lizvogel

Apocollapse has been badly stalled for a while now. Partly that's because middles are like that; I usually hit a point of being bored to death with my own story right around this point, and it's not a function of quality, just of being in the middle-to-two-thirds. Partly that's because I needed some vital research, which involved wandering around a truck stop convenience store last Sunday taking notes until the manager came over to make sure I wasn't a stray, unattended vendor. ;-) Partly I've got a couple chunks of just-get-words-down that are in the way and will have to go. :-( But part of it is something else, and yes, an old Pat Wrede post was the key to what:

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.
[...]
Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Right now, my characters have come to a resting point. They've achieved food and water; neither is a permanent solution, but it's long-term enough that they can catch their breath and start thinking beyond the next five minutes. They've established a functional means of working together. There's another major threat coming soon, but they don't know about it yet, and there's some day-to-day life stuff (apocalypse-style) that has to happen before it puts in an appearance (and that will actually trigger it, so I can't skip it). Basically, there's an interlude of wax-on-wax-off-paint-fence where the characters aren't making visible progress. It's brief, and it shouldn't be boring to read because I'll gloss over most of it and dress up what remains, but it's boring as hell to write.

Oddly enough, I was thinking recently about season 6 of Lucifer, which we're halfway through watching, and ( Spoiler )

I can't skip the not-getting-somewhere part, but now that I know that's what it is, it feels like I can brush through it and get on to the next development. Which is what I was trying to do anyway, but knowing why it's boring the snot out of me makes it easier to deal with.

I was deeply struck by this passage from Jo Walton's Or What You Will:

( cut for possible very minor spoilers )

This is as close as anything I have ever seen to describing the way I do characters. The way I get characters, rather, because "do" implies that I'm taking some deliberate action to construct them, when in reality I simply put down a name or a viewpoint or a line of dialogue on the page, and the person who embodies them blossoms forth like crystals in a solution, forming around that tiny seed, that speck that didn't mean anything until it was written, and now means everything.

This is why classes and articles and such on how to write this-or-that-kind-of characters bounce off me so very hard. I have tried to build characters to fit a story concept, done the "what kind of person would fill this role in this story" approach, but they are flat and lifeless things, not people, certainly not anyone interesting or compelling enough to get me to sit down and spend time with them. But give me a name, give me a statement or an action or an observation, and suddenly there is someone there, someone real and whole and alive. I might not know their favorite color or how they take their coffee right off the bat, but I know them, and if the time comes when I need to know the color or the coffee, it'll be there then.

My housemate tells me it's weird and a little alarming how she can give me just a name and I can instantly give her a character. She once gave me "Oswald". I don't know his plot or his scenario, but he's the director or assistant director of operations for a small British spy agency, and he keeps a pet goldfish because goldfish have a memory only three minutes long, so it's the perfect pet in his line of work and that amuses him, in his reserved and understated way. This was years ago, and he's still here. Ready to go if I ever get a story for him, but in the meantime, feeding his goldfish and knowing the contents of every file on his desk as if they were open before his eyes.

I really should post more about Narrativity here. It was excellent again this year, as always. Some behind-the-scenes drama made it far more stressful and exhausting for me that it needed to be, but that got resolved pretty smoothly once I could address it in person, and it didn't spill over into anyone's enjoyment of the con. (And please ghod, we should be done with that particular flavor of drama from now on. A group of people all pulling together in the same direction is a beautiful thing.) I'm always too tired once I get home to do more than scrawl a few brief lines, if that, and by the time I recover it's been long enough that the con-impetus is past. But I'll see what I can do here:

As usual, the best part was the people, both old friends and new. One of the new folks was a long-time friend of the con who was finally able to attend, and turned out to be even awesomer in person than he was in email; another was a serendipitous find in the "smoking lounge" (aka the hotel parking lot) who turned out to be very much One Of Us and was promptly sucked into the rest of the con. And many other nifty new faces who I'm hoping to see next year, along with the standard crowd.

