writing is such a chaotic sport

Justine Musk (who always has amazingly clever things to say on the topic of wordsmithery) talks about outlining, and why outlines change:

This is what took me way too long (and three published novels) to figure out about plot:

Plot is a process.

…the outline informs the novel but the growing novel also informs the outline.

…What this process requires, however, is a tolerance for ambiguity. For what I described in an earlier blog post as “the muck and murk of writing”: the sense that you’re slogging through a dark swamp with no exit in sight.

We like to have a plan in place, we like to move through an orderly and predictable checklist, but creativity doesn’t sequence so easily. The process works off itself. You show up, you see what you already have, you descend into the muck and the murk, and let the process take you further along.

And she's just absolutely NAILED why outlines have never worked for me. I've been treating it as an either/or approach: writing with an inviolate plan, or without one.

Now, I know writers who outline, and they've always told me they never stick slavishly to said outline, that it evolves even as the story does — which I admit to never quite grasping, probably because my brain runs to extremes.

I'm thoroughly accustomed to a "tolerance for ambiguity" when writing without an outline: wading into a story knowing nothing more than a character's name, sometimes not even that, doesn't distress me in the least. I need to interact with the story and the characters in order for it to evolve, and progress, and grow into a narrative.

I know how to do that when there's no outline in place — but whenever I have attempted an outline, I've then expected it to be my checklist. I've expected it to do away with all that muck and murk of the process. How foolish was I?1

One day I will learn that just because my head and thought patterns lend themselves to BLACK! or WHITE!, no grey or middle paths allowed, that not everything in the world — actually nothing in the world — follows suit.

  1. Doubtless there are writers whose outlines do work that way. I presume those writers have tested and discarded ideas and dug deeply during the outlining process itself, and done an awful lot of thinking and evolving of the narrative prior to writing. I think I can safely say I will never be one of those writers. [↩]

26 April 2010 @ 19:38 |

ONE DAY I WILL HAVE TIME FOR EVERYTHING. EVEN YOU. ESPECIALLY YOU.

So the short story currently stands at 12,000+ words. And thus the short story is not short at all, particularly given the fact that there are great, enormous gaping holes all throughout the narrative. And thus the short story, in addition to not being short, is not actually a story (yet) either. (Two criteria, and it hasn't achieved either. Poor story is currently suffering a quite severe existential crisis.)

Normally, I'm of the "write, keep writing, don't stop 'til you get enough finish a first draft" school of thought. Because otherwise I'd have a perfectly polished paragraph which may or may not be the beginning and nothing to hang off any side of it. But there's always a tipping point, a point where I abandon the not-draft I'm working on and call it finished enough and start revising said not-draft into a proper first draft. And two days ago I hit that tipping point because I don't think I can fill in those narrative holes without actually knowing, well, the narrative. So back to the start it is for me.

Those of you who've been around for a while will know that my normal routine is to write sans outline, but also sans narrative order. I write a scene, or half a scene, or even just a line of dialogue, and figure out where it fits in the entire story only once I have the entire story. I even write scenes and paragraphs this way — leaving a couple of blank lines and just pouring sentence fragments onto the page, and then I go back and start writing up to and around them. (Writing paragraphs this way is actually probably approaching normal – it's just my way of both editing as I go and at the same time avoiding the "can't write because my brain is trying to edit it!" dilemma. Writing scenes this way gets a little trickier, but it's not so bad because a scene is small enough to keep the whole thing in your head at once. Short stories and novels, not so much.)

Which is why Tessa, for one, gets a wild and panicked look in her eye whenever we discuss this scattershot/jigsaw habit of mine, as if I've just confessed I've decided to take up juggling pissy cobras and I don't need to practice with inanimate objects first, really, how hard can it be? She's right, really. So much to go wrong! So much does go wrong! My first attempt, the not-draft, is appalling. It's basically one big tangle of continuity errors, ambience at the expense of narrative, characters with no names, clues about what the story hinges on that my subconscious has oh-so-conveniently dropped rather than just, yanno, telling me outright, and notes in the margin. (Normally the latter are of the FUCK FUCK FUCK I DON'T KNOW WHAT? variety. Or sometimes the equally amusing, ER, REALLY? variety.) Seriously, those tangential illogical outlines that pour out of a fevered brain at 2am in an illegible scrawl are cohesive in comparison to the not-draft. Hence the tipping point.

