What do I know? Quite a few things, evidently. (Not me, her. I can barely count.) This blog features a combination of book reviews, tips on technique, and author interviews.
Your Journey Begins, says this forum for, well, you can see who it’s for. Primarily, anyway - but the numerous tips and discussions here are useful for any working writer. If writing challenge events are your thing, to help you focus or get motivated, well, this community is big on them.
Billed as offering “Insider perspectives from today’s hottest thriller and mystery writers,” this is another multi-contributor blog offering a variety of content, notably including tips by writers for writers in the indicated genres. Of course, a useful tip for one writer is a useful tip for another, regardless of genre.
Celebrating Independent Authors is the tagline of this multi-contributor blog. Less of a blog than a sort of ongoing online newsletter, this active site maintains a heavy flow of information targeted at late-stage writers and early-adopter readers of self-published genre fiction.
Novels written from a third-person perspective these days are written in a different style from novels written 2-3 generations back. The difference is in the amount of information the narrator has about the events of the story and the story world. In the fairly distant past, the third-person narrator was omniscient, meaning the narrator knew everything and could tell the reader about events known to none of the characters. In most modern novels written in third-person, the narrator is non-omniscient, which means that at any given time, one of the characters in the story is really the narrator. Or that the narration is taking place based on the information that character knows.
The value of third-person non-omniscient (a.k.a. third-person limited, or 3PNO, or 3PL) perspective is that it enables the writer to tell a broader story involving multiple perspectives and even multiple groups of characters acting out separate subplots, while still retaining some of the personal feel of a first-person narrative. Of course, some novels are written in multiple first-person perspective, where different parts of the book, e.g., different chapters or groups of chapters, are narrated by different characters, with each of the characters speaking in first person. This approach attempts to preserve the benefits of both first-person (instant, easy sympathy) and third-person (multiple perspectives). I personally don’t usually care for this mixed style, but I’ve seen it done fairly often and it’s not always bad (see example below, toward the bottom of this entry).
Without going into detail on how third-person non-omniscient perspective narration is achieved in the writing, which is yet another topic, I’d like to bring up an issue I’ve seen in some novels. Specifically, I’d like to talk about overloading a story with too many viewpoints.
Like the idea of the unreliable narrator, the point of a non-omniscient narrator is to impose a perspective on the writing. This gives it flavor and limits the reader’s access to information. When a story is told from a handful of perspectives, these limits really add something, which I suppose is ironic. By contrast, a third-person omniscient perspective gives the reader so much more information than the characters have that it really limits the kinds of suspense and personality that can be employed.
When a story features too many perspectives, though, like eight or ten or a dozen, it makes me wonder why. Granted, each chapter or scene remains limited, in terms of what information it can give the reader, by the viewpoint from which it’s told.
But overall, when so many viewpoints are used, the amount of information (and opinion) available in total begins to approach what an omniscient narrator would have. In my opinion, this defeats the purpose of non-omniscient narration and costs the story most of its benefits…and begs the question of why the author doesn’t just go ahead and use an omniscient narrator. That’s still allowed, so to speak, and you see it occasionally, though no examples spring to mind.
It’s true that the reader should still get the feeling of being in the heads of the various narrators (viewpoint characters). So there’s a benefit that remains. And yet, how close can you feel to any of these characters if you’ve been inside a whole pack of them? Like polygamy. Exactly like polygamy. Yeah, I just said that. Bam! That just happened.
Moving on…
As a result of this realization—or belief, if you prefer, or philosophy—I’ve tried to limit the number of viewpoints in my own project to two main ones, one secondary, and one and a half very occasional ones. (The one-half is a non-human narrator, and I’ve used it only three times in interstices.)
I could be totally missing the point here, and I can’t say this issue has ruined my enjoyment of any particular book, but I just don’t like the idea of trying to tell a story from too many viewpoints unless there’s a specific reason to do so. An example of an exception would be one book I read recently called The Atopia Chronicles, by Matthew Mather.
That book—which I found thought-provoking, and quite liked, and even reviewed on Amazon—was written as a series of shorts from a whole slew of different first-person perspectives. As I mentioned above, this is not exactly the same as 3rd-person non-omniscient, but it serves the same purpose of providing a number of different perspectives that the reader can pull together into a big picture. (Frankly, I don’t really see why he didn’t just use 3PNO, but that’s a question of style and not really my business.) Anyway, my point is that in this case, there was a good reason for covering an intersecting set of events from many different perspectives, and I won’t reveal that reason to avoid spoilers. But, I do think this is the exception that evades the rule.
I’d be interested to hear conflicting/supporting opinions regarding this blog entry.
I’m reblogging this useful entry and adding the writing-related blog it came from to the blog roll.
I’m currently working on editing a book that will be released sometime next year and I’ve gotten a few corrections from the editor I’m working with. She told me the corrections she suggested are common for authors, so I figured I’d share them with you. I’m sure if you have these things fixed…
This blog about “juggling work, writing, and life” offers commentary on a variety of writing, ebooks, and related topics.
Guest Post by Wil Forbis
As a writer and musician, I’ve long been interested in the structural similarities between stories and music. And I find that the process of ruminating on these similarities can provide new insights and ideas relevent to both disciplines. Much can be learned by taking a “musical” approach to writing and a “writerly” approach to music.
Let’s first consider the structure of a story. On the most basic level, a story should have a beginning, middle and an end. This corresponds with the classic three-act or three-stage story structure popular in fiction and especially movie screenwriting. (This structure is, of course, not the only option available in constructing a story, but it’s the one we’re going to examine here.) Each of these individual stages are given different names depending on who’s expounding the storytelling theory; here I’ll refer to the names used in this Wikipedia article on the three-act structure.
The three-act structure is a model used in writing and evaluating modern storytelling which divides a screenplay into three parts called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution.
Star Wars is a clear example of the three-act structure. In the setup, we see the droids landing on Tatooine and are introduced to Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi. The death of Luke’s aunt and uncle sets him on the path of confrontation with the forces of the Empire. Ultimately, Luke and the rebel alliance triumph which leads to a resolution of the conflict (at least for that episode).
It’s also often stated that during the course of a three-act story, the main character(s) should grow and change. At the end of the story, they should not be the same people they were at the beginning.
Can we find a parallel of the three-stage narrative structure in music? Certainly we can in the Sonata form that was extremely popular during the Classical period of Western music (occurring, roughly speaking, during the 18th century). Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve doubtless heard many Sonatas during your life, including such popular pieces as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
The Sonata also has a three stage structure, defined as follows…
As you can see (or better, hear) the three stages of the Sonata are not far removed from the three stages of the three-act story. As in a three-act narrative, the elements of a Sonata are introduced, developed, and then return in a changed form.
Now, you might be saying, “This is all well and good, but what does this really do for me as a writer?” Personally, I find that recognizing these shared elements between writing and music (and even other art forms) helps me conceptualize different ways of affecting a story through pacing, or mood, or story arc. I might intellectually understand that a story I’m working on needs more drama, but it’s not until I hear a certain electrifying piece of music that I understand, “That’s what the story really needs: that intangible flavor expressed in this music.” Music may be —- as some have called it — the most abstract of art forms, but we intuitively understand its flow, and we can learn to apply that intuitive knowledge to other art forms. In essence, by seeing the connections between writing and music, you expand the set of dramatic templates you can draw from. Now it’s not just every story you’ve ever read, but all the music you been exposed to as well.
Structure is, of course, the skeleton holding together a piece of writing or music. It’s the 30,000 feet view. Do music and writing share similarities on more atomic levels? They do, and I’ll be discussing them in the future, here.
I mentioned in the last entry that I’d talk about the different kinds of breaks that can go between what I’ve been calling “scene stages” in the manuscript. Actually, technically a break doesn’t go between scene stages…it goes before any given scene stage of the author’s choice.
