Day 16 - 1488 Words - Half of them Good

Why is it that people gravitate to you when you most need to concentrate? What I wrote today sucked, and the more I tried to get a handle on it, the more every being in the vicinity seemed to be drawn to be right next to me doing things designed to distract.

I bulled my way through it, but I didn't actually improve it any. I did get some good stuff, and the next section should be fun, but today's effort ended up a stressful waste. Feh.

(I'll talk about point of view more tomorrow.)

Running Total: 19690 Words.

19690 / 70000 words. 28% done!

In Today's Pages: Rosie makes his entrance. (Although I might cut that bit and just let tomorrow's section be his entrance.)

Day 15 - 1205 Words and Point of View Issues

I'm going to have to take on point of view soon. This is a multiple pov third person story. I like this kind of story, and I've written a few things this way. But this is the first time I've written something where I have scenes that are equally interesting from several points of view. And in some cases, the scenes almost demand to be written from more than one point of view.

What to do? At the moment I'm just picking the point of view that has the most demanding moments in the scene, and occasionally using a slightly overlapping time line. That is, when I switch point of view, I might recap a bit of the scene before - usually in summary and character thought.

I hope to have time to discuss a few techniques I've seen for shifting point of view. Robert Crais has been combining third person and first person in his novels lately. Philip Craig and Robert Tapply have been doing even more interesting things in their jointly written two-narrator novels. And then there is good old omniscient....

Running Total: 18202 Words.

18202 / 70000 words. 26% done!

In Today's Pages: George lets something slip. Karla hears the tune from Charade playing in her head.

Day 14 - 842 Hard Earned Words

I got a late start after a longer day than I expected. (Also it was a migraine day, but not a bad one. Just a blind and stupid day.) But I still feel good about my progress, because this was almost all new material.

Running Total: 16997 Words.

16997 / 70000 words. 24% done!

In Today's Pages: George makes another promise. Karla makes a decision.

Day 13 - 1312 Words And Back in The Saddle Again

I went back and did some editing on the previous section, and then moved forward into the current bit. It was a long session, though, and I'm too tired to write more at the moment.

Running Total: 16155 Words.

16155 / 70000 words. 23% done!

In Today's Pages: George and Karla compare notes, and bandaids.

Back to the Dare Tomorrow

Busy day, good personal stuff, but weird events at work that left me kind of distracted.

Tomorrow I start up on the dare again. I'm continuing on the same track, but I am expanding the final word count to 70,000, and the final date to March 14. That leaves the approximate daily goal at 1200, just like before.

Now, when I'm doing first fresh exploratory writing like I did in the fall, I count all words written. If I write a thousand words on a scene, and then the next day I throw it out and write a thousand new words - both sets count.

However, this dare is a "full draft" dare, so the count that matters is the total number of words in the manuscript. Stuff that gets cut is negative progress. And duplicate scenes don't get to exist. (Not unless they are both going to be there in the final version - something which I will talk about when I get around to talking about point of view variations.)

So, I expect some backwards progress a few times in the coming weeks, as I maneuver the new beginning into place. Still, that does make for a great incentive to move forward and not fuss.

Tired But Still Creative

Too weary to make a lucid post about writing, other than to say a little about serendipity. (Or maybe serendipity is not the right word, but I'm too weary to care....)

A minor incident at work today prompted thoughts about how my characters might react in a similar situation. Being fictional characters, pretty much all of them are going to be more proactive than the real people involved were. Characters have to be proactive, even if they give the appearance of being whimps, they HAVE to act or you have no story.

Without going into the specifics, let's just say it was a classic moment of deciding whether to help someone who may not need or want help. Which could be the inspiration for just about any kind of story, and the idea that came of it could be used for any of my characters depending on how I handle it. With Mick and Casey, it's a great opportunity for Mick to get himself into trouble.

That choice, though, would constrain the idea. The series is narrated by Mick, so it would be from his point of view, so he would be the one who would have to end up in a pickle. (Which is pretty much the essence of the series - Mick gets into trouble, and has to solve his way out of it.)

But as details grew on this idea this afternoon, I knew it was a George idea. And I think the reason is because this is a third person narrative, and so it can be told from the point of view of the "guest character." I knew that this would be a story about that character, someone in desperate trouble, and someone who must go it alone. (Except for Simon Templar and Mary Poppins lurking around in the background.)

