In Which Sherlock Sees a Pattern Developing
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Bonnie and I come across LARPers mid-battle on a Tennessee Road Trip.
What this blog is really meant to be about is writing. I started a blog after hearing writers talk about blogging at Clarion West. It’s been a good way to keep track of some of my writing habits and goals, and a great way to stay in touch with my writing friends who are scattered all over the country. The frequency of my posting also tends to fluctuate depending on writing. If I’m not writing fiction, for example, I’m definitely not writing blog posts. And if I’m writing a lot of fiction, I’m on a roll and I’m not going to stop to write a blog post. The sweet spot for blogging is when I’m writing and I’m in the middle of the project and I still want to write but I don’t know what comes next (got that?)
Yesterday, I discovered that this point inevitably comes about 1/3 of the way though any project.
Let’s look at some trends. First of all, there’s a previous series of blog posts where I was posting word counters for my novel, working title Perfectly Average. Eventually I got bored of the word counter thing, mostly because it wasn’t climbing fast enough. On February 21st, 2009 I posted the word counter and it was at EXACTLY 33%, or 16,606 words. The next word counter isn’t posted until March 8th, and it’s only a few words more (44%.)
Over the weekend, I had a sudden inspiration on a fantasy story I’ve been wanting to write about a girl who has access to a fantasy world a la Narnia but just wants out and to live a normal life in the Real World. I wrote in a fever all weekend, totaling about 17,300 words. Almost exactly 1/3 of a 50,000 word YA novel. Now I’m stuck. The first five chapters took two days. The sixth was torture and took two days. The seventh? Um, well, I’m blogging right now but I’m sure I’ll get to it.
A few other examples include:
• Henry’s Atlantis: 15,635 words — This novel is from a short story that I wrote for Jim Grimsley’s Advanced Fiction class at Emory. It’s a mystery/ghost story that I remember working on feverishly and happily my entire winter break in ‘08-’09.
• Untitled Mystery: 12,233 words — Involves magic and a kidnapping.
• Raven Novel: ~13,000 — this one exists in various incarnations.
• Waveriders: 11,012 — My comic YA novel about feuding pool and beach lifeguards.
Word counts aren’t everything. I don’t think the problem here is focusing on words counts. I’m just using the approximate word count of 50,000 to show that in terms of my goal (a completed, polished YA manuscript) I’m only managing to get 1/3 of the way there. The thing that shocked me was that, when I looked at these stories all together, my progress is so consistent.
I write beginnings. Long ones. Even good ones. Some of the novel fragments I pulled out for this post were ones I hadn’t looked at in forever. I liked parts of them more than I could have expected now that I had the perspective of time. But the fact remains, they’re only 1/3 of the way there. The only exception is Perfectly Average, which I managed to complete during the CW Write a Thon. It’s at about 56,000 words and needs a huge edit before I start soliciting critiques.
In some ways, I guess this makes sense. It’s easy to write a start to something and then see that it doesn’t work or try a different tactic. Although, these beginnings are a bit more substantial than a chapter or two.
In terms of memory, people tend to be better at recalling beginnings and endings. I’m probably way more of an expert on how stories start and end than I am on middles just because of how I remember what I read. Also, not to be macabre or tempt fate of anything, but I’m only about 1/3 of the way done as a person. Some days, my life doesn’t even feel like it had a middle, but is instead just a bunch of loose threads and precipitating action that will at some point coalesce and by all middle-y and then, you know…
What it comes down to is, I’d like to solve this problem. And the solution isn’t as simple as “just writing” and the solution also isn’t going to be putting these manuscripts in a drawer and waiting another twenty years of so to see if I know what a middle looks like.
What should I do? Any ideas? I’m going to come up with some of my own, but I thought I’d throw my dilemma out there. Consider this a beginning…