lizvogel

I am having a problem. I have this story idea. It's a good idea, I like it, but I absolutely cannot get it moving. And the reason I can't get it moving seems to be that the characters are effectively non-existent, just plot roles without personalities. This never happens to me. Characters wander into my head and set up housekeeping at the slightest provocation; in fact, I can't keep the little buggers out. It's plot I normally struggle with. Except this time.

In other circumstances I would figure this story just isn't ready yet, and shove it into the back-brain and let it percolate for a while. But the deadline for the anthology I want to send it to is in five days, so letting it stew in its own time isn't a viable option.

Neither is smacking my head against a wall until it splits open and the necessary story components fall out, but I'm considering it.

I swear, driving around while listening to a play-list is second only to the shower for idea generation.

( Spoilerific musings on unpublished novel )

I'm really rather proud of myself for (a) figuring out what the hold-up was, (b) applying methods that have worked before, and (c) getting enough of a solution to be going on with in a day, rather than weeks or months. I know better than to tempt Murphy by saying I'm getting this writing thing figured out (ha!), but it is nice to demonstrate learning from experience once in a while.

I haven't been able to write a word for... I don't know how long. Too long. Even the easy thing (Green Ring) won't move forward. (I suspect Green Ring may be at about the 1/3 point, because it's that kind of stuck. But nothing else wants to move, either.) It seems to be a focus issue; I can sit and stare at the screen, but the work just slithers out from under my attention like a wet bar of soap.

The only thing that I've gotten words on at all lately (usually when I'm trying to sleep and am pinned under a cat and can't reach a pen anyway) is something that's about fifth down the to-write list, and I've got more than enough on the front burners already. But it was the only words I've gotten lately, so yesterday I went ahead and started The Kitten Case.

It's fighting me, too, in patchy and absurd ways. (Really? Afternoon or morning? You're going to hang up for half an hour over that?) I had to skip past the opening scene to when developments start happening, and will have to go back and fill in character-establishing later -- perhaps much later. But words did happen, and I even like some of them.

I'm not as happy as I would normally be about producing really quite a decent chunk of words, because I'm afraid this too is going to go thus far and stop dead on me. I'm trying to cash in on some of the NaNo-productivity from a few years ago; I'm working on the "work" laptop, and trying to treat it as work: get up, sit down at desk, produce. Wash rinse repeat. And cobbling together something like the NaNo progress chart that I liked so much. We'll see if it works.

'Cause something has to.

I'm still having trouble getting into the main character's head. Attempts at self-immersion are leaving me cold, and my brain seems to have an infinite resource of distractions to dangle before me. And I still don't wanna; all the personal stuff aside, all that emotional intensity just sounds exhausting.

The housemate suggests it's due to stress, and she may be right. In addition to all the usual (and some of it more so than usual), there's a couple of sizable house projects that need to be done this summer (or at least before winter, and fall is such an uncertain thing), and we're fast running out of summer.


The other problem is that this novel seems to be insisting on being written piecemeal. I've always jotted bits down in advance of where I'm working, though I try to keep it to a minimum; for this one, that's almost all I'm doing, and when I do manage to write a longer passage in order, I'm often not entirely happy with it.

This is a frustrating way to write: I'll push out a couple hundred words, then shut down the writing laptop and go do something else -- only to have the perfect phrase for that concept, or the right way to connect those three bits and in what order, pop into my head insistently. (I'm going through a lot of post-it notes.) And while I have jigsawed together scenes before, and they've worked well and readers couldn't see the seams, I don't fancy writing an entire novel that way.


And then there's the worldbuilding. I'm normally not much for in-advance worldbuilding -- what I need to know will come to me when I need it, and there's no sense fussing about with it before that -- but in this case, I've got worldbuilding coming out my ears. And every time I try to focus on the necessary character stuff, I get more of it -- Mars has got political backstory that says all kinds of things about the culture on Earth at that point, and political, social, and aesthetic characteristics keep turning up in nearly every paragraph. I honestly can't tell if I'm offering the reader interesting tidbits about a complex new world or info-dumping it to death.