That can be a great way to keep series characters fresh and fun - by letting them lurk in the background as mysterious strangers. Even if they are not strangers to the audience.

I have to admit, I really like that kind of story in general. It's all Scarlet Pimpernelly, or Zorro-y. And that may be an option even for Mick and Casey. I like to write shorts and novellas for them too - so who is to say I couldn't have them enter somebody else's story? Especially since they are already prone to be underestimated by others.

So those were the thoughts I had for today. The "redo the first chapter" project is moving slowly along. I will not be done with the new material by the time I start up the dare again on Thursday, but I probably just cut the material I'm going to replace and add it to the overall dare.

I'll be posting the redone goals tomorrow.

Approaching the Approach

I think the exact right approach for the beginning came to me last night, so I'm finally moving forward on my opening again.

Although the scene is static - two people sitting and talking - it is also cinematic, and I find that I need to block it out as though it is a screenplay to really find where it is going, dramatically. Of course, when you have two people, it is often good to think in terms of drama. Not one person with an objective, but two people with conflicting objectives. (That is the essence of drama. You know, conflict.)

The really interesting thing is that I'm not sure of the voice and point of view of this scene. It could end up objective or omniscient, or in either character's ball park. And yet, by taking this approach, I get a very strong feel for the scene, which makes me confident that when I'm done blocking it out, the voice will fall in to place. Actually, I think the voice may already be there.

This whole novel presents interesting problems in point of view. There are some scenes in this that almost demand more than one point of view. And there are more solutions than just going to omniscient. I'm going to have to do a post on this soon.

The Dancing Bear Liberation Front

Bears are not meant to dance. They are meant to lumber, and eat berries and salmon, and sleep and scare people. And when they are forced to dance, they are really bad at it. And yet for centuries people have captured bears and spent years training them to lurch around on two feet. It's hard work for the trainer and it's harder work for the bear, and the trainer does it just so people will say "Wow, look! A dancing bear. I've never seen that before!"

The entertainment here is not to watch brilliant choreography, but to marvel at the fact that the bear can dance at all.

We, as writers, capture virtual bears and force them to dance all the time. We get an idea, and it sounds cool, and we work and work and work, and actually make it do what it's supposed to. Maybe it doesn't quite fit, but with a little more work, we actually do make it fit into the flow of the story.... And it works.

But it doesn't work well.

But it was so difficult and tricky, that when the time comes to ruthlessly edit the story, we are too proud of having made the bear dance at all to see that it's no Fred Astaire.

I suspect that this is what some people really mean by "kill your darlings." But they're not always all that darling. The truth is you may or may not love your dancing bears. You may just have committed yourself to it with so much work that you don't see how you can replace it.

The goal is to be most proud of the actual best things in your story. The goal is to learn which things these are, so that you can make the ballerinas into your prima donnas (your darlings) and chase the bears back into the woods.

Back to the Drawing Board

I have done a lot of good work on this opening, but it is all wrong. And must be thrown out. (Well, not really thrown out, so much as stuck into the compost bin.)

My original concept has the right flow for the story. I broke up that flow for good reasons - mainly trying to find the most attractive first page - but in the end the whole thing had become a dancing bear. The story lurches, rather than glides.

Of course, the original concept needs work too. It needs to be funnier, and perhaps, if it's possible so early in the story, more poignant. Which means that there should be more conflict in the opening scene.

Nurture Your Darlings

"Kill Your Darlings" is, imho, the single most misleading, and dangerous, bit of advice that everyone always gives to a writer. It's not actually synonymous with "Edit Yourself Ruthlessly", which can be a good piece of advice, but people treat it as if it's exactly the same. It's actually just a short cut, and like all short cuts, it has a bad side. A very bad side.

First, what does "Kill Your Darlings" mean? There are different versions, but mainly it's that any bit of prose that you are overly attached to, or anything that stands out as better the rest, is probably hurting the rest of the story. As I said, it's a short cut. It is probably true of many of those bits, but not always true.

So what happens is this: the advice gets repeated among young writers as, "cut everything you really like." And then, as they repeat it and confirm it with one another, soon it's not a short cut, it's a rule. And it's good for you, so you've got to do it.  Right?

