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90 Day Novelty
Jul. 2nd, 2013 12:50 pmSo I may have promised the spouse that I'd stop bitching and write a novel in 90 days. Thirty days ago. It seemed like a good idea, and honestly it's time to shit or get off the pot on this whole writing deal. I'm happier when I do it, so I need to figure out how to make that happen consistently.
So far I've done a revamp on almost 100 pages of a fic that should top out at about 150. This is kind of cheating, as it's both editing and using material that was co-written with Thassalia. I still want to finish this, and it's now in a shape to come back to without crying in despair about verb tenses. We've got the ending roughly sketched, emotional beats and resolution, and it really caps what we wanted to do with that whole series. It's back-burnered, but this is a step up from where it had been, rotting in the WIP fridge.
Next up is what I've been mentally calling Bullfinch's Suburban Mythology. For over a decade, though it's been morphing that whole time and only sits still long enough for the Dastardly Editor in my brain to say, "This start will not be a workable plot--this sucks--this makes no sense--you should do X instead of Z--you know shit about magical realism, you can't even suspend your own disbelief--" etc, etc.
Stephen King has often compared writing a novel to an archaeological dig, his job being to unearth the story that already exists as a whole before it's written. This is a comforting thought. For a long time, writing has felt more like trying to extract a big hairy sliver of rotten wood that breaks apart and sidles deeper into the layers of skin no matter how carefully I proceed. The issue at hand is overzealous 'quality control, it's silencing the part of my brain that spectates, because honestly, I've never been the kind of writer who knows the plot until it's almost over with anyway, so the Dastardly Editor is ALWAYS LYING.
I used to be able to do this. I could unhook the Dastard and let the Confabulator natter onto the page until enough Shit Happened that I could follow it around and down until I had a puzzle I could solve. It was dreaming while awake, there was a knack to it, and I hadn't even understood the knack was gone.
Which brings me to the last few weeks, where I've been wrestling with the check my mouth wrote that my Confabulator needs to cash by Labor Day. The knack is coming back. Here's the deal: it really is a lot like dozing while awake.
It comes down to severely paring down distractions; writing at night, using a simple text editor. For the Pavlovian touch that takes me back to being twelve and banging away on the family Smith Corona, the Q10 text editor has a full screen with no tabs or menu bars, and typewriter sounds. OMG, the first time I opened that program I wrote 950 words in two hours, just following the Confabulator like a bee through a field of violets and clover.
I may not have a fully wired novel in a sunlit museum atrium by September, but I'm beginning to believe I will have enough plaster-jacketed specimens of Shit Happening that I can assemble into one.
So far I've done a revamp on almost 100 pages of a fic that should top out at about 150. This is kind of cheating, as it's both editing and using material that was co-written with Thassalia. I still want to finish this, and it's now in a shape to come back to without crying in despair about verb tenses. We've got the ending roughly sketched, emotional beats and resolution, and it really caps what we wanted to do with that whole series. It's back-burnered, but this is a step up from where it had been, rotting in the WIP fridge.
Next up is what I've been mentally calling Bullfinch's Suburban Mythology. For over a decade, though it's been morphing that whole time and only sits still long enough for the Dastardly Editor in my brain to say, "This start will not be a workable plot--this sucks--this makes no sense--you should do X instead of Z--you know shit about magical realism, you can't even suspend your own disbelief--" etc, etc.
Stephen King has often compared writing a novel to an archaeological dig, his job being to unearth the story that already exists as a whole before it's written. This is a comforting thought. For a long time, writing has felt more like trying to extract a big hairy sliver of rotten wood that breaks apart and sidles deeper into the layers of skin no matter how carefully I proceed. The issue at hand is overzealous 'quality control, it's silencing the part of my brain that spectates, because honestly, I've never been the kind of writer who knows the plot until it's almost over with anyway, so the Dastardly Editor is ALWAYS LYING.
I used to be able to do this. I could unhook the Dastard and let the Confabulator natter onto the page until enough Shit Happened that I could follow it around and down until I had a puzzle I could solve. It was dreaming while awake, there was a knack to it, and I hadn't even understood the knack was gone.
Which brings me to the last few weeks, where I've been wrestling with the check my mouth wrote that my Confabulator needs to cash by Labor Day. The knack is coming back. Here's the deal: it really is a lot like dozing while awake.
It comes down to severely paring down distractions; writing at night, using a simple text editor. For the Pavlovian touch that takes me back to being twelve and banging away on the family Smith Corona, the Q10 text editor has a full screen with no tabs or menu bars, and typewriter sounds. OMG, the first time I opened that program I wrote 950 words in two hours, just following the Confabulator like a bee through a field of violets and clover.
I may not have a fully wired novel in a sunlit museum atrium by September, but I'm beginning to believe I will have enough plaster-jacketed specimens of Shit Happening that I can assemble into one.