Probably my favorite moment was hanging out in the hotel lobby... some evening... (I was a bear of even less brain than usual this year)... with S and L and K (one of the nifty newbies) discussing my "weird clown story", which turns out to not have at all the problem I thought it did, but some other problem entirely that was expertly mimicking the first kind, and branching off into visual vs. non-visual readers and kinetic vs. visual understanding of one's location in space, and all kinds of brains-are-neat-and-also-weird stuff. This, my friends, is what Narrativity is for.

I also tested a theory. I have talked many times, here and elsewhere, about needing to learn how to Do Plot. (This is different than understanding plotting in general; I chose those words deliberately.) Well, one of our panels was "Help Steve Write A Book", which sounded an awful lot like what I'm talking about when I talk about plot. And... it wasn't, quite, because he comes at a book, or at least this book, in a very different way than I do, but the process was similar enough in principle that I could apply it to my own struggles. And yes, that. That is what I'm looking for: something that functions the same way a big room full of people all focused on helping figure out how to make this particular story go the way the author wants it to does.

IOW, I need a writers group. Which sucks, because I've been trying to find/build one of those for long enough that I've pretty much given up on ever getting what I need, but it's good to identify, at least.

Writers need other writers. The stereotype of the hermit writer in their attic churning out pages may exist in a few, isolated cases, but for most writers, some like-minded folks to bounce ideas off of is somewhere between incredibly helpful and vitally necessary.

And one of the things Narrativity does is help people make those connections. That's pretty fabulous.

So apparently I'm in one of those phases where I have to leave the house to get any writing done. This is inconvenient, not least because my favorite writing venue is still not back to their pre-Covid hours. However, having been hauled out by the housemate on Sunday and sat down in the bookstore cafe, I turned out a solid page on the new Dix story. And I went back yesterday, and did it again.

There was also a nice hot shower before we went out, the value of which should never be underestimated.

(I've been smashing my head against the wall on this one for a month or more now, and it just would not move. Changing location for myself somehow magically made it possible to throw out the original setting (or rather, set it aside for a more suitable occasion) and start fresh, and all the unknowns that were insurmountable obstacles are suddenly minor look-that-up-later brackets. There is no logical reason for this, but it works.)

This is also an expensive way to write, because if I'm sitting there seeing all the yummy food other people are eating, I'm going to end up buying more than just a coffee. If the thing sells for pro rates I'm not quite going to end up having spent more to produce it than I net, but it's not far off. ;-P

As mentioned previously, the 2500-words-a-week thing has been working better in theory than in practice. That doesn't mean writing hasn't been happening, however!

January:

4685 = Green Ring
5185 = original short fiction (mostly "Venturesome Sheep Day")

Total new words in January: 9870

That ain't bad! Especially when you consider I'm coming out of a two-year slump with very little writing in it at all. If that's all the weekly-quota thing achieves, I'd still say it's an absolute win.

Speaking of which:

Week 1: 4097
Week 2: 1074
Week 3: 1634
Week 4: 1443
Week 5: 1622
Week 6: 1710
Week 7:   989 (Week 7 ends today, but I'm unlikely to get more words in before midnight.)

The average on days that I've written has been pretty decent, often at least within shouting distance of that magical 833 and occasionally well above it. The primary failure point is that I'm frequently only managing one or two writing days in a week. Now granted, I'm pulling extra hours at work and life has been insane lately, but I need to fit writing in more often. Relatedly, I need to speed up my "booting up" process so that a good writing session doesn't have to be a most-of-the-day affair.

The last time I sat down at the keyboard, I put the Mission Impossible theme on repeat. That definitely served to get me going faster sooner! (It's wildly not the appropriate music for the story in question, but it was good for that one scene.)

So that's the state of the writer thus far this year. Now I have to go get ready for my writers group, which paradoxically is one of the reasons I'm not writing today.

A comment elsewhere by Deep Lurker nailed something so fundamental that I don't think I'd ever fully realized it before, when brainstorming story ideas and rejecting what seem like perfectly reasonable suggestions:

When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the problem, but I don’t want it to be the problem itself, and I really don’t want “Something goes wrong with Cool Idea” to be the problem. Instead, I need something else adjacent to be the problem.

This isn't every story idea I get... but it's a lot of them.

