writing process » Deborah Kalin

hours and words (eventually) make a manuscript

Dec 312011

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and as is periodically inevitable, lately I've been struggling with morale. C'est la vie.

I've hit that spot in writing a novel where the whole thing feels trivial and trifling. Although if I'm honest, it's a feeling that's been plaguing me since I can't remember when; and because I have a nasty habit of high expectations, and wanting everything I attempt to be (at least subjectively) worthwhile, the pressure for this novel to be spectacular is beginning to effect my ability to actually write the damn thing.

This novel has been difficult from the get-go, and I've come up with a hundred reasons why, and ways to fix it, but somehow none of them seem quite to explain everything. When I was writing Shadow Queen, I had a certainty that there was something about that book that would work, not just for me but for other people. Which turned into a bit of a superstition because it went on to sell, and sit on actual bookstore shelves for other people to read. So it's been bugging me that, for a long time, I haven't had a similar certainty about the faerie novel.

But superstition is not going to stop me from finishing it, for the closure if for nothing else. Perhaps that certainty will become apparent during the rewrites — it isn't wise for a writer to trust her own mindset or judgement when she's a long way into the hard slog of a novel, after all, and it's still a story I'm enjoying, which means it's still a story I believe in. (Although I have given myself permission to skip such pesky things as transitions and leave them for the next draft.)

As if to reward me for such self-enlightenment, the internet has since been sending me little reminders. One was a conversation about the power of the square bracket (hello transition which reads simply: [they go here]!), and the other was a post by John Barnes on the effort of quality:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly at first.

I've seen this advice before, of course, more often in other guises. Give yourself permission to write a shoddy first draft. Write first, edit later. You can edit shit, but you can't edit a blank page.

The post has other gems as well — I particularly liked the remark that fiction doesn't depict nearly enough failure. As an engineer and a writer, I know what it's like to smack my head against a variety of brick walls and seemingly end up nowhere, so that trying apparently-fruitless approaches seems viable and failures teach you more about your task than achievements ever could.

The last reminder (so far) has been a startling realisation, just yesterday, of what's wrong with the faeries: I don't want them to be faeries. Somewhere in this draft I'd gotten too caught up in everybody else's mythologies, and they lost their vibrancy for me. So fixing that will change everything. Again. (I've lost count of how many fundamental everything-changing realisations I've had to slog through 100,000 words for in this book.) (This time, I shall be very good and NOT go back to the start again; I shall simply make a note in the margin for the next draft and, pretending it's fixed already, and forge ahead.)

Out of curiosity, the other day I had occasion to count all the hours and words I've spent on the faerie novel to date.

The answer? 483 hours, spread over a stint of days that add up to about 3 and a quarter years. (The first word was written in 2007.) In total, I've written 168,000 words of manuscript draft, 141,000 of them from scratch. (At one point I reached 95,000 words before scrapping all of them because of a startling realisation that made them redundant. That hurt. So far it looks like I've managed to salvage about 20,000 of those 95,000, but it was in such an altered form it may as well have been from scratch as well.)

Having said that, by the time I was done with Shadow Queen (including all publication-level edits etc), I'd spent 1,143 hours, and Shadow Bound cost me 871 hours.

So looks like I'm still only halfway at best on this sucker. Onward and upward.

dear scrivener: i've come back. never leave me again.

journal, writing life 6 Responses »

Aug 222011

Over the weekend, I moved the current draft of the faerie novel back into Scrivener.

I loved Scrivener almost from the moment I first purchased it. The corkboard feature alone pretty much sells it for me, especially with my preference for writing without an outline, stopping half-way through in a panic because none of it makes sense, rearranging scenes in a whole new pattern that makes only slightly more sense than before, forging ahead again, retreating, wandering off sideways, pausing for some world history, and so on. But about a year ago, I had to give up using it because I needed to be able to work on my manuscript anywhere, including cross-platform. I knew Scrivener for Windows was in the pipeline, but I also needed to work on computers on which I had no administration rights, and I couldn't rely on SfW releasing a portable version. So back into MS Word I trudged.¹

But last week I discovered that the current version of Scrivener syncs with simplenote, or with an external folder.