Note: I’ve excluded “part” or “book” breaks from this list, since they are largely irrelevant to the overarching topic of splitting scenes into stages/chunks. These types of breaks obviously can’t happen in the middle of a scene.
So…the first type of break is the chapter break, naturally. Typically this consists of a hard page break, maybe some extra vertical whitespace on the next page, a chapter title (maybe just a number), and then the text of the next scene stage in the story (the first scene stage of the next chapter).
Second, there’s what I’ve been thinking of as the triple-asterisk break. There’s probably a better name for this, but what it amounts to is a lesser kind of break when you don’t want to end the chapter yet. I seem to mainly use these between scenes (sometimes, though not even close to always) rather than for splitting up a single scene. This typically consists of a blank line, a centered ***, another blank line, and then the next scene stage of the story begins. I’ve seen many books where the author/publisher/printer has put some sort of cute special symbol that has meaning to the story, like the ankhish crosses in The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (off the top of my head). I’ve also seen books where this is just done with three or so lines of vertical whitespace.
The third type of break is the invisible break, where the author knows the scene split technically belongs, but doesn’t want to break the flow at that point. This has been relevant to me partly because I’m using Scrivener and am, for example, assigning characters and setting as keywords to each file.
Invisible breaks may seem nonsensical to some people, and maybe they kind of are, but I’ve got two reasons for considering them important.
As I’ve split scenes into stages, I’ve also done a first pass as to the placement of the different kinds of breaks (chapter, *** and invisible). The chapter and *** breaks are there as a refinement of the flow of tension throughout the story as written thus far. The type 3 (invisible) breaks are there to help me track where each new scene/scene stage begins. Readers will never see them, but hopefully they’ll benefit from them anyway, as a result of my own improved understanding of the pace and flow of the story through the future draft refinement process.
This all seems pretty technical, but there’s a lot of theory and technique to the novel-writing process anyway. I’m guessing that other writers who use Scrivener and other project-manager-style writing software will understand the problem and the solution I’ve gone with, myself. (Whether they care is a whole ‘nother matter.)
In closing, I’d like to note that if I’d been forced into, or doggedly insisted upon, getting all this figured out before the first draft rather than after it, I’d never have gotten that first draft done and would probably be cold in a tub of red water long before now.
Last time I explained how I got to my definition of a scene, which is, more or less: [Viewpoint] observes [Characters] interacting in [setting] for a given chunk of time, and something changes that moves the plot forward.
Now I’d like to get back to the original topic, which was, what do chapters consist of, if they don’t (always, exactly) consist of scenes?
The answer that certain correspondents and I have come up with is that chapters consist of scene stages.
Now, if someone else is already using this term, maybe we can call them Scene Phases or something, but alliteration is always awesome.
So what are the stages of a scene? I’m sure there are many excellent answers, but ultimately what I’ve been trying to learn is, how to identify where to split scenes between chapters for dramatic effect. So for this purposes, I think it’s enough to say that the stages of a scene are as follows:
The reason for this seemingly rather obvious split (except for #4 if you’ve never heard the term “sequel” used this way) is simple: you can put a break between any two of these stages. Or between all of them, or some of them, or none, though if you don’t at least split 1 from 3 you lose the dramatic tension cliffhanger effect which was the original goal of this series.
By “break,” by the way, I generally mean a chapter break, but there’s that other kind of break you see a lot, what I think of as a triple-asterisk break. And there’s also the invisible break, for the writer’s purposes only. (I think I’ll do another short blog entry on these breaks rather than derail this one here.)
Anyway, let’s look at some examples.
Inferring this breakdown—from other people’s doubtless more thoughtful work on the subject—made it possible for me to go through my own chapters and identify and split scenes across chapters…in some cases very differently from the way I had them split up, or not split, before.
I don’t feel right about blogging on the more detailed view of what scene opening & closure stages ought to consist of, and definitely not on the subject of “sequels,” because I didn’t invent them and don’t feel like any kind of an authority. Maybe someday I’ll feel differently about it. For now, I really recommend that you look up these things, especially the subject of “scenes and sequels.” Maybe I can find a good link to post.
So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, then what do they consist of?
Well, first of all, some chapters do consist of full scenes, or even more than one scene. Maybe. It depends on what your definition of a scene is. So let’s look at that first.
Like the relationship between chapters and scenes, I found it difficult to find a good definition of what a scene is. One definition I found was, to paraphrase it, a piece of a story where something changes. Interesting. Another definition that I found, in various variations, was that a scene consists of a setting, some characters and something happening. That’s not as obvious as it sounds at first.
Together these definitions gave me something to work with.
In my own project, now, I’m defining a scene in terms of the points at where I need to declare one scene to end and another to begin. I’ve decided that this is necessary when any of the following takes place:
A) When the setting changes, e.g. the action moves on to a different place. Now, The exception to this might—might—be a running shot where the “camera” (or the writer’s/reader’s mind’s eye) follows the characters as they move from one place to another in what is otherwise clearly continuous action.
It’s a judgment call in cases like this. Generally, the way I see it, even if the action is continuous, if the mood of the setting changes, that’s a scene break. Like if the characters are walking along in a sunny field having a conversation, and then suddenly they look up and realize they’ve wandered into the dark forest. That seems like a scene break to me.
B) When the characters change. The substance or mood of a scene can change pretty dramatically with the addition or removal of just one character from the dynamic.
There’s also a certain element of judgment to this, of course. You can have a character wander off for a minute to take a phone call or something, and if you don’t follow that character and listen to the phone call (which would clearly be a different scene), maybe the main scene continues.
C) When the viewpoint changes. Personally I prefer to almost always start a new chapter when switching to a different viewpoint character, and at the very least use a triple-asterisk type of break. Regardless, there are good reasons to declare it a new scene when the viewpoint changes. For example, one viewpoint character might be a wide-eyed optimist interpreting the action in one way, whereas another viewpoint character might be older, wiser, cynical, and interpreting the action in a completely contradictory fashion. This affects the mood of the writing at least as much as a change of setting, in my opinion, at least.
D. When enough time passes. This is subjective, like everything to do with fiction, but if you have some characters camping and talking, or walking down the road for days (and you don’t consider it a setting change), it seems to me there’s still a scene change. An exception might be the written version of a montage.
In terms of the breakdown of a book from a reader’s perspective, this stuff doesn’t matter all that much. Books are visibly broken into chapters, not scenes. Still, personally I found it necessary to develop some sort of understanding of what scenes are in order to learn to split them up with any kind of effectiveness.
There’s also the question of what specifically a scene consists of: the things that should be in it, and generally in what order. I’m not going to go into that now, but let’s summarize it as saying that a scene must be necessary, which means that it must move the plot along.
So, we have a working definition of what a scene is: [Viewpoint] observes [Characters] interacting in [setting] for a given chunk of time, and something changes that moves the plot forward.
If that’s what a scene is (and I could certainly be wrong about that, but I don’t think I’m that far off), then what are the pieces of a scene?
Coming up next.
The Free Online Writing Guide is another site that’s not exactly a blog (though it has one) but is updated with useful information for writers, in this case more on the writing side than the publishing side.
I can’t say I really know what the overall purpose of this site is, but I’ve found its section on the “discipline” of “storytelling” to be among the most concise and useful references for things like plot analysis and comparing different variants of “mythic structure.”
So, I spent most of a week trying to figure out how chapters and scenes fit together. The internet is packed with useful advice on the subject. I’d never imagined that there could be so many ways to say “chapters consist of scenes.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t nearly enough for me to work from.
Part of the problem is the idea of the cliffhanger. There’s probably a more technical term for this that I’ve learned and forgotten, but it comes down to the idea that, to oversimplify rather grossly, at least every other chapter needs to end on a high note of tension. This is the essence of the “page-turner,” which is one of the high-priority goals of every genre novelist: inciting in readers the compulsive need to find out what happens next.