For example, I have this idea for a novel about a war criminal who joins an FTL colonization ship in order to make a fresh start. That's an intriguing character and a good scenario, but it's not a plot. And the thing is, I don't want it to be the plot; doubtless his past will come out at some point, and it's certainly going to influence some events, but whatever the plot is (and I have no idea, yet), it's not about his past. It's about something else entirely; at most, something "adjacent".

I'm still processing how to incorporate this into my ongoing quest for plot discussion, but I wanted to get the concept down for reference.

I had two stated goals for this NaNoWriMo when I started: (1) Teach myself to do this level of output while still working the day job, carrying on with house projects in progress, etc. -- in short, without putting the entire rest of life on hold. (2) Remind myself that writing can be fun.

How'd I do? Okay.



Doing NaNo around working for a living, especially the day job, was as annoying as I expected it to be.

Interestingly, statistically, work days weren't significantly worse for word-count than non-work days. They were more frustrating, because either I was inspired and had to go help people find hardware instead of writing, or I was tired from work and had to slog out words anyway, but apparently I generally managed either way. My very best days weren't work days, but some work days were quite good (even some over 2K), and while some really low days were work days, others weren't.


I had this note for a journal post hand-written in the pocket notebook. I think it's referring to the 28th, based on details in it and the hand-written novel text it was next to, but I can't be sure enough to back-date it as its own post:

Yesterday was a work day. The writing session before work was good, and the one immediately after was pretty good, but the truth is I come home from the day job with a proto-headache more often than not, and writing through a headache is just not a recipe for my best productivity. By the time I got to the third session of the day, I was tired and cranky about being awake and just not feeling it.

If I've got the day right, the statistics do not entirely bear this out: Writing speed per session was 597 wph, 434 wph, and 367 wph respectively. So clearly return on investment was decreasing; on the other hand, even 367 wph is pretty good by my standards. On the third hand, time-on-task was getting longer as words-done was getting smaller, which is never a good sign.



As for fun, the early days were a slog starting at about day 2, but there were some high points. And toward the end, when I finally seemed to get my mojo going, I was quite enjoying myself. I had a lot of fun writing the banter with Schlee, and Kearsley being brilliant at the Customs desk was an absolute delight. So despite spending half the month behind and quite a lot of it bulling through by sheer force of refusing to fail, I did meet this goal in the end. And I'm quite looking forward to writing the rest.



Other things I learned, and miscellaneous bits worthy of note:


Mostly I've learned: Do not go into something like this already exhausted and burned out. Which, duh, and I already knew that, but I didn't appreciate just how bad an idea it was going to be.


Next time, get shinier stars. These are the ones I decided weren't flashy enough last time, and indeed, they aren't proving to be the incentive that the more indulgent, holographic ones I ended up using last time were.


Something to remember for next time: For me, NaNo is primarily an exercise in second wind. I can sit down and write 350-500 words in a session, and that's fine. And I can stop when I'm tired, and under normal circumstances that's okay. But I should never lose sight of the fact that I can, if I push through that tired, usually get another good batch of words done. I don't have to do it that way all the time, but perhaps I should do it once in a while, just to remind myself that I can.


Accomplishing something made for a much more effective break than playing computer games or screwing around on the internet. Doubly so if the accomplishing involved physical activity (such as shoveling snow). But the accomplishing seemed to be the biggest key, rather than the activity.


Just for laughs, I did try one "Cauldron of Doom" word sprint at the last write-in I went to (after I'd hit 50,000). I went into it fully expecting not to hit the number, and I didn't, though I did come closer than I thought I would (target was 425, I did 368). However, I could tell even as I was doing it that the quality wasn't there. One paragraph in particular is repetitive, drivelling... well, drivel. I might be able to get away with it in that particular instance as a bit of word play, but that's for a paragraph. A whole book of that would be unsupportable; never mind editing, I'd have to burn it and start over.


Catching up involved a lot of hard work and stubborn refusal to fail. It also involved the day job finally getting my hours back down to where they should be. I don't know how I would have done it without that extra day.


Blasting selected music really loudly on the good headphones got me going a number of times when nothing else would. Mind you, there were also times I needed silence to work at all.



Statistical stuff:

For days when I wrote at least quota (1667+), average time-on-task was 4.23 hours.
For days when I wrote at least goal (2000+), average time-on-task was 4.46 hours.