I have to admit, my first inclination was to shout at the whole internet: WHICH OF YOU KNEW ABOUT THIS, AND WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?

My second was to embark on an attempt to convert the pterosaur to the wonders of this software, even though he will have no earthly use for it in all his days. (He was very patient, and ooh'ed and aah'ed over the prettiness of the corkboard. I think mainly because he could see that was the best way to placate me and therefore escape.)

The worst thing is, I have the sneaking suspicion that this current version was released about a week or so after I moved back to Word. All this last year, labouring in Word, without a corkboard, when I didn't need to!

That'll teach me to read the release notes.²

Actually, I don't hate MS Word. I kind of like it, if I'm going to be honest. But it does like to get in your way a little bit, and every install requires me to ruthlessly and rigorously train it out of autocorrecting and autosuggesting and generally being a nuisance. But I do hate outlining in it. Hate, loathe, stab it with a fork. [↩]
In my defence, they always pop up at me when I'm trying to do something else. [↩]

never trust an outliner

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Aug 042011

The other day I stumbled across a link, something along the lines of 25 ways to torment your characters, and in idly perusing this list I realised that one of the reasons I'm struggling with momentum on the faerie novel is because the characters' wants, needs and fears have evolved as part of the plot but I hadn't kept up. I need to check what's changed and what hasn't, and whether that leads to new plot.

And do you know what this means? This means I'm trudging (once again) through the dreaded Middle of the Book. Figuring shit out in the dark, with no idea how I'm going to get where I need to, or whether that's even where I still need to arrive.

And that's okay. I'm practiced at this, I know how to write a book without knowing the path.

What's not okay is that this time I wrote a synopsis. Isn't that the whole point of planning in advance? I trudged and slugged through months of trying to plan this novel in advance — one of my least favourite writing activities — specifically so I wouldn't have to feel lost in the middle and OUTLINERS, YOU LIED TO ME.

So, okay, it wasn't the world's most comprehensive synopsis. But I still maintain that's not the point.

And also, where the hell do I fit all this worldbuilding that dropped into my head while watching a show about Darwin's orchids? Huh?

two months down? already?

the wages of honey, writing life Comments Off

Mar 032011

I'm behind in my blogging (as usual), and partly that's because I'm this close to wrapping up the thorn girls short story. I am tempted to indulge in the cliche so close I can taste it, but really that would only be attractive if finishing were, say, a peanut butter sandwich. With fresh white bread. Yum.

Last night I got the structure all but nailed down (albeit with an awful lot of white space in the manuscript which is nothing more than the note GET HIM OUTSIDE NOW, or some other such crossing-the-room instruction); tonight I get to trawl through and put in all those room-crossings and transitions.

Normally when I write my first draft, I put the transitions in — but in a tricky first draft, such as this one, which I got half-written and then threw at Tess in desperation, and sulked until she came back with the suggestion to rip it to pieces (which was more helpful than it sounds, given she told me which pieces I needed to keep) and thus required significant structural edits at the same time as trying to write the rest of the story … well. In those cases I tend to skip the transitions. Mostly because I find I'll spend hours agonising over the one sentence that will impel the character across the room, only to find that character now needs to not be in the scene at all. Structural edits never progress linearly, for me. Heck, nothing about my story-writing process is linear. Let's be honest.

So, because listening to me opine about editing is bound to be a little dry, I'll point you instead to Gillian's blog, where there is a piece up by me in honour of Women's History Month, where I talk about my dayjob:

…my favourite subjects were mathematics and chemistry. …I could go on at length about the appeal of science and engineering — the way it takes hard physical evidence and observable, reproducible phenomena, and strings theorems and hypotheses between them to create stories of why the leaves are green and the sky is blue. That, just like writing, it's about past experiences, a shared history, imagination, and daring to dream. The fact that the entire discipline is built on a premise of being collaborative and rigorously open, encouraging invention and innovation, like a global remix project centred around numbers and factoids. I like that language is immaterial, that the stars speak to us through chemicals and fractals and ratios.

