subscribeFinished?!
Tuesday January 26, 2010
It’s a term that’s always relative, isn’t it? Being “finished” with something — especially for writers. How finished is finished? Even now, a week after I hacked, slashed, and rewrote the final chapter in my Work in Progress, I’m reluctant to say I’m finished. In one definitional sense I am (the edited, cleaned-up, polished rewrite is DONE!), but in others, I’m still working.
Since I “finished” the rewrite, I’ve been looking to cut scenes, unnecessary words and phrases, and redundancy. Thankfully, the slicing has been going well and mercilessly. I will miss a lot but I’m not too concerned about that at this point. After my betas read it, I’ll go through again (hastily! Speedily! Remarkably quickly!) and… well. At that point Things Will Happen. Yes, indeed.
It’s been hard to want to tear myself away from working to even think about blogging. (I apologize for the gap here!) I’ve tried to supplement with occasional Twitter comments, but I even forget to update (and check) Twitter — and Twitter is Twitter. Even when I stare at the WiP (which is still “in progress” as far as I’m concerned for now) and I don’t want to work on/in it, I still do something else involving writing. I write notes for future projects, I fiddle around with reference documents, I read or re-read something else. I’m no longer in the habit to blog. (Bad Erin!) Then, when I’m not working, I’m catching up on all of the other life essentials I consistently neglect, which is hardly different from anyone else who gets sucked into their work.
(One of said life essentials is now appeasing my husband by watching one episode of Battlestar Galactica a night. His