For the days when I didn't make quota, the average was 2.39 hours, but it doesn't correlate beyond that; for example, on the 15th I wrote 273 words in 2.75 hours, but the next day I wrote nearly four times as much (1003 words) in almost the same amount of time (3 hours).

The 15th was the worst day I wrote at all; the second-worst day, it took me 2.5 hours to produce 309 words, which is a sure sign it's time to give it up as a bad job if anything is. Some days, it just ain't happening, and more time doesn't change that.

Words-per-hour doesn't really tell me anything useful; many of the really stellar speeds are for very short bursts (20 minutes or so). Oddly enough, so is the worst wph. The other really dismal speeds correlate to very low-output days, which just reinforces that sitting there staring at the screen when words ain't happening is not only unproductive, but a waste of time that could be spent recharging.



I'll do more Nanalysis if I think of anything. Oh, and one more thing I learned; much of the above is notes I took during the month. I've expanded on several of them, but getting the gist down as I realize things makes for a much better process overview.

As I threatened mentioned a while ago, I went back and checked if I'd written anything useful about my process while finishing the Haley novel, because I'm feeling a similar sort of stuck on FFG.

I don't generally record much detail of that sort (which is something I should probably work on, so I don't have to keep re-inventing the clue stick). But I did find three posts that seemed to have something to tell me.

Those posts are probably worth re-reading in their entirety, though my habit of vagueing things up to avoid spoilers makes them a bit opaque even for me in places. However, for quick reference, here's the distilled highlights:


Write a troublesome scene from another character's point of view. I did this for Highway of Mirrors, and I did the thought-experiment equivalent for Haley. And it worked both times. So what is the 2C thinking right now? I thought I didn't have a feel for her PoV -- she's pretty much a cipher to the MC and has been all along -- but then I thought about her being annoyed with the MC. That's definitely my entry point. ;-)

Don't let the desire for a clear plan get in the way of getting something written. Yes, sailing ahead without thinking about where I'm going has gotten me in trouble more than once on this book. And I am at the point, approaching the end, where I probably need to keep the target in mind. But winging it and writing whatever sounds good at the time is still the core of my process, and if trying to brainstorm the next plot point or scene or whatever is brick-walling me, maybe I just need to put fingers on keyboard and give my back-brain a chance to give me something I can use.

Play to my strengths. What am I good at? Setting and character, especially angsty character-abuse. What am I currently beating my head against? A plot problem. Uh, clue-stick, anyone? And didn't I just sort out a stuck bit by thinking about not what they find out but where they find the person who knows it?

So I should probably be waxing eloquent about the spaceport (which I glossed on the way in, but that made sense for the MC at the time). I think I've fired most of my ammo as far as character angst goes, though I shouldn't rule it out if another opportunity arises. Setting doesn't just warm up my fingers, it also primes the pump for the word-generator in my brain. And if they're effin' bored with carved rock and duraplas, well, that can be useful, too.

This is an example of why plot as it's usually discussed doesn't make sense to me.

( Spoilers for as-yet-unfinished and unpublished novel... )


And this is part of why plot-oriented craft discussions don't work for me. They're all about those bullet points, as though that's what's driving the story. But for me, they're almost irrelevant at this stage, except for how they enable other things.

The other reason plot discussions don't work for me, of course, is that they never go into how to make those bullet points happen. They seem to think that once you have those bullet-points, it will be obvious how to get from one to another, but it never, ever is for me. There's always at least one step into a murky well of impenetrable darkness, which may conceal solid ground from which to step back out or may conceal a hole of bottomless depth and width that cannot be spanned without tools and materials and a significant investment in infrastructure. And that's the hard bit, for me.

I have come up with a "what the hell's going on" for the Mars novel that is just evil, evil, eeeevil. I probably won't use it -- it's not quite the kind of story I thought I was writing, and it's got its own "what's going on" that would need to be solved -- but it is so far the only idea I've come up with that connects all the dots.

There are things I want to do with this novel that I can't do if I do that (probably... hmm.), but it does put a happy evil writer grin on my face. My main character is staring at me in appalled disbelief.