In Which Sherlock Sees a Pattern Developing
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…
November 19th, 2009 at 14:20
I highly recommend reading Nancy Kress’s _Beginnings, Middles, & Ends_ for bug-fixing this problem!
For what it’s worth, I have the same issue. Here’s how it typically plays out these days with a short story. I write about 1/3 to 1/2 of it without outlining or organizing (because my subconscious can do a better job than I can), then I come to an abrupt halt. After a day or two of pacing around frustrated, I take a few big pieces of copy paper (11″ x 17″) and “organize” what I have: motifs, settings, what each character wants, &tc. For me, it’s important to do the “organizing” as fast as possible — freewriting, really. The big pieces of copy paper end up covered with a bunch of arrows, question marks, loops and scribbled text… you get the idea. I put all this “organizing” away, pace around some more — a day or two. Then a “solution” dawns on me, often while exercising. I use that solution to write to the end of the story, without organizing or outlining any further. Then I revise for a long, long time until I consider the story at least an “8″ on a 1-10 scale.
I don’t know if that helps you any, but maybe it will!
November 19th, 2009 at 14:32
I was going to predict that DAL would recommend that Kress book. I tried to find it at the library b/c he’s mentioned it being helpful before.
I don’t know that I’m the best person to be making recommendations but I think you need to try to just push through it — even if you feel icky and stuck — and try to get something resembling an ending. Then you have something to work with.
I like DAL’s suggestion.
I try to use what I have and find a few key events that lead toward an ending so I have points to write toward. I’m not suggesting that this makes it easy but at least I’m still moving forward.
November 19th, 2009 at 15:25
Here’s my solution: don’t write long until you are really, really good at writing short. This goes against seemingly everyone in the universe who opines on it out loud, but I used to do what you’re talking about: write long-ass stories that invariably ran into a tree. Over and over.
Writing short forces you to see, over and over, how beginnings and endings tie together. I just do not buy into the idea that this comes easy, any more than hitting ten free throws means you don’t have to work on free throws anymore. The people who are really good at free throws shoot shitloads of freethrows. Once upon a time I could reliably (~70%) hit free throws with my eyes closed, and it’s because I shot a lot of them, so they it was automatic.
It’s this automaticity that matters, I think. There’s a large psychological literature on automaticity and expertise, with the idea being that experts in most domains, even ones considered highly cognitive, don’t think more. They’ve just internalized the rules. The idea is that when you’re at word 20k if you have to think and plan about how to manage your pacing, your characters, your conflicts, then the battle is lost. Beating it into your brain via executing these patterns a zillion times, in a zillion variations, is what gets you there.
So I am dead-set against everything NaNoWriMo stands for. I think it’s utter bunk. Maybe it’s a good idea for other reasons, for people who need to convince themselves that they can get into a routine, or need permission to put words down, or god knows what. But if you want to do good work, I haven’t seen one iota of evidence that the road to good long work doesn’t go through a shitload of good short work first.
Speaking personally, I got tired of making my own writing life hard, which is why I’m going back and trying to get the fundamentals in order, and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s going so far.
November 25th, 2009 at 19:04
I both agree and disagree with Shane. I think learning the mechanics of a story in its short form is essential to knowing how to write longer things. Practice in story arc, character development, etc. is obviously essential for a novel. But I disagree that having the short story format down cold is essential for novel writing. In fact, in my limited experience, the two things are very very different beasts that require a very different set of skills. Or rather, a mostly-different set of skills. A Venn diagram of skills, let’s say.
As far as NaNo goes, I am also annoyed by it — but only in that people seem to think it makes them better novel writers. I think it’s good for camaraderie and community-building and getting in good habits and all that, but in my mind it’s just kind of nonsense for the skills you need to really organize and think about novels. But then again, it seems to work for some people. Just like outlining works for some people (and not me). And just like writing a short story a day (SHANE) in preparation for future novels works for others. Figuring out how to write a novel has been a whole new experience for me and is a learning process in trying to keep my interest, trying to plan, trying to write, trying to get a draft done without freaking out, and so on.
So yes, in a way, I think being a good short story writer will prep you for novel writing. But I also think if you have a Big Idea that you want to really sprawl out with over 100,000 words, then do it. I also think (and this, Kira, is where I might actually have some helpful advice instead of just rambling) that much of the work in novel writing comes in the editing phases. So in that sense, maybe writing short stories first *is* good advice… as long as you actually spend time editing them so they work as finished pieces.
December 1st, 2009 at 22:50
I have the same problem with beginnings middles and ends. Plus I also recommend the book that Douglas and the others recommended. As for myself, when I get stuck after a really promising beginning, I reread that beginning and note down any clues that might show me where to go next. Things like symbols, motifs, objects, themes, feelings. Usually I can find two that seem to be crying out to be developed further and that’s when I start seeing where the path should go next. If after looking, i can’t find anything that jumps out, I backtrack and ask myself, “Where did I take the wrong path?” and “What could my character have done instead?” That also helps.