The not-draft, being so very appalling, does then present serious difficulties when it comes to revision time. It's basically like doing a jigsaw — one where some of the snippets have been jammed together incorrectly and need to be undone in order to be put together correctly, where some of the pieces are missing entirely, and where some of the pieces may, in point of fact, belong to your Aunt Mildred's puzzle depicting a vase of gladioli and she's been wondering where that got to, thank you dear. Thankfully, I've gotten a little better at this jigsaw revision process, so that the official first draft doesn't (always) look like I've pieced together bits of the cat's vomit.

Part of this improvement is learning just how ruthless and brutal to be. Answer: exceedingly.

I've spent the past two nights — two weary, post-dayjob-wrung-out sort of nights — painstakingly massaging this one particular scene, getting the words just right. And last night, as I fell asleep, I realised that this one particular scene has to go. In its entirety. Because it's the second scene, and a giggle in a doorway, while important, is not enough to justify an entire scene, particularly the second scene in a story that should have started by now. Fuckit.

All of which is a very long way of saying Note to Self: Every scene and paragraph and sentence must accomplish more than one important something. Kill your darlings. YOU KNOW THIS ALREADY.

So tonight I'm going to spend my evening excising that painstakingly-revised scene out of the story, leaving no traces behind. I'll scavenge some of the passages, and weave them in among the rest of the story as appropriate, so the work (and the time spent on it) is not lost entirely. And any work that gets you to realising precisely what you need to do to fix or improve a story is never lost.

But it FEELS like lost and wasted time.

12 March 2010 @ 17:54 | 4 Comments

outlining, damselfly-style. (with footnotes.)

I don't talk about my writing process overly much, or with a great deal of specificity when I do — mainly because every time I contemplate the topic, I always trip over the "what (barely, if at all) works for me won't necessarily work for anyone else" hurdle; and if I manage to make it past that one there's always the "I'm hardly an expert!"

But it occurs to me I should, mainly because I like hearing about how other writers work. So, you know, share and share about and all that.

So, given I've been whinging so much lately about the plot (or apparent lack thereof) of the faerie novel, I thought perhaps I should share how I currently1 approach outlining.

My first novel2 I wrote out of order, and without any outline at all. Literally scattershot. I wrote 350,000 words worth of novel, and then wrote a summary of each scene on an index card, and only then did I put the scenes in order. It was inefficient, and messy, and led to a whole lot of continuity errors. But that's okay: at the time, I was writing solely for myself, without any guidance or practice, to see if I could not only start a novel but finish one.

I'm not quite that inefficient any more — although I've not progressed far along the spectrum yet.

Shadow Queen I wrote without an outline, and without any planning in advance, but at least this time I wrote the story linearly, meaning I started at Chapter One and plugged right on through to Chapter Eleven.3 With Pledged, thanks to it being a continuation of the story, I had an idea of the turning points that needed to happen4 to get the story to the end I had envisioned back when I started writing The Binding books — which gave me some leeway to write not-entirely-linearly without messing up the continuity too much. (Heh. Two distinct skills, having an outline and writing in order. I can't do either one particularly thoroughly on its own; I definitely don't like to do both together, apparently.)

I've tried outlining up-front, using various approaches, from loose character sketches and a few key plot points, to the uber-detailed snowflake method. Ultimately, though, none of those tricks work for me unless I've written at least some of the alpha draft already. And by some I mean at least a good third of the draft.

At that point I know the world and the characters well enough to know where the story I started is heading.

