill his own destiny.  Sound familiar?  Lots of great fantasy stories have been told with the same motifs.  So have lots of truly awful dreck.  My own fantasy novel rested on these same themes, and yet I knew in my heart of hearts by this point that my novel was practically unpublishable.

No, I reasoned, these themes were not a reason for success.  Neither, it was clear to me, were they a hindrance, no matter that you always hear that we, as writers, have to avoid such clichés “like the plague”.  The success of Harry Potter proved for certain that the old saw about fantasy clichés was no true path to greatness in fantasy literature.  Many stories have been new and unique and inspired.  Many of them have been consigned to the dustbins of history.  No, there is no formula for greatness in the way that we approach these fantasy clichés.

What about Rowling’s prose, and her style?  Certainly, one can count points in her favor here.  Yet it cannot escape notice that though these were books written for and to a young adult and juvenile audience, they nevertheless had an appeal to a much broader audience.  Adults and people of all stripes and ages were completely caught up in the Potter-mania.  Should we all strive to write YA-fiction with broad market appeal?  How would one do that?  No, that line of reasoning is silly.  Stephen King churns out a never-ending stream of best-sellers, and his books are decidedly not YA in appeal.  Still, there is something to be said for writing style: for finding an authorial voice that has general and broad appeal.  But this is not a lesson that can easily be applied, in principle.  Each writer must find his or her own authorial voice, and it’s something I’ve yet to see a standard or formula that could replicate success in this regard.

So, my thoughts continued.  It was not Rowling world-building.  While her world was interesting and at time immersive, there were nonetheless numerous inconsistencies that would crop up from time to time.  But they were not central to the plot, nor to our enjoyment of the book, so as readers they were easily forgotten or missed entirely.  It was not her meticulous plotting.  While engaging, the plots were almost entirely self-contained from book to book, with only a handful of threads continuing across the entire series.  But… we’re getting closer.

And that’s when it hit me. The characters.  The relationships.  This became clear to me, especially, while reading the last book of the series.  All throughout the series we’d been introduced to a wide array of characters with interesting backstories and, more importantly, a complex web of relationships between them.  And, as the stories progress, we see the consequences of the interactions of the characters – both those that take place within the timeline of  the books and those that took place in the past – play out in the climaxes of each book.  What the villains do – whether Severus Snape or Draco Malfoy or even Lord Voldemort – is influenced by their pasts and the relationships they had with the people around them.  And the same is true of the heroes. 

As I realized this, I knew I was onto a profound discovery.  We human beings: we’re social creatures, even the most introverted of us.  We crave human interaction.  We crave relationships.  It’s woven into the fiber of our beings.  And stories?  Stories are about people.  People who have relationships.  The more interesting and dynamic those relationships, the more interesting and compelling the story.

A quick survey of my fantasy favorites confirmed my budding theory.  The Lord of the Rings?  You’ve got the powerful friendship between Sam and Frodo.  Boromir’s betrayal, fueled in part by his (offscreen) relationship with his father, and strained relationship between Boromir’s brother, Faramir, and their father.  You have the growing friendship of Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, and the (mostly offscreen) love between Aragorn and Arwen and the attendant angst related to it.  You have the friendship of Pippin and Merry.  And so on.  Whilst writ large, at mythic scope, the story is nonetheless fraught with relationship complexities. 

Or the Prydain books of my youth?  Here, you have the conflict in Taran between who he was – a question of his relationship with his unknown parents and with his mentor, Dallben – and who he has become, in light of his new relationships with the princess Eilonwy, the bard Flewddur Fflam, the creature Gurgi, the dwarf Doli and the prince Gwydion.  Or how about “The Wheel of Time”?  There are so many characters and complex relationships that it becomes rather easy to lose track, and you need a half-dozen online encyclopedias to keep track.  (If anything, “The Wheel of Time” sometimes seems to suffer from relationship overload.)

Yes, my friends, I did and do believe that I discovered the secret of greatness in writing.  Which is not to say I’ve discovered a magic formula for best-sellerdom.  What I have found is the secret ingredient.  There are a lot of ingredients that will make the stew of a great novel a savory and steamy affair.  You need an interesting plot, and an immersive world.  You need attention to detail, and an eye for the setting details that bring your story to life.  You need clean prose and a style with wide appeal.  You need some new idea or some new take on the conventions of your genre.  But if you fail to deliver a perfect tale in any of those regards, you may, I believe, still have a perfectly fine and publishable book.  But what you cannot do without, I have come to believe, is a caste of interesting characters caught in a web of relationships.  It is these relationships that will drive your story.  Without these, your story will ultimately be forgettable.

At least, that’s what I’ve come to believe.

Happy writing.

The Character’s the Thing

I’m still working on the character studies to help me in rewriting this tale.  How I’ve approached this is to take each character and write a short paragraph (about 250 to 300 words each) written from the point of view of the character’s subconscious mind (so that the paragraph is written in a way that it’s voice is aware of motivations that the character himself may not be) that reveals the salient events that came before the start of the story that will influence what the character does during the story.  Were this a novella, or a full-fledged novel, I would likely need a more robust character study – and one that was evolving as the story progressed, so that I could keep track of how the character changes over the course of the story.

Because this story is a contemporary tale, I’ve also been doing a bit of research to try to give the setting a little more verisimilitude.  For instance, if I’m writing that the main character got an education in a certain field, the next question I had to ask myself is “where did he go to school?”  Was it one of the top schools in his field?  What are the top schools in his field?  Little bits like that, I believe, if layered in with a certain tact and craft can make the story come alive all the more for the reader.   At this point, then, I have two options: make up a school, or research real-world institutions that may have a reputation in this field.  The latter will more likely produce results that ring true to the reader.  The former, to my way of thinking, will be more valuable at points where the story intentionally diverges from our contemporary reality.

Beyond that, I’ve already figured out a new opening line that more clearly lays out the tone of the story and sets the hook.  I’m also playing the opening scene in my mind, with new characters and a better explanation of the opening impetus that’s driving the plot.  But I haven’t written any of this down, yet, because I want to make sure the scene I have in mind is in line with the characters I intend to populate it with.

So, the work progresses, albeit slowly.  I expect the holidays may put a minor damper in progress, simply because I’ll be spending more of my free time enjoying the company of my wife and family and less of it on writing.

For you and yours: happy writing, and happy holidays.