I am tempted, deeply tempted, to jump ahead to one of the key scenes that I've got clear in my head, which feels like it's at least in chapter 4 and possibly chapter 8 or later -- which could mean anything, as I've never been good at predicting how long it'll take to get to something in a book. (And it could be that what this story really needs is to have the later thing shoved forward, and figure out more stuff to put in after; it wouldn't be the first time.) And just start writing from there, forwards and backwards as need be. This is not a thing I do; I'll jot bits of a future scene as they come to me, yes, but I've learned the hard way not to commit to them, lest the scene no longer fits when I write up to it. Not to mention the carrot effect. Better by far to write as close to chronologically as I can. And yet, that scene is the one I'm feeling; I can hear the character voices, feel the setting, all that stuff that says this scene is Right. It even has its own specific theme song. (Though the soundtrack is the one thing about the whole novel that's going easily, so what does that prove?)

And quite frankly, if I sit down to write that scene and even that runs aground, I'm going to be seriously tempted to bin the whole novel. Which, before anyone suggests it, is not the right answer here.

retro-posted 8-25-14

Haley novel: 2569
Total new words in April: 2569

Yeah, totally blew my quota. There are excuses; Science Festival at the local university ate several evenings and an entire weekend, and of course there were taxes. But mostly it was because Chapter 14 kept kicking my ass. And 15 is being even more obstreperous.

I am an intuitive writer, and story comes to me as words, not as pictures or movie images or, ghod forbid, an intellectual decision to write something that works like [this]. Ideally, it comes as the first words, following naturally from the scene before. Sometimes it's a chunk from the middle of a scene, a sentence fragment or even a paragraph, but it generally comes attached to enough stuff in my head that I know what the surrounding words will be like. And this works great, about 95% of the time.

The end of this book is being the other 5%. I know what kind of scenes I need, to wrap up the various sub-plots, but for most of it I have NO WORDS. And the words I do have aren't coming with the necessary context attached to them, and what context they do have is... going to take some juggling to make it fit on a purely practical level in-story. So I'm having to sort out on a purely intellectual level what [this] scene will be, and what order it will come in, and what sort of emotional weight it will have, and how much screen time it merits... and that is not how I normally work! So it is coming slowly, and hard.

Having consciously bashed out the approximate shape of the end of the book, I did finally start getting some words yesterday, lines and even one or two paragraphs spread scattershot through the last half-dozen scenes. It's a very jigsaw-puzzle way of working, and it hazards things not fitting once I finally write up to them, but it seems to be what I've got to work with this time. So work I shall.


The query goal was to go through the AAR database, and that... didn't happen. It's still a good idea, and I still intend to do it, but it may have to wait for a little while.



May's goal: finish the book.

What is it with this novel, that every time I say it's finally going decently, it stalls again? I am well and truly stalled now. Though I did manage a tricky bit of revision, small in terms of wordcount but significant in terms of plot. Yes, people have cell phones. If you want them to not have cell phones -- and there is a sound in-story reason for this, as well as the author-convenience reason -- you have to do something to take their cell phones away.

Now I just need to finish the bloody thing. About another chapter and a half should do it, which I could do in a week if the words would just come. Why won't the words come?!?

Haven't been posting much here lately, which generally means the writing's been going either really well, or really poorly. Yeah, I wish.

So Wendig had a post yesterday on The Varied Emotional Stages of Writing A Book, and as usual with such lists, half of it doesn't apply to me at all. But of the things which do apply, several are stuck on with industrial-grade adhesive, so much so that I'm going to quote the most applicable (and the shortest, which is only appropriate) in its entirety:

12. I Wrote Four Words Today (“The Trickled Pee”)

Every word is like extracting a rotten tooth with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers. It is a day of great effort that yields nearly no result. A rich, full fruit tree with one fucking apple dangling.

That was yesterday. I had the whole afternoon and evening, and a super mocha... and I got something like 108 words. All day, for about 108 words.

This is the bottom of the trend so far this month, but the high points weren't all that impressive, either. (Though pleasingly, if I can choke out a mere 250 words two days out of three, that's still on track for quota. Such as it is.) I am stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck, increasingly stuck, and I don't know why. I have things for the characters to do (they're in the midst of a high-speed escape at this very moment), I've wedged in the orphaned bit in the best place for it to be, I know roughly where things are headed next... and it just won't go.

I am now going to go out and shovel expletive-deleted snow, in hopes that doing something physical will give my back-brain the leeway it needs to sort this out.

Total new words in April: 685

(All on the new novel; the novella is more-or-less on hold until I figure out what fscking country it's set in.)

That actually represents a per-day rate that is passable by my standards, if far from brilliant. If I'd written at that rate for more than three days last month, I'd have something to show for it. However, real life, um, well. Let's just say I'm getting really tired of having to dig myself out of pits.