lizvogel

So there's this anthology call for which I thought I might write a story. I came up with a plot idea to fit the theme, and then I came up with a better plot idea. And then I wrote about half the story, then paused for research, which is when I discovered the science didn't work at all the way I needed it to. So there was a lot of flailing and more research and wondering if I should just let the story die. Finally I got my idea and reality to play nice with each other, or at least nice enough to be going on with.

Research issues aside, I didn't get quite as into the story as I would've liked, because the anthology has a hard upper limit of 2000 words, so I was trying to write short. So of course it came in at 2362. *facepalm*

Cut nearly 400 words? Not bloody likely, but I figured I'd give it a try, just for the experiment.

The current fashion for "efficient" writing is entirely wrong-headed, IMNSHO. But it's been an interesting exercise trying to edit for shorter ways to say things without entirely losing the rather sprawly, drawly voice of the story. Surprisingly, I was still fairly pleased with it after the first pass (2114 words) and even the second pass (2030 words).

The third pass, however, was a different matter. Apparently there is a point at which the character stops sounding like himself, and trying to cut those last thirty words passed it. It's down to 2003 now, and losing those 27 words hurt. And three more, while it should not be that big an obstacle, is a big obstacle. I'm about to give it another go, and then I'm going to have to think about whether this is still something I'm comfortable submitting.

ETA: Okay, done it! And amazingly, it's not bad. The longer version is better, but I wouldn't be sorry to see this one in print. (And if it doesn't sell, I can mine the various passes for useful phrases and go back to the +400 words version for regular submissions.)

Yesterday was a day off: I had a dentist appointment and assorted errands, and also I was almost two thousand words ahead. :-) Though tempted by the shiny 7-days badge, I decided not to squeeze in a quick fifty words or so just to keep up the writing streak, because days off are good for me. Letting the streak break felt like a proclamation against the write-every-day pushers.

And last night, contemplating the next day's tasks, I was heard to say, "I get to write tomorrow!"

I even managed to sustain some of that enthusiasm through to today. ;-) And yes, I wrote. And yes, it was good; it was even relatively easy. I clocked 1192 words in 2.5 hours, which is a lot fast for me. (I had hoped to pack in a second mini-writing-session, but after a break to feed the cats and a quick research check, I really had to go get ready for the evening's social obligations.) I like what I wrote; it's progressing the way I need it to, my characters surprised me a little but not so much so as to cause problems, and I'm closing in on the end of the chapter, which means I'll soon be able to hand it off to the housemate for alpha-reading. Dare I say it, I had fun.

And that is why I took the day off yesterday. And why I will take a couple more days off during November, as life demands and wordcount permits.

8141 new words and counting.

(Copied from comments elseweb, because I want to be able to find this should it happen again.)

I don't deliberately choose stories to stretch my writing ability; I just write what catches my interest. But sometimes, it seems, stretchy sneaks up on you.

The current WIP is definitely of the snuck-up-on-me kind of stretchy.

Some of it is simply that I'm having to be more analytical than is my wont. For example, I need a bigger cast for the ending to work, so I'm having to deliberately create characters, when normally they just wander into my head fully-formed. I'm trying to balance the demographics, because while I don't care, my MC would. And I'm measuring out their introductions so that I don't end up dumping a whole horde of people in at once Because The Plot Said So, which means I'm watching the pacing/structure a lot more carefully, when usually I'll just do things whenever it feels right.

There's also a lot more threads in play than I anticipated for something as surface-simple as "man survives Apocalypse". I wouldn't go so far as to call them all plot threads, but they're definitely concepts in play throughout the novel. So I have to keep the theology discussions balanced against the practical necessities, and time them so that the one supports or feeds off of the other. I introduced an additional outside threat that I planned to do more with, ended up dropping, and am going to have to weave back in PDQ before it becomes a broken promise to the reader. There's a character with a Secret, who spends the first two-thirds of the book saying things that everybody takes one way, but that the character and I know mean something else entirely. (That part's been fun; cue evil author cackle of glee.) I'm having to do more set-up than I'm used to for the ending, because none of the characters know what's coming so none of them are actively working toward it, but several of them are unknowingly doing things that will contribute to it. Having to hide the plot from all the characters is definitely a new thing for me.

Looking at it like this, none of these things are supremely stretchy for me (except maybe hiding the plot from the characters). But trying to do a whole bunch of moderately-stretchy things at the same time definitely adds up. And here I thought I just had a nice little trying-not-to-die-in-a-devastated-world story. (No, seriously, I thought this one was going to be relatively easy.)

It's definitely taking longer, too. Not so much in time (I'm always slow) but in word count. I'm at 80,000 words right now; my natural length is usually 80-90,000. This sucker's got at least 30K more words to go, maybe more, and I've been saying that for at least the past 10,000 words now. The more I work on it, the farther from the end I get. So the little voice in the back of my brain saying "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" is not helping.

And of course all this is coming to a head at about the two-thirds point, which is where I usually bog down on a novel anyway. I know what happens, I don't care any more, can rocks just fall and everybody dies? This has nothing to do with the quality of the story and everything to do with the writer, but it's hard enough to slog through even when the path forward is relatively, er, straightforward. When I have to keep jumping between multiple paths and keeping them all in sync and this is hard work, dammit, it's awfully easy to decide the yardwork is a higher priority.

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.