To assess that, I use the four-act structure. It's a narrative structure I picked up from the Crusie Mayer blog (which no longer appears to be available online, so this is from the notes I made at the time and may have skewed from the original that Jenny Crusie presented):

  1. Inciting Event: the first conflict, which starts Act I
  2. Turning Point 1: the protagonist makes a decision they wouldn't have at the start of the story, thus ending Act I and kicking Act II into gear
  3. Turning Point 2: at the midpoint, the protagonist makes a decision which demonstrates how utterly they've changed from the story's outset, thus ending Act II and ushering in Act III
  4. Turning Point 3: the dark moment, at the end of Act III, when the protagonist is all but defeated
  6. Climax: the end of Act IV, and only one of the combatants is coming out a winner

Jenny Crusie had approximate wordcounts by which each of these turning points should occur, but I forget them. For my purposes, I find a "not quite quarters" approach works nicely for me: the fourth act needs to be shorter, for pacing reasons, whereas the second and third acts can stand to carry a little more weight.

It's all arbitrary, anyway — I for one have seen plenty of other-act structures out there, from the 3-act5 to the 9-act. I find 4 works for my brain because there's enough turning points to hang the story on, but not so many that I get lost and frustrated in the agonising process of trying to figure out the story without writing it first.

Usually, because I've written about a third of the draft, I've either written the first turning point, or I'm not far off it — so it's simply a matter of figuring out two more turning points and the climax to resolve everything. And because my characters are invariably capable of having an argument in white space which lasts a good 10,000 words, having from 20-50,000 words between turning points isn't too daunting and in fact can sometimes feel a bit rushed.

I'll also sometimes write a blurb or (usually incomplete) synopsis at this point, because that captures the mood of the story better than turning points, and knowing the mood I want to evoke is just as important as knowing what happens. One of my friends makes word-lists (brine in preference to salt, for example) to make sure she can pin the mood to the page, and sometimes I'll do something similar. Theme and symbolism might also get a few quick notes at this point, too.

The Binding books, being first-person, had only the one set of turning points, as the other characters' storylines played a very definite second fiddle to Matilde's. The faerie novel, on the other hand, has two protagonists, who are not always working together, so I have two sets of turning points happening, sometimes coinciding and sometimes in counterpoint. Here's hoping I can make that work.

I do find that with each book I attempt I'm wanting slightly more outlining up-front, so who knows? Maybe one day I'll end up being uber-detailed, outlining every beat of every scene of every chapter before I even write a word.

Although that would be a world gone topsy-turvy.6

  1. Processes change with time, of course, but also with books. I'd heard writers saying before that every book is written differently, demands to be written differently. Every book is a first book in the sense that you never learn how to write books, you only ever learn how to write the book you are currently writing. Before I'd actually hit the magical =30= on my first novel, I didn't disbelieve them, but neither did I entirely understand. Surely tricks learnt in writing a previous book would stand an author in good stead in writing the next book? Yes, in the sense that the author now knows those tricks and will try them, but no in the sense that the tricks in question may not help wrest the book out of the head and onto paper, and then the author is back to square one: whatever works. [↩]
  2. Not Shadow Queen, that's my first published novel [↩]
  3. Which, in the published version, roughly align with Chapters, oh, about 2 to um…however many chapters there ended up being. Thirty-odd, from memory. I don't have a copy of the book to hand to check, and I am too lazy to walk into the other room to find one. [↩]
  4. Ooh look! that almost sounds like a bona fide outline — for very loose and nebulous interpretations of the word outline [↩]
  5. Which is generally the same, Act II of the 3-act structure being equivalent to Acts II & III of the 4-act structure [↩]
  6. As evidenced by this very post. Most people can explain their outlining process in a sentence or two, or a quick concise list. Me? Over a thousand rambling words. I sigh in a resigned fashion. [↩]

Triveni (Rodrigo y Gabriela — 11:11)

11 October 2009 @ 15:03 | 3 Comments

that, that and which

Glenda Larke has started a Sunday Writing Tips feature on her blog. Last week she focussed on the perils of the word "that". This week, she's explaining the difference between "that" and "which".