And, in terms of playing the odds, it's an effective rule. If you mindlessly cut out all the little things that you are most attached to in a story, you can turn an awkward or even downright bad story into a servicable mediocre story.

But you can never turn mediocre into great by killing your darlings. Great only comes from the stuff you love. Period.

Now, you may say, "But there are great writers who use that rule!" That's because they actually are just using that phrase to describe something else - something that isn't a short cut.

See great writers have pretty much come to terms with their own psychology. They know what's false and what's true in their own writing. They're actually doing what I call kicking out the dancing bears. (Which is what I'll talk about tomorrow.) Their real darlings have already been nurtured into greatness by the time they get to that point.

I was lucky, since the person who taught me about a "kill your darlings" type rule was Kate Wilhelm. On the first day of her weeks at Clarion, she said "If you have something in your story that is noticeably better than the rest, you have two choices. You can cut it out, or you can raise the rest of the story to that level."

In other words, you can settle ... or you can go for the gold.

This is really important because most of us have a sensitive spot around something that really matters to us. Whether it's childhood teasing or something more subtle, we learn to hide the things we like most. It's so easy for the "kill your darlings" to tap into this almost unconscious feeling, and give writers permission to play it safe.

The truth is, if something embarrasses you or excites you, that a clue that you should go after it! You may have to edit it ruthlessly, you may have to watch out for things that detract from the story. And until you are good at it, you will probably fail. But if you're going to write something really worth the effort, you've got to go after those darlings and find out if maybe they are the actual heart of the story.

Which is why, tomorrow, I will go through the existing versions of the beginning of this novel and finding the best parts, and cutting out all the rest.

See you in the funny papers.

Incomprehensible Characters

One of the two main characters of the novel I'm working on is a movie buff. Not just any kind of movie buff - she's a fangirl. She's a movie geek. Part of the problem with geeks is that they talk about things that nobody knows what the heck they mean. It doesn't matter if it's Chaos Theory, who Ruth Hussey was.

Ruth Hussey, for those who don't know, is the actress who played the sassy and long suffering photographer who was patiently in love with Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, among other things. She had that wonderful dry delivery, kind of like Eve Arden....

Which raises the question; does the reader even know who Eve Arden was?

And does it matter?

It depends. Geeks can be funny and even charming, and when they explain something incomprehensible by comparing it to something even more incomprehensible, it reveals a lot of their obsessions and their character.

But geeks are also full of pitfalls. To write a geek, you have to know as much as they do. And if you know what all that means, you can't always tell how incomprehensible you are being. You can't tell if you're being tiresome. You may not know if you are over or under explaining. (And your audience is likely to have differing levels of knowledge of the trivia involved.)

To complicate this further, you have the fact that mysterious statements are kind of fun in a mystery. Whether it's Sherlock Holmes mentioning the dog in "Silver Blaze"....

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

...Or when Miss Marple looks down at the murdered body of a young girl, and says something about how it reminds her of a frog jumping out. She explains much later that where the body was left reminded her of a childish prank, and that it was not perhaps as relevant to the murder as one might think. (Miss Marple is kind of a geek of village life - and thus human psychology.)

Miss Marple, of course, comes across as a ditz, but for those in the know (the readers) the fact that the other characters dismiss what she says as nonsense just raises the anticipation. In some ways it is more attractive than Holmes, because Miss Marple isn't trying to mystify. She's just thinking aloud.

Karla is geekier than Miss Marple. I think of her as more like Pamela North (of the Mr. and Mrs. North books by Frances and Richard Lockridge) who is definitely a ditz, but a smart one who thinks much much faster than she talks, and assumes that those listening are as smart as she is. (Ironically leaving people believing she is dumb.) Nearly everything she says therefore, comes out backwards. Which could get tiring in a full protagonist, but it's fine in the comic relief.

So Karla will need to fall somewhere short of Pam North. But, I think that's for later drafts.

In the meantime, since I've been posting silly Animaniacs videos from YouTube, here is one with Yakko being a geek as he sings a song naming all the Nations of the World.

Other Funny Videos

I couldn't decide on which Slappy Squirrel videos to link in the last post. I decided to do the one that was more typical of Slappy, but this one is my favorite. The Little Old Slappy From Pasadena.