The idea is simple: you have some stuff happen in the opening stage of the scene. Say, your sexy-yet-brainy 400-year-old vampiric antiheroine gets attacked by villains with holy water-filled Super Soakers. She fights her way through them, dodging streams of the deadly liquid and clubbing the righteous bastards over the head with her heirloom mandolin. Now, thinking she’s got them all, she turns to check on her plucky werepig sidekick and whoa momma! There’s one left, and he’s aiming his deadly toy right at her pale and youthful face. His finger tightens on the trigger. How will she get out of this one?
Whitespace, chapter break, maybe even cut away to another set of characters working on a different subplot to prolong the tension.
The problem I have with this isn’t the technique. Not only does it demonstrably work, it’s key to managing tension on the mid-level scale. The problem I have with it is that it’s a very common rationale for the placement of chapter breaks—arguably the most common reason for chapter breaks in the first place—and it involves splitting a single scene across chapters. It’s clear evidence that no, chapters do not consist of whole scenes.
The contradiction between these common pearls of advice is something no one seems to talk about, and it’s incredibly frustrating to someone—well, me—trying to understand proper novel structure.
So if chapters don’t consist of scenes, what do they consist of? That’s what I had to figure out. Through messing around with pieces of my own story and several conversations with writing-type friends, I came up with some theory on the subject, and answered the question well enough for myself, at least.
In the interest of shortening these blog entries…tune in next time.
Hey…I’m doing it RIGHT NOW, aren’t I? I didn’t even do that on purpose. How’s that for internalization?
It’s quiet here in the abyss, except for the music blasting in my headphones to keep out the screams of children running wild at Starbucks. I’m going through a particularly tedious iteration of the between-drafts organization process.
I’ll post more on this shortly, but in the broad strokes what I’m doing is going through my Scrivener project and splitting the chapters I’ve written into scenes and sequels and pieces of scenes so I can split scenes across chapters. As I do this, I’m also applying a certain naming standard to all the scene phase/sequel files. So far this has taken me three days, or, technically, three very long afternoons.
Before that I was working on forms for character, setting and faction sheets.
Each of these subprojects, and the learning I had to submit myself to in order to trudge through them, merits an entry of its own. So, more to come.
It’s not the funnest part of writing a novel.
But at least it’s quiet.
Kindle Boards is a forum related to Kindle devices and the technosystem around them. Yes, I made that word up, just now. I can’t exactly call it an ecosystem, right? Anyway, The Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting subforum has been particularly useful to me in finding solutions to annoying problems with various generations of Kindles (e.g., I’ve really found the Kindle’s indexing/search system problematic, and I’m still not sure about it even on the Paperwhite).
Goodreads is an ebook- and indie writer-friendly forum that’s more for readers than writers. Since writers are readers, though, it’s a logical place for both. Writers like to plug their books there, but the community’s jaded with that, from what I’m told. A good review can get your book onto lots of members’ reading lists, which can be a real leg up. On the other hand, if your book gets panned there, a lot of people will see. But, life is risk.
So, I’m stuck.
As I’ve mentioned before, my first draft is finished, more or less. More or less means that technically some of what I add from here on out could be considered first draft itself—bits of continuity, character/setting description changes, small but key scenes I may find I’ve forgotten—but most of what I’ll do from now on can only be considered rewrites, and that’s second-draft-land. Doesn’t matter; whatever we call it, there’s plenty more to do.
If only I could get some momentum on it.
I’ve written about certain walls I’ve hit at different times, walls I think most writers hit, sometimes over and over. Now, though, this doesn’t feel like a wall. It feels like a chasm, a big rift between first and second drafts, between writing and rewriting.
So what’s making it such a big deal? Well, for one thing, I hate everything I’ve written. OK, that’s not true. Not quite everything. But I can see a huge number of places that would benefit from improvements. I’ve decided to forego any notion of firm deadline and instead work to make this first novel the absolute best that I can. That means wherever I’m pretty sure I need to insert/change an improvement, I really need to do it. And that’s a lot of changes.
I spent two of the last few months on 14,000 miles of road trips across the US. I found myself totally unable to write on these trips, for reasons both logical and lame. However, I did manage to accumulate a fair number of ideas for improvements, and took decent notes about them. (“Notes” in the Hollywood sense: otherwise known as “aggressive and expansive plans for improvement.) Since I’ve been back, I’ve added even more notes, and I’ve compiled most of them (except the last few days’ worth) into my Scrivener project. It’s exciting in the sense that I know a lot of neat stuff to add/change in the story, but it’s also very daunting.
So what’s scaring me? Well, for one thing there’s a ton of work to be done, and that’s tough enough, but life is work. What’s bugging me more is that I’ve gone and implemented some small percentage of these changes, and I find that there’s a price to every change. It has to do with the way I write in the first place. Back when I was writing articles, it was the same. I would write at the paragraph level: sentence 2 would tie in with what sentence 1 had to say, and so forth, in a chain. So I have to break and reforge those chains to insert and remove things from them, and sometimes I don’t like the resulting flow. Imagine trying to insert lines into a rhyming poem with lovely imagery and haunting language. I don’t claim to be turning out choice poetry here, but whatever I’ve managed to do in that vein is severely slapped around by subsequent changes.
“You’re doing it wrong,” you say. I know. A first draft is supposed to be quick and dirty. But I just have trouble doing that. I tried it in some parts of the first draft, and it just wasn’t enjoyable to me, though it was a lot quicker. All I can say is, it really does seem like every writer writes differently, and this is just how i do it. My style of first draft composition is more like second or third draft writing should be. Only…this is the result: rewrites shred that flow.
The solution is obvious but even more terrifying. I might have to do what some of the more extreme writers do, which is to rewrite from complete scratch. More than anything else, that scares the hell out of me, because it’s a huge amount of work and there’s no reason to believe the next iteration will be any different. Thinking about a total rewrite is sort of like looking into the deep black abyss of despair. You know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but all you can see is black right now.
So, like any good abyss-starer, I’m doing the only thing I can do: procrastinating.
Well, that’s a little unkind. What I’m doing now is actually more productive than your average procrastination. It’s something I should have done earlier, though if I had, I might not have gotten nearly as far as I have. Sometimes you have to just go for it, free-write. Other times you need to plan and fill in the details, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m doing up full character sheets, thinking out the details of each setting (location), working on the structure and metadata of my Scrivener template, and some other things I’m thinking about blogging on later.
Honestly, I’m glad I’m getting this stuff done, because nothing less than an abyss would have made it look like fun by comparison. I figure that if I get all my notes into the right places in the documents and get all my reference material laid out and sorted, it will make the rewrite go more smoothly. Will it really? I guess I’ll let you know.
A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing covers a range of topics pertaining to the world of indie writing. There’s a lot of very specific practical information, including number-crunching, which I personally really hate doing. Outspoken, largely pro-Amazon, and a strong advocate for indie writers vs. the traditional publishing model, it alternates between hardcore and pretty damn funny.
Let’s Get Digital - How to Self-Publish and Why You Should espouses the upsides of self-publishing over traditional publishing models in what you’d call “no uncertain terms.” There’s also a lot of practical advice directed at indie writers, as well as news and commentary on writing-related topics.
Why would you ever need more than Tuna for Bernadette? What can those other guys offer you but bad trips and good intentions? And extensive working experience? Math skills and documented statistics…track records of successful published fiction….
Look, never mind all that now. What matters is: while TFB is clearly the bright center of the universe, it turns out there are some other fried gold slices out there too, scattered about the interwebs. Translated into saner language, this means that from time to time I, or the writing-type people I talk to, come across other blogs and web sites with interesting ideas and/or info on offer.
So: I’m going to start posting some of these here. Over time, I’ll post each blog, forum, or other relevant-type site as its own blog entry, and add it to the appropriate “linked resource” page (e.g. BLOGROLL) as well. (This current Tumblr theme puts these in the upper right, beneath the HOME link.)