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I crave answers, yes, but more than anything, I want space and the chance to both be curious and to indulge that curiosity.

ETA: Oops! Link was borked. Fixt.

but the year is slipping away, and i miss the words

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Oct 032010

There's an interview with Paolo Bacigalupi up at Techland and, quite apart from the fact that I am now livid with jealousy over what is apparently the coolest surname meaning EVER, towards the end of the interview Bacigalupi has some powerful things to say about writing:¹

For me … having the raw ability … it was meaningless, ultimately. It was the willingness to write four novels and fuck them all up and keep going that was the definer … the willingness to accept failure and not let it stop you, and to not let that define you.

And I feel like it doesn't get talked about, that idea that nobody accidentally gets published. You don't accidentally fall into writing a novel. Just the process of actually writing a novel is too damn hard for anybody to accidentally fall into it. And if somebody says, "yeah I just did it," they're probably lying. They wanted it and they went after it is what they did.

…Discipline comes from within, not from without. I think of it as being, there are those people who are waiting for the thing to arrive, and then there's people who are going out and making it. I think about it as almost theft. You almost have to steal the book from the rest of your life. There's so few things that are going to support you in the process of writing a book. There's always more child care. There's always some emergency that has to happen. There's always some reason why, you know, you have a deadline at your regular job and so you have to stay up late, and you can't get your writing done. If you're going to write it's always stolen from somebody else's time, or some other responsibility.

Life's been a bit hectic lately, complicated by such fun things as being stalked by RSI and productivity targets at the dayjob, not to mention a ludicrous quantity of errands, and it's been stealing my writing time and energy. Worse, I've been letting that happen — because the stories I have at hand are being uncooperative, and procrastinating on them is far easier than wrangling them into submission.²

Carving time out of your day and life to write is a lesson I've already learnt — but it's also one of those lessons I continually have to re-learn and re-affirm. It can be a hard fight, to carve out that time for myself and my stories, but the hardest fight is to do it consistently and incessantly, every day. Life lets me steal a pocket out of any given day without too much trouble — but when I try to steal a pocket out of every single day, life fights back. Sooner or later, life lands a suckerpunch, and I'll miss a day. That's when the slide starts, and I find myself skipping two days and promising myself if I just have the rest of the week off from writing to knock over all these errands I'll be able to start again on Saturday with a clear head.

Finding time to write, it seems, is one endless game of snakes and ladders. Only without the ladders.

Today I'm going to dodge those pesky snakes, though.

And/or investing in the creative process, since it has a far wider application than simply writing [↩]
Well, okay, to be fair to me: calling life a bit hectic lately is a touch of an understatement. But still. [↩]

i am this close to declaring to-do-list bankruptcy

journal, writing life 6 Responses »

Jul 112010

Since the old routine was proving difficult to groove back into, post-Mongolia, I've been trying out a new routine. It's not quite working yet.

Previously I'd been landing early at the dayjob, and writing after I clocked off. This has the benefit of my morning tram not being a peak hour one, and the library, where I'm sure not to be interrupted, is open for my writing session. But the library is in the wrong direction, away from home, and errands tend to be scheduled in my writing time. All of which means it tends to vanish before I get to it.

So I've taken to writing before I clock on. It means I get to keep my non-peak-hour tram, I get to work more "normal" hours, and I get at least one hour's writing time that won't be eaten by errands. Sadly, libraries are not early-risers, so while my writing time isn't being eaten by errands, it's not sans interruptions. Decidedly not.

I've been thinking, this weekend, about what I can do to fix that.

There are a couple of external options — writing in a cafe, for example — but maybe what I really need to change is my mind-set.

Writing used to be easier and swifter than I find it now. Partly that's because I'm more conscious of the craft, and trying to exercise finer control over it; a slower pace is a natural consequence. But maybe it's also partly because I have a habit of pushing myself too hard.