Oh, and just to pile on the NBC fiasco.... I don't know how many of you may have heard of Apple Daily, a Taiwanese video company that makes wild 3-D recreations of tabloid stories. (They were made famous by their awkward and really BAD renditions of the Tiger Woods scandal.)

Well, they did a recreation of the NBC/Leno/Conan debacle, and it is awkwardly brilliant. The version narrated in Chinese is actually funnier than the one in English, so I'm including both links

Showdown at NBC In Chinese

Showdown at NBC In English

The Interim - Thoughts About Splosions

On the subject of making things more fun, more tense, more exciting:

I was browsing in the mystery section today, and found a series I had not known about before. (Jeffrey Cohen's Double-Feature Mystery series.) It's light comic mystery, and promises to be just what I want. One of the things that made me decide to buy the first book in the series was the back cover copy on one of the other books. The hero owns a small, struggling movie theater, and among the daily troubles it listed for him were things like a bomb in row five.

To quote Slappy Squirrel "Now, THAT'S comedy!"

I paused only to hunt down which title was the first in the series and immediately bought it. A bomb - even just a bomb scare - definitely qualifies as an intense and interesting complication.

Usually.

I say "usually" becuase I am reminded of another series that I generally like, but not as much as I used to - the "Cat Who" books by Lillian Jackson Braun. The more bombs and buildings burning down that she threw into the series, the less interesting I found it. Why?

I think there are two reasons, and they contradict each other (at least on the surface).

The first reason is what a friend of mine calls "The Casablanca Test." This comes from the line about how the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. When you have something like a bomb or a major fire or a man with a gun, it's more important than anything else that might be happening. If the world is falling apart, your silly broken heart is not important, no matter how much it hurts.

This idea would seem to mean that comedies can't have bombs, but really it's why a bomb works better in a high comedy than a light cozy. Not that it can't work in a light cozy, but you can't be cozy with a bomb around. That bomb has to put the characters in a predicament. It's too important, too urgent, to be used as a mere clue or plot twist. And to me, that's what all these disasters were in the Cat Who books - just events.

So that's something to think about when you want to take your story to a higher level, or turn up the stakes. You won't achieve that by just inserting a more intense event. It has to create a more intense conflict. It has to be something that successfully competes with the existing problems and conflicts of your character.

In my opinion, a whimpy pretend bomb that scares the heck out of your main character and makes it impossible for her to do what she intended is much more effective than an explosion that levels a building but only inspires her to action. Whether it's tragic or comic, it has to put your character in some kind of predicament.

In the meantime, I put in a couple of hours on both chapter 1 and the rethinking. I forgot to mention: the dare countdown will begin again a week from now, on next Thursday.

Day 12 - 1224 Words of Reflection on an Emergency Lunchbox

It was hard settling in tonight, but I got to some fun work.

However it is now time for the short hiatus. As of tomorrow, I will be taking a short detour in the dare - suspending the word count and reworking the opening. And depending on time, I will probably also do some plot work - especially work that drives it deeper and makes it more exciting. Can I make the plot twists twistier? Can I make the dangers more dire, the surprises surprisier? And the cool bits cooler?

Running Total: 14843 Words.

14843 / 60000 words. 25% done!

In Today's Pages: Karla uses the wisdom of Hitchcock.

Pushing Things Further

I was just reading the long article in the New York Times Magazine about James Patterson. I am not yet a Patterson fan, because I don't like grueling books. However, I might try some of his other series after reading this....

The reason I'm remarking on this though, is that I do like the attitude that comes across in this article. He is very focused on the reader (as opposed to the critic or the publishing industry) and I am energized by the way he tramples limits. Kinda like a literary Jack Bauer.

While people criticize his books for being shallow, I do think the lesson of Patterson is actually a matter of taking things to another level. Go further, go deeper.

I think a lot of us 'advanced' writers who haven't published a book, or made a breakout yet, suffer from doing the right thing. You can write a story that doesn't make mistakes and does everything it's supposed to, but if that's all you do, you end up with a story that's no more than it's supposed to be.

Now... Patterson said something about abandoning pretty sentences and going all for story. I am a person who writes this way in the first place. (The most common comment I get is "Boy, this moves right along!") But since I don't write 17 books a year, I actually can do both. Because the first couple of drafts may be for story, and maybe a middle draft can be for taking the story to another level. But with each draft, I can also push the voice and language.