4 June 2006 @ 12:05 | 3 Comments

letter from kelly link

Kelly Link, resident editor at the OWW, has written a letter to workshop members, which Charlie has posted at his blog.

The only kind of critique that I worry about, in the long run, is the tendency of a workshop to sand off all the interesting edges from a writer.

2 June 2006 @ 10:46 |

and the angels will weep for you

Today, all I want to do is watch Garden State. Sadly, I do not have a copy of it handy, and so looks like I'll be thwarted in that want yet another day.

Also today, after an hour and a half spent fighting for words during which I spectacularly achieved zero, count them zero, I gave up on the writing for a bit and sat down with Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. It's been on my shelf for a whiles now, but since I'm also reading another book on the craft of writing, I had been intending to steer clear of more tomes of advice. There's only so much reading fiction and reading about writing you can do and still keep a balance of getting your own writing done.

And now I'm wishing I'd picked this book up aeons ago. I sat and read for nearly two hours, and I would've made it further than halfway if I'd let myself stop and simply read — but I couldn't, I had to keep stopping to scribble down snippets. To reinforce them, and to keep them for later.

Very early in the book, in talking about writing practice, Goldberg states:

When you write, don't say "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say "I am free to write the worst junk in the world." You have to give yourself permission to write a lot without a destination.

(emphasis mine)

I've seen this advice before, in the form of Give yourself permission to write a shit first draft — but that last line, about writing without a destination, suddenly unpacked a whole new level of this advice for me. Writing a cruddy first draft is all very well, because it's not about deliberately sitting down to write crud: it's about writing through self-doubts and lack of trust and perspective.

But lately it hasn't been working so fully for me, and Goldberg's snippet above unpacked why. Because letting myself write crap isn't my current rut. It's writing to a (frustratingly, stubbornly unknown) destination that's got me stuck at the moment.

My first novel was easy (said with hindsight ;) ) in that I knew the ending, and had only to cast backwards to find a beginning which would lead up to it. The current second novel (both of them ;) ) have only given me the beginning, and refuse to cough up more. Every short story I have on the burner at the moment is playing the same cat and mouse game.

So it's time for one of those insidious and yet oh-so-helpful little writers lies. I'll take up Goldberg's practice writing, for a half-hour or so a day after work; and then when I sit down to the proper wordcount, I'll tell myself that I'm writing entirely without a destination and any direction will do. And if the sneaky, snarky backbrain starts whispering sly truths about that nebulous outline lurking on my hard-drive, I shall turn up the iPod so I can't hear it.

It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing; otherwise, washing the dishes will become the most important thing on earth — anything that will divert you from writing. Finally one just has to shut up, sit down, and write. That is painful. Writing is so simple, basic, and austere. There are no fancy gadgets to make it more attractive. Our monkey minds would much rather discuss our resistances with a friend at a lovely restaurant or go to a therapist to work out our writing blocks. We like to complicate simple tasks. There is a Zen saying, "Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die." Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.

28 May 2006 @ 19:58 | 7 Comments

what's your quirk?

Agent Nephele Tempest muses about voice:

So, what's your writing style? You should know, and keep track as it evolves. Agents and editors talk about voice a lot, and the truth is that we're talking about two different things at the same time: what your writing tone and style are, and what your narrator or characters sound like. These things combine to give your story its voice–that sound, rhythm, personality that resonates in your head as you read. It's great to have a voice that's unique. You need to guard against falling into the trap of always using that signature vocabulary word or funky sentence structure you really love, though, because too much of that will make your writing all blend together and seem the same.

13 May 2006 @ 8:35 |

broken vs flawed

In case you read my blog but don't read hers: Elizabeth Bear on the difference between 'flawed' and 'broken'.

12 May 2006 @ 21:30 |