Because pretty much all this year I've been caught in a vicious cycle. I'm tired, from working long hours, which means I don't hit even the modest wordcount I'm aiming for, so I push myself harder the next day and work all weekend to catch up, which means I'm tired from working long hours with no break, so I don't hit even the modest wordcount I'm aiming for…

From now on I'll be taking at minimum one day off a week — and that day is going to be a weekend, so it's a proper rest from all forms of work.

And in the meantime I'm going to practise being more in the now,¹ so that when I am interrupted it doesn't take me 20 minutes to get back into my train of thought. Or so that when I'm writing, my mind is working — not on how many words I've written or revised (and oh no I only have 20 minutes left before I have to clock on) — but instead on how I'm going to fix this next sentence, this next paragraph, this next scene.

Oh, and also, I am going to get to all those emails and phonecalls currently waiting on me to return them. Just, yanno, when I can. [↩]

writing is such a chaotic sport

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Apr 262010

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.

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. [↩]

seagull singing status: not yet

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Apr 112010

So far, the proofs have taught me three things (or at least, three things which come immediately to mind).

First, a "brace" is a pair of something. Did you all know this? I did not. I was in fact under the impression that it denoted decidedly more than two. Dear proof-reader, thank you for questioning.

Second, enjoy those easy pages which have no mark-up, because sooner or later you're going to hit a page with one tiny little question that makes you realise you have previously farked up the plot in a rather horrifying way, and fixing it elegantly (which you must do, it being proofs stage and nobody therefore wanting to add too much more bulk to the book) takes a good four hours. To produce a paragraph. Oy vey. (I fixed it. But now I am not ahead on my target. Boo.)

Third, I do NOT, resolutely NOT, need a smaller desk. In fact, I may well need a much, much larger desk.

I have this pine monstrosity I've been thinking of getting rid of, it being too high for a short person such as myself, and I admit I've been toying with the thought of going all minimalist. A just-barely-enough work surface, which I would naturally keep sparse and clean. But the proofs have reminded me that such a wish is utter, utter folly.

Any desk I own will need to have a work surface large enough to contain the laptop, lamp and scanner (its normal accessories), plus room for the stack of pages I'm working on, the stack of pages I'm yet to go through, the stack of pages I've been through but may need to go back to or at least refer to, a notepad for "thinking out loud" or experimenting with the words I want before committing them to the page in question, and somewhere to put the scads of reference material such as maps, lists of names, issues to fix, &c. That's a whole lot of stacks of paper, and my pine desk is, despite being to my mind too large, not up to the task. I currently have drawers pulled open on either side of me acting as ad-hoc surfaces for supporting the reference material.

On the plus side, this means I don't have to find money for a new teeny desk any time soon. (And a new larger desk is not going to happen. If I have to I'll resort to the floor.)

I'm planning on putting that money I just "saved" towards the purchase of a new camera, so I can taunt you with pictures of Mongolia.

and they're all (well, mostly all) cousins

shadow bound, writing life 7 Responses »

Apr 072010

The proofs for Shadow Bound landed today. The fourteen-day forecast is therefore for sudden squalls of insanity, the occasional seagull impersonation, an inability to discuss any topic that does not immediately relate to (for example) the placement of commas, and a general air of abstraction and sleeplessness.

Although, the proof reader has won my undying love for the following comment in her cover letter:

This was a thoroughly absorbing read. Lots of urst (please cast Viggo Mortensen or Hugh Jackman as Dieter), tension and complexities.

Heh. Heheh. I think it was only a couple of months ago I finally figured out what URST stood for,¹ and now apparently I've written a book with sufficient URST to make at least one person think of Viggo.

I can live with that.

This evening, along with getting started on the proofs, I also wrote up the dedication and acknowledgements. My next task, concurrent with the edits, is to whip up some kind of character/house/tribe glossary — which I think is no bad idea, given that no less than 40-odd character and house names are mentioned in the first 60 pages. And this is a novel with actually not that many characters!

It's all starting to take shape people. Book!

I'm slow on the uptake. But I know there's at least one person who also doesn't know what it means, so just for you, Mum: UnResolved Sexual Tension. [↩]

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

the wages of honey, writing life 4 Responses »

Mar 122010

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.

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