I haven’t got any connection to any of these guys, and don’t even know them, at this writing at least. I just think other prospective authors and involved readers may, as I did, find some of these thought-provoking and/or informative too. By the way, if you have found any blogs or sites of interest to interested parties—or if you write one yourself, and it’s awesome—please feel free to contribute them. The CONTRIBUTE link, top center above (on the current Tumblr theme), is one way to do this.
By no means is this meant to serve as a comprehensive writers’ resource guide; nor does it necessarily represent a studied selection of the choicest of the choice (though I obviously think there’s merit to be found within each). But at least, hopefully, the results will, as Spinal Tap might put it, “add a tiny bit of color to [our] gray little lives.”
Or at least dump some fuel into the fires of existential confusion.
Let’s start with one or two right now…
In my last entry, I mentioned that I would list the reasons one is not supposed to show an early draft around. I wrote about some of those reasons, but I didn’t actually mention the one that convinced me the most. It was something Sol Stein wrote in a book I’ve quoted before: How to Grow a Novel. Last time I referenced this book, it was about something he said that I found destructive and really disagreed with. Conversely, this point made a lot of sense to me, and I think it bears repeating. I’ll refer to his key point down the page a bit.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, though I suspect there are exceptions to that rule. But I can definitely see the logic to the idea that there is such a thing as harmful feedback. Knowing the difference is key to an author’s success, especially an indie writer, who serves as his/her own gatekeeping editor and publisher. I am by no means the expert on this stuff, but I’ve read a few things that made sense to me, and seen a few things happen, and I’d like to highlight a couple of them here.
The basic idea is that there’s feedback and then there’s feedback…and not all feedback is created equal. There are different factors that contribute very heavily to the value of a given, to use the Hollywood term, “Note.”
One factor, for example, is the appropriateness of the material for the reader. Is the reader part of the book’s target audience? If not, the feedback given might be exactly the opposite of what the book needs. I remember when a friend of mine was showing a near-final draft around to beta readers, one of them absolutely hated it. Turned out the reader had no idea there was a horror aspect to the material, and was also very protective (overprotective, IMO) of his/her kids. He/she thought the YA material was way too harsh for them to be reading (not that they did read it) and ended up going so far as to give the book a low Amazon rating and review when it did go up for purchase. The bottom line was that he/she wasn’t in the target audience. And kind of a douche, frankly. Not that I have strong opinions or anything.
Another factor is the amount of attention the reader commits to reviewing the material. Sometimes when we scan and skim and gloss over a chunk of text, we miss things that are key to the story (and the quality of the writing). We might get the wrong idea about a character or event, or misinterpret our own failure to follow plot points as a problem with the plot being convoluted or dull. If an early reader is just looking at it as a favor to the writer and isn’t into it, the resulting feedback can be sparse, confusing, or just plain wrong.
Good friends can be a problem as well. The whole time a friend is reading your stuff, he/she might be thinking, cool, my good bud Gryphon wrote this, and it’s pretty good considering he’s someone I know. A friend’s feedback can be biased in a lot of ways, including softballing to save your feelings. Or by contrast, it might be excessively harsh in order to avoid the appearance of bias, or just because you tend to be hard on each other…the way some friendships are. Well, most of mine. Anyway, I think the most common scenario is, “wow, cool, you wrote this? I like it! I want a signed copy.” (But it’s an ebook….)
The most important factor, I think, and the point Stein was making above all, has to do with the idea of treating writing as a craft, writing a book as a project/process, and publishing as a business. On page 156 of the aforementioned book, he says:
Friends and family are the least objective people in the world for manuscript reading purposes. … They are so pleased to see your words on paper, they will exult, they will praise, and they will mislead because your prospective readers … will be judging your material by the emotional charge they get out of reading it [as opposed to] out of knowing you wrote it.
He goes on to mention, perhaps more importantly, that:
The editing of fiction is a high craft that takes years to learn, and you can’t expect friends and relatives close at hand to substitute their intuitive reactions for experience.
As indie writers, or at least independent-minded writers, we often think in terms of bucking the system and the way publishing has worked in the last couple of centuries. The reality, of course, is that a lot of the professionals who’ve worked in the business as writers, editors or hands-on publishers have developed experience and expertise that’s extremely relevant and meaningful, especially to inexperienced novelists like, say, me. The same applies to people who have fought their way through the indie system.
What I’m talking about is that if writing is a craft and publishing is a business, there are right and wrong ways to do things, or at least righter and wronger, or certainly more/less likely to be successful. This means that there are a ton of things you can do in the structure and content of your novel that experienced professionals can see right off the bat will not work well for the typical readership. Feedback from a professional editor who has spent time studying the craft is very different from feedback from your office-mate (assuming he/she hasn’t been through the workshop circuit or the publishing grinder). By different, I mean better, or rather, more likely to be useful and result in improvements, not just changes.
Of course, most indie writers don’t have ready access to professional story editors, at least not for free. And anyway, not everything an editor says is necessarily right, or right for you. The way I see it, though, the closer you can get to professionally-minded feedback, the better. And there are definitely degrees and in-betweens. For example, other writers, especially those who have studied the craft by reading lots of books and ideally taking workshops, are more likely (IMO) to give useful feedback than the average bear. I’ve heard that’s one of the top value points workshops deliver: meeting and befriending (or at least allying with) other writers who can trade considered critiques with you. I haven’t done any workshops, at least not yet, but this makes a ton of sense to me, and it’s the number one reason I’m thinking about doing one (a big one, ideally) in the next few months.
So…showing an early draft to friends might be a good stroke, but it also might mislead us into taking the wrong direction with our rewrites. Worse, generalized negative feedback might be devastating and drive us to despair. To my mind, feedback is only useful if it comes with clear suggestions as to how to fix the perceived problem. This generally means being able to tell with some level of accuracy what specifically is missing. Is the tension being built too slowly or too quickly? Is it being built inconsistently, in peaks and valleys? Is there not enough conflict in the dialogue, and in which scenes is the problem most pronounced? And also, which scenes/chapters/exchanges of dialogue read like the work of a professional? Positive feedback is a lot more wonderful if we know both where and why we’re doing everything, or something, right.
Naturally, there’s a lot to be said for just “I like it” or “I don’t” when it comes from enough target audience members. Still, it seems to me that we might as well use the craft, and thoughts from its other practitioners, to get as far as we can before the public even gets a look. It’s always possible to get lucky and pump out a bestseller (or literary classic) without paying attention to any of the rules (or breaking every one of them). But I don’t see any harm in listening to the voice of experience, or at least training, whenever I can get it.
You probably like to shower before going out into the world each day. I generally do, too, especially since nappy really doesn’t work for my hair.
Lately, as I’ve talked about the first draft being more or less done, more and more friends have been asking to read it. I’ve been tempted a couple of times, especially on days when I like what I’ve done.
So what’s the big deal? says the shoulder devil. Let them read it. Thrill and delight them. Bask in the glow of admiration and get some early feedback.
Don’t do it, says the angel on the other one. It’s a bad idea, for every reason in the book.
I’ll list those reasons in a minute, but first, a little history. I used to write articles for computer magazines. Exactly ninety of them, as it happens, plus chunks of two computer books. One thing I learned from this, about my writing, is that what I write doesn’t need editing. It’s perfect as it comes out. Perfect!
How I learned this is, one time many years ago, I suspected editors weren’t doing much editing on my articles. They would change the titles sometimes, but I could never find anything that had been changed. Like every hungry freelancer, I followed length guidelines closely, so that was never an issue. And I honestly do have good spelling skills, except for a couple of rules I can never quite learn dealing with “-ence” vs. “-ance” and that sort of thing. And spell-checkers have existed since before I was in puberty. Just barely, but still.
So I tested the theory. I dug out the magazine with my latest article in it and compared it to the original manuscript word for word. What I learned was interesting: not one word had been changed. I even found a typo, and when I looked for it in the original, there it was.
So, what did this mean? I assumed it either meant that editor was lazy or that my writing was perfect as it was. I’m sure there was some truth to both. A valuable lesson.
Only…
A martial arts instructor told me once—many times, actually—that some lessons are really bad to learn. He would get students in with nonprofessional training, or who’d tried to learn some things on their own, or who were naturally graceful and adept at certain movements. These people tended to be the hardest to train, because they had a lot of unlearning to do first. And just like that, it’s important that I unlearn what that article comparison taught me.
First of all, nonfiction is very different from fiction. While doubtless my articles were, without exception, hilarious and uplifting, they were fundamentally fact-based. As long as there were no factual errors, and the information was delivered concisely around the humor bits, they would serve their purpose.
There are a lot of of other factors to good fiction, though, especially novel-length fiction. Constant conflict in action and dialog. Escalating tension at scene, arc, part and total book levels. A purpose to every descriptive passage (foreshadowing, establishing terrain for a fight, etc.) In fact, nothing in the book at all that doesn’t serve a purpose. Not to mention plot and subplots, appropriate PoV voicing through syntax and vocabulary, character differentiation, and, wherever possible, a musical flow to the grouping and order of words. And of course, most importantly, conveying emotional experiences of interest to the reader, from sympathetic misery to plain old fun. Still want to write fiction?
Anyway, no matter how “perfect” it may seem in terms of spelling and grammar and punctuation and generally hanging together, no first draft ever has all of those things. Probably not even most of them. Plenty of final drafts don’t either, not to mention published novels, but at least by then the writer’s given it hris all. (Hris=his or her, and yes, I made that up.)
So, showing someone your first draft is like going out stinky. On a date. A first date. Sure, you can do it, and you might even not be instantly loathed. But your first shot is important and as a new novelist the odds are massively stacked against you anyway. Only one chance to make a first impression, and the opinion of every early reader is a key voice contributing to the ultimate success, or failure, of the book. I’ve seen the same phenomenon in releasing software before it’s completely finished. Users don’t see bugs the same way developers do.
The moral of the story, obviously, is that it’s probably wiser to put in the effort and not present until it’s ready, or at least as ready as I can get it. So, if I’ve got any wisdom in me, which is questionable, I’ll keep it close until the next full pass at least. And that will take more time.
Well, after two out of the four months spent on road trips, I’m back and writing with reasonable efficiency. I did zero writing on the trips, but I did note a bunch of ideas. It’s just too hard to write on a (mostly) solo road trip. There’s just too much thrashing involved in the mindspace switching between driving hundreds of miles a day, photography and writing. So two out of three was all I’d expected anyway.
No other trips planned at the moment, though I often try to go away on train trips or other city destinations in winter. We’ll see. I don’t plan any further ahead than absolutely necessary.
Since returning home a couple of weeks ago, I’ve pretty much finished the first draft. I’m going through finding and trimming loose ends, planting candlesticks for use as murder weapons later (metaphorically speaking) and generally looking things over for the second draft process.
I feel like things are coming together pretty well. Of course, everyone may hate it. But if I don’t, that’s a start.
Once this draft is done, I’ll have a little problem on my hands. Well, it’s more of a compound problem.
This multifaceted problem will call for an algorithmic solution.
First of all, obviously I’ll have to make cuts. You always have to make cuts. I don’t have a target size in mind, or on order, so I’m really just talking about trimming and efficiency enhancement, that sort of thing. But I can tell you right now that cuts won’t get this book down by more than 100 pages, 200 at the absolute outside. We’d still be dealing with a double-size book at least.
From there, there’s the question of whether to split the book or not. This was planned as the first novel in an epic (urban/post-apocalyptic) fantasy type of series with a large cast of characters and three substantial POV characters in the first volume alone. Anything that can be split (i.e. a series split into books) can be split again, and it’s certainly possible to split this up into two or perhaps three smaller books. But there are significant problems I see with this, right off the bat.
For one thing, each book in a series is expected to have a 3-act structure with goals articulated and achieved and a big climactic set piece and all the rest. I can see opportunities to upscale lesser travails and triumphs for this purpose, but even just thinking about it, it feels a little too deliberate. Not impossible, though.
I could try to do more of a serial sort of thing (“Tune in next time!”) and just end the first (and possibly second) book with everything up in the air. I think this could be said of several of the six books in the Lord of the Rings series, so there’s precedent. If I did this, it would be purely for marketing reasons, and I can already see the hateful comments about unsatisfying, incomplete stories…but at least I wouldn’t be bending the material out of shape in the process.
There’s another problem with that kind of split, though. Without getting into too terribly spoilerish details, certain key characters don’t meet until the third act, which would mean they wouldn’t meet until the third book, unless I made drastic changes or contrived some sort of device where they have spiritual contact or something. Not entirely impossible, but it does concern me.
Look at Wool, for example. The author of that work (which I quite enjoyed, by the way) had the opposite problem: several self-contained novellas which he subsequently assembled into an omnibus edition. I’ve seen this style before; for example, the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski, or my other favorite eastern European series, the Watch books (Night Watch, Day Watch, etc.) by Sergey Lukayenko. Those books were clearly written as shorter self-contained stories that were collected into novel-length works.
To be honest, though, I kind of dislike that approach to revisited-universe storytelling. I don’t mean I dislike the stories, obviously. I like all of the above, really a lot. But as a lifelong heavy reader, I’d usually rather experience the conflict and suspense and the characters’ world stretched over the arc of a full-length novel. There’s a reason novels are as long as they are. And in addition to that one, there’s a second reason a lot of tome-length books are as long as they are. I mean, I don’t know why some of Stephen King’s books need to be as long as they are; but it’s clear why a lot of epic fantasy does. It’s simple: lots of characters, multiple POV characters in particular, especially when they have their own separate stories, result in longer books. It’s just obvious. And for better or worse, that’s what this first book of mine is.
One especially odd possibility would be to split the book along POV lines. Book 1 would be the collected POV chapters of character 1; Book 2, character 2; and Book 3 would be where they come together. I hate this idea instinctively, because I like reading series and I hate it when the author makes a major change in the POV character lineup later in the series, and that’s exactly what this would feel like. Still, it’s a possibility, and even more interesting is the possibility that in an ebook you could do BOTH - some readers could choose to read the chapters as they are arranged for the larger total work; others could read the Book of Character 1 first, then the Book of Char 2, and then the Book of Both. I may look into this choose-your-own-split option regardless of how things shake out in the final arrangement.
At the moment I’m leaning toward leaving the book as it is: long. I have a lot of the next book in mind already, and I doubt it’ll be any shorter, so already we’re looking at either 4-6 installments or two tomes. And I intend to do at least three of the larger stories, so that could be up to 9 installments if I don’t rein in the splitting. I can envision getting into it with the verve of an axe-hacking psycho killer and turning it into a sheaf of magazine-sized segments, thinly sliced and bloody.
More installments might bring certain shelf space-type benefits, though pricing becomes a complex problem and a losing proposition for everyone but Amazon. As an ebook buyer, though, I think I would find any more splitting than absolutely necessary to be pretty annoying. In fact, personally I even prefer long editions with a whole series encapsulated in one giant ebook file whenever possible. Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber would be one of many such examples; of course, it’s usually only the older finished series that are reprinted in that sort of format.
Anyway, once the first draft is done, I’ll look at these different possibilities and see what seems right.
Your ideas are welcome, always, but even more so in this case.
Recently, I read a Willam Gibson novel called The Difference Engine. The premise is that computing became popular a century or so earlier, based on Babbage’s designs for, well, his difference engine. In the world of that book, hackers are called “clackers,” presumably referring the noise made by the giant steam-powered machines - or maybe specifically the punching of punch-cards.
In my world, the clacking noises are coming from the Unicomp buckling spring keyboard that I’m typing this on right now. This thing’s as freaking awesome as the original ones were, back when the PC-AT was the i7 of the day and there were four colors, including black, in the world. But I digress.
I mention this because we discussed these keyboards earlier in the blog, and I was inspired at the time to order one. But I didn’t use it much until recently. In this recliner that’s situated before one wall-mounted oracular 1080p TV, I’ve a used a Logitech wireless backlit keyboard for a long time. There were advantages to that thing, like it was was obviously better in the dark than this unlit one. When the battery felt like holding a charge, anyway.
I can live without the backlighting, though; I can type without seeing the keys. It took me a good dozen years, but I did eventually learn to touch-type. Conveniently, these buckling spring keyboards are much easier to touch-type on than any other keyboard ever invented, for a very simple reason. Two words: accurate feedback. Once your fingers have learned how hard and deep they need to mash each key, you can just let them fly without worrying about missing any keystrokes: each and every clack guarantees that the key you typed actually registered.
“Modern” keyboards, by contrast, give inconsistent feedback in the form of mushy, tentative presses and uneven returns. As a result, you never know whether you’ve actually typed what you meant to until you see it on the screen. The head-bobbing and eyeball-bouncing this engenders constitutes a sort of writers’ equivalent to digital photographers’ “chimping” phenomenon. Instead of pouring out your daydreams efficiently through confident fingertips, your focus thrashes between keyboard, screen, whatever body parts happen to itch, the 100 other distractions around you, and such bits and scraps of ideas as you can remember in between.
This tawdry little dance—which we could call, say, “chumping”—is all too familiar to me, especially lately. For the last several months I’ve done all my book writing on a mac laptop keyboard. Some people may claim to like those flat, featureless rubberized scrabble tiles…but whoever feels that way is not a fast typist, I can tell you that for free.
In a proactive effort to combat this very issue, I ordered a second Unicomp keyboard, in this case designed for a mac. I set it up neatly alongside the rest of the mac docking station type gear. Unfortunately it gets zero use, because virtually all of the writing gets done with the computer in my lap in an armchair somewhere. Maybe someday I’ll attempt creative writing in an office setting. But for now, I’ll have to remain a slave to the routines I’ve carefully cultivated to get the work done by any means necessary.
Maybe I’ll relearn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard again, while I’m at it. They make a buckling-spring Dvorak, don’t they?
I’m thinking of taking a break between first and second drafts to generate the thing into an ebook end to end and see how it reads in that form. It’s easy to do that in a basic way, but I was thinking of treating it as an educational project. I’m talking about actually preparing the necessary front matter and whatever other bits are needed to squeeze it correctly and cleanly out of Scrivener. Then, from there, possibly further, by running it through into the iBook Author program, or whatever it’s called, to add bells and whistles and spinning pinwheels.
I actually do have a few pinwheels in mind for the final draft, though I’m not sure about bothering with them on early test runs. Either way, it should be worth some bloggage later.
Anyway, I think it’ll be a good trial run of the material. Any obvious holes and errors should stand out, for one thing. Hopefully it’ll also serve the purpose of seeing the material in a different medium. Writers’ lore says to read it out loud, or have someone else do so, in order to experience the (your) same words in different ways. I think that’s interesting in principle, and I could see trying that out too. But I don’t think anyone’s going to want to read 800 pages of first draft aloud.
So, a first-draft ebook it will be. To one extent or another.
It’s like this: you’re at point A, and you need to get to point B. Full of pep, starting out, you cross the first half in no time at all. Then your pace becomes more modest, but it’s steady, and before you know it, you’ve gone half the remaining distance. You can see the finish line, but it seems to take you as long to get half of the rest of the way there as it did to cross the first half of the whole field.
And so forth. You move along by halves, more and more slowly, and it seems you’ll never get there. Then, finally, you get to the point where you can’t go halfway without some part of your body swinging over the line. And you’re there.
That’s where I am with this damn first draft.
Over the last couple of weeks, I cranked out the long, extended climax and now I’m writing what happens after it. Then I have to go back and write a couple of earlier chapters for character who’s instrumental in the big showdown, but who hasn’t had enough POV time to be ready for it. At that point it’s second draft time, and the real work begins.
The original purpose of this blog was to have a record of the experience of writing this first novel, for me and whoever else might be interested later. I didn’t expect much notice until sometime after publication at the very least.
The occasional comment and “like” that some entries have garnered, though, suggest that sometimes someone reads something. But I really have no idea if anyone’s reading this blog with any degree of regularity.
So…if you’ve read more than a couple, and think you might read more in the future, could you please make some sort of mark to let me know? A comment on Disqus or Facebook, or even a ”like,” or whatever else there is.
Let me know!
I’ve taken a few steps toward the eventual marketing of the book(s), such as this blog, and setting up facebook and twitter, and like, writing the book(s). (The (s) means I’ll probably have to split it into 2-3 books in the end, since it’s 170,000 words so far).
I’m wondering whether I should set up a “product” page on Facebook, for example, or get started on a website. That sort of thing. Heck, some people even set up phony twitter or facebook accounts for the characters in their books. And then there’s the book trailer…let’s not even think about that one for now.
I’ve been assuming it would be better to do these sorts of things once I’ve settled on a title for the/each book or for the series overall (even if I don’t split the first book, it’s written as the first part of a series).
At the very least, I can start planning what specific elements I’ll end up needing. If anyone has any suggestions, e.g., based on what they’ve seen out there for other genre novels, I’m legitimately interested.
I’ve done my daily quota of writing for at least the last 13 days in a row, possibly more like 17. Saturday I had to take the RV to Reno for trip prep-related work, so I took the day off from writing. But the project’s cranking along. I’ve been working on the climax for the last five or six days, and I’ve gotten about 3/4 through it, maybe a little more.
I read a book on the ConformiPad the other day. (That’s iPad, for those who have trouble parsing nicknames…no one ever seems to understand that one. Let it be clear that, in the same way Devo acknowledges their own ludicrousness along with the rest of the species, I can’t exclude myself from the conformism that having one of these things implies.)
I did it because I didn’t know what I wanted to read and it was easier to search through the library on that device than on the slower Kindle. Also I was reading in dim light and would have had to use the Kindle light the whole time, which is OK, and the light on the Kindle Touch case is much more battery-efficient than the one for the Kindle Keyboard. But we’re all still waiting for them to release a sidelit model like B&N did months ago, and it’s getting annoying. (They call it frontlit, but it’s sidelit. I don’t know if it’ll be better or worse than the current lighting system, but it’ll be more compact.)
The device was much bulkier and heavier and notifications kept distracting me, and I had to charge it about three times during the course of the book, including once when I wanted to be reading. Also I dropped it once, on carpet, and it reminded me that I fumble-drop Kindles all the time…they tend to survive nowadays, though I broke about four of the more fragile models in the early days, but truly dropping the C-pad will smash it.
So I don’t think I’ll do it very often. But it wasn’t so bad for occasional reading. Now let it never be said that I’m bigoted against Apple, even though I am.
Not head down, as in hanging one’s head, but heads down, as in, nose to the grindstone. Except I only have one head, so the plural is irresponsible and misleading. And this answers the question of whether it’s possible to digress before you even get started.
So here’s the status. I’m pleased to say I’ve been writing an average of 6.5 out of 7 days since I got back into the saddle after the last road trip. Though that wording makes no sense, since the driver’s seat is more like a saddle than the seat at Starbucks I write in. But again I digress.
I wanted to write everything else before writing the climax of the story, so I went along finishing up the final chapters that lead up to it (that’s lead as in present tense, not the extremely annoying common modern misspelling of the past tense “led”). Then I found I had left a couple of other chapters unfinished, and one or two outlined but unwritten. Then I had to decide whether to write the denoument before or after writing the climax (do books have denouments or just movies?) All this took way longer than I had hoped, especially since I was slow to get into it at first.
But now things are moving along at a reasonable clip, though I continue to have the problem of writing too clean of a first draft, and am spending too much time on word selection and that sort of tweak that the second draft’s supposed to deal with. At this point I’ve got maybe a third of the first iteration of the climax written. I say it this way because I’m sure it will go through several iterations, i.e. rewrites by the time the book is completely done. That’s sort of disheartening, because it seems like everything I do now is throwaway, but I suppose you can’t start rewrites until you’ve finished the write.
Still hoping to finish the first draft before leaving on my next road trip, but it’s completely dependent now on whether I choose to leave next week or a month later to try to catch the turning of the leaves in Maine. Either way, I hereby swear on all that’s holy, that I will write at least 50% of days on my next road trip. (Although I’m agnostic at best, so I don’t know how much that’s worth.) Seriously, it ought to be more doable this time because I’ve learned enough about photography now that, and got my gear to the state where, that other activity shouldn’t interfere nearly as much with this one.
I’ve talked about the first wall I hit since I started this project, and how I got past it. Now I’d like to talk about the second one I hit, and the periodic rearing of its ugly head.
Once again, I’m not talking about writer’s block - the blank page syndrome. That hasn’t happened to me, at least not in the way I envision it, where you sit down and have nothing to write about, nothing to say. I wonder if it’s a cliche in film with little basis in reality. Or maybe it’s a literary fiction thing, where the writer is resisting all structure and plot and waiting for the essence of the universe to flow through him, or something, and it’s not flowing.
What happened to me, this time, is that I got to a point where I had cherry-picked all or most of the sections of the book that I felt like writing, and was now in a position where I had to write pieces that needed to be written, but that I didn’t feel like writing right then. These weren’t necessarily boring parts…ideally all boring parts will be cut anyway, so there’s not much sense in writing them in the first place, really.
These were perfectly good parts, dealing with things important to the characters: relationship building, learning key skills, stepping stone conflict encounters, that kind of stuff. Also, the big showdown climax, which you’d think I’d be eager to get to.
And I am. But just then, I didn’t feel like writing these pieces. I didn’t really know why. Part of it, I think, was that I had spent a lot of time on the parts dealing with one POV character, and now I needed to move to a different POV character who I hadn’t written on for a couple of weeks or more. I can’t explain it further than that, other than to assume it was my own ornery laziness that I had to fight through.
The solution to this was the same as always: keep writing. I chipped away at it bit by bit, and in the process I had some of the shortest writing days that I’d had since early on in the project. It took me almost a week to get through a 2-3 chapter sequence. Now, as I approach the end of the first draft, sometimes it takes days to get through a single chapter.
By this point, though, it seems to be paying off. I’ve got some holes that need to be filled in early chapters, and some continuity smoothing, but other than that, I’m finally to the point where the last remaining parts of the first draft are getting knocked out, and all that will be left is the big showdown climax and the denoument afterward.
Of course, once the first draft is done, that’s when the problems will really start coming.
I’ve written before about how I feel about Apple products, despite the fact that I use them. For now let’s just say it’s a mixed bag, but I have reasons for using a Macbook Air 11” for fiction writing. That’s what I’ve been using all along. It’s smallish, somewhat light, and perhaps more importantly, has no hard drive to crash. But it’s poor in terms of ports, among other failings.
Now they’ve put out a model that’s twice as big, twice as heavy, and more than twice as expensive: the MacBook 15” with Retina Display, or similar name. It has an exceptionally high-resolution screen, though oddly it’s not a touch screen when they clearly have the technology to do that well using exactly the same components. It’s got better ports than I’d expect from Apple (including 2X USB 3.0), an SDXC slot legitimately useful for photography, the same awful keyboard, and the same size SSD as I have now (there’s a slightly larger one in the insane high-end model which is even more outrageously priced). Also a pretty good, though not top-notch gaming card, which I could really only use if I installed Windows dual-boot, wasting a lot of premium SSD space in the process. And of course, no blu-ray (or any internal disc)—I read Jobs didn’t like them for some reason, finding them technically untidy or something, so the company’s employees started spouting nonsense about how you can just download everything including the highest-resolution video you could ever want.
So why am I considering getting one?
Lately I’ve felt that the amount of real estate on the screen has been a problem for things like outlining and referring to notes. The high-resolution, larger screen would let me arrange more resources on the screen at once. It would also be much better for any sort of photo work, since I’ve been doing that at a more pro-ish level than ever before. Also if I someday get back to writing music, it’s more powerful and has a better screen for it.
On the other hand, I can solve these problems in other ways and probably should. I also know they will put out a better version in six months and I’ll wish at that time that I’d waited. Also, the system setting regarding the screen’s resolution is bizarre and misleading, and I still don’t understand it. Also I’d need to use a different bag to carry the thing, since it would be about 4” larger diagonally and almost twice as thick.
So far I’ve resisted.
Since the last batch of blog entries, i.e., for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been faithfully following rule #1: Write Every Day. Getting back into the habit was less difficult than I had expected, perhaps because of reinforcing factors like the fact that I usually go to the same place to do it, which happens to be the local Starbucks. Whatever the reason, I started out expecting to get going @ 10 minutes a day, but quickly moved up to basically draining the laptop’s battery each day and then going home andthinking about the project.
This sounds good and all, and it’s better than not writing every day, but there have been different kinds of problems. First, when I got back from the last trip I had many distractions, some of which were related to the following:
Even so I’ve managed to get on a schedule where writing gets a good chunk of time blocked off to itself daily. But there have been distractions during that time, including:
It may be time to find a new place to go every day, or to train myself to do it at home or the office, but I feel like I should just brute-force my way through finishing the first draft before making any changes to the routine. I guess that’s what I’ll do.
Still, it seems to take a long time to get anything written now, though, and it often feels less natural than it did before. Perhaps as a result of this, I often find myself tweaking existing parts of the book instead of writing the new stuff that’s needed to get the first draft finished.
I guess the answer is always the same in this life: never give up, try; try again; git ’er done; just do it; however you want to say it. So, that’s what I’ll do.
This is mostly about photography, not much about writing.
I’ve always taken pictures on trips, when I found things worth shooting. I have ten thousand pictures posted at http://gryphontravel.shutterfly.com, and I post more in batches after each trip or so. I have traditionally used the best point-and-shoot cameras I could find and done zero work in photoshop. Post-production has been limited to orienting photos as portrait rather than landscape, when I notice it’s needed, in the rare cases where I’ve taken sideways shots. I avoid it because that’s too much post-production for me.
After a fishing trip on which I took pictures of wildlife more than I fished, I upgraded to a camera on which I could change out lenses. I hadn’t been able to zoom as far as I needed to, or frame shots well enough, and wanted to upgrade. I wanted the Sony NEX-7 but it wasn’t being shipped due to meltdowns or earthquakes or something in Japan.
So I got the Nikon 1 V1 instead. When I went to central Europe over the new year, I took the V1 and the results were pretty good. I also acquired a Leica D-Lux 5 while I was there, which is an excellent-quality (though low-resolution) point-and-shoot. I found myself using it a lot for its low-light capabilities and creamy yellow coloring in available-light shots (I almost never use a flash).
When I returned from Europe, I left the V1 sitting for a month or more on my table here and then when I tried to start it up, I found the viewscreen wasn’t working. I had to have it sent back to Nikon, which took a month and annoyed the hell out of me since it was a new camera. Partly as a result of this and partly because I now realized that the sensor is too small, and the resolution too low, I decided to upgrade to a real semi-pro DSLR. I probably shouldn’t have tried to get what I needed out of an intermediate camera anyway. Guess I’ll sell it.
After much research I decided on the Nikon D800 or the Canon EOS 5D Mark 3. I was leaning toward the Canon due to the problem I’d just had with the Nikon 1 V1, and since I’ve been happy with Canon point-and-shoots over the last several years since I stopped buying Sony products due to terrible service. But the Nikon D800 had won in the court of internet reviews, and I decided to go for it. Except, I couldn’t get one, since it was backordered worldwide.
Due to the surprising quality of the Leica D-Lux 5, I decided to also look into higher-end Leicas. I found out that the M9-P and its lenses are collectible and therefore resellable, in the case of the lenses, even scalpable for more money, though I’m not so into that. So I decided against my better (cheaper) judgment to get one of those too, though I could only find one lens at first. I figured I’d just sell it if I didn’t find out it was phenomenal. It arrived just before I left on the recent trip.
Setting out on that trip, I planned to beg at camera shops in different cities in case they had a D800 that had just come in and not been allocated to a customer yet. In a stroke of extreme luck, I got one on the first try. So now I had two real cameras, half of the US to shoot, and very little knowledge about manual-mode photography. I spent a lot of time learning about this stuff and took a decent number of decent pictures in the process, including attempting some full-auto, manual-focus, manual-shutter-speed pictures of interesting lightning near the border of Georgia and Florida. I also seeked out Leica M-system lenses in various stores in various cities in various southern states; they are very rare and hard to find, and I figured I was traveling anyway so I might as well have a quest.
One thing I learned was that you have to have your mind in the right state and your camera ready to go in order to catch some interesting shots. I took to wearing the Leica M9-P around my neck near-constantly since it’s so much smaller, and using the Nikon D800 for anything requiring zoom, distance or tricky focus. I haven’t really studied the results yet but I’ll bet both cameras performed fantastically.
Sadly, I found it hard to be in both photo mindset and writing mindset. I find that to write a lot, I have to be in a frame of mind where it’s not just the most important thing I’m concerned with, but rather, the only thing. I have to learn to balance it a little, because I need to be able to do other things and not lose the aggressive write-every-day mindset that it takes to finish a novel. Maybe it will be better now that I have (a little) less to learn about photography.
It had better be better, because the next road trip is less than 3 weeks away, and I want to complete my first draft before I leave.
This blog post is not about writing per se. It’s more about not-writing, due to vehicular problems on the road trip I just returned from.
My Itasca Navion has been a lemon from the very beginning, which could be kind of charming in a Milennium Falcon sort of way. Except that it’s been me it’s happening to, instead of some fictional character. So it’s actually been more inconvenient and dangerous than, you know, comically romantic.
I won’t get into details about what went wrong with it in the past, but in the first months after I got it, it had multiple separate incidents of serious engine computer problems and various other issues on both the chassis part (the Mercedes Sprinter van that’s the engine and drive train and most of the cab) and the house part (the Winnebago RV box that’s the shell of the turtle). At least it’s still under (extended) warranty, so I don’t have to pay for much of what happens to it. Except apparently headlights are only covered for the first six months.
On this trip, both headlights burned out at different times, which about doubles the number of headlights I’ve had burn out in my entire driving career. I also had a propane leak, which is as dangerous and disturbing as it sounds, and it sounds like a loud hissing with a sulphurous stench. Simultaneously there was a sewage leak, which would be as gross as it sounds except I don’t really use the built-in facilities. Also a hubcap went flying off somewhere in Atlanta, which is probably more a testament to some of the awful potholey roads on the outskirts of that city than to the vehicle’s assembly, though I suspect it wasn’t solidly attached (since the other three are still there).
The air conditioning started to malfunction in Florida, which isn’t really the place you want that to happen. It would be blasting lots of cold air goodness with loud wind tunnel sound effects and then suddenly not be blowing at all, though still sounding like it was blowing just as hard. I’m not sure that one got fixed right, since it didn’t happen for the two Mercedes dealers I took it to. We’ll see on the next trip, I guess, which is soon. Also, the rearward of the two ceiling fans failed, and needs to be replaced and ideally upgraded. And the TV antenna stopped working at some point; I don’t watch TV, so I’m not sure how long that’s been out, but I was trying to demo it.
The vehicle consumed a great deal of various fluids, more than it should have in my opinion for a three-week trip, including, oddly, antifreeze, and less surprisingly, the ever-delightful Diesel Exhaust Fluid, which is basically synthetic urine in a bottle (I am not making this up) that somehow cleanses diesel fumes. I’d had the truck serviced the day before I left, so it should have been good for at least 7000 miles…although, regarding that service, the first problem I had on this trip was that they’d put too much motor oil in, which I discovered on a Sunday, and which I had to have fixed at a truck workshop that I was just lucky was open. So who knows what state it was in really.
So, in addition to all the other majestic sights on this trip, I got to see the inside of several Mercedes Sprinter dealerships and Winnebago service centers. And there’s more to do at the local warranty service place before my next trip, which is soon. I did meet some interesting characters at these places, though, and generally received good service.
I just don’t understand how a new vehicle can have this amount of trouble without the maker going out of business. Or makers, in this case, since there’s the chassis and the house and they’re completely separate. These constant problems are really distracting when all you want to do is drive, look at cities to possibly move to, take photos, and finish the first draft of your novel. Instead you’re constantly worrying about whether you’re going to die in a fiery gas explosion or faint from heat exhaustion, or run out of some fluid you didn’t know you needed when you’re hundreds of miles from anywhere. It’s all the delights of boat ownership coupled with road hazards and traffic.
Though I still do like having my house, and my stuff, with me wherever I go. In principle.
In the last few months I’ve been talking a lot to a friend who was stalled in the novel he’d been working on off and on for a year or two. We’ve been discussing what we’ve learned from experience and books and trying to motivate each other, and in fact, the first of my road trips this year was with him, and we both wrote on most days, as I posted about before.
Among lots of other excellent advice (most of which I learned from other people and not my own brain) I told him that all he had to do to get started was to write for 10 minutes each day, even 5 minutes, just long enough to get a taste for it but not long enough to feel like it’s a pressure. He blew it off at first, then started doing it, and has been very consistent about it, as I was before these road trips began. He’s started doing hours at a time, which is rare for me. Now he’s very nearly done with his first draft, which puts him weeks ahead of me, and which also makes me proud of him.
I lamented to him several times over the last couple of weeks that I’d been breaking Rule #1 to the point where I might as well have never formed the habit in the first place. The first few times, he said it’s OK, you need to let things stew sometimes, to let ideas gel and problems to be solved by your subconscious, or whatever.
I told him that might work for him, but it’s not what I need, and it’s an unfairly generous interpretation of my slowed progress. Those sorts of inspirations and epiphanies do come to me in the shower or dreams or whenever, but productivity comes from following Rule #1 above all.
Finally he said, OK, you’re right. You do suck, plus you’re whiny. So go back to 10 minutes a day. (Some of that might be paraphrased.)
This, of course, was a really good point. I’d gotten to where I was expecting myself to do 1-2 hours per session, and it had become hard to find that kind of time on road trip days, so I was blowing it off entirely…when all I really had to do was 10 minutes to keep the habit going. Of course, it’s the rough gear shifting between mindspaces that’s hard, and probably takes more than 10 minutes to achieve after driving hundreds of miles, but the principle is sound.
I’ve said in the past that it’s much easier to keep a habit than form it. Now I’m going to have to find out. After I post this, I’ll be doing my 10 minutes for the day. Maybe even much more. I have to get back in the saddle.
Setting goals is another key to completing your novel. Maybe Set and Achieve Goals should even be Rule #2, though if I’m going to be declaring a whole set of rules I’ll need to put some time in to get them just right. Anyway, I haven’t done this as much as I should. So, my goal, now, shall be:
to finish my first draft before I leave for my next road trip in about 3 weeks.
Can I do it?
I guess we’ll see.
Meanwhile, my message to all working writers is, as always, follow Rule #1. Write every day! Don’t blow it like I did and have to form the habit again from scratch. 10 minutes is enough to keep yourself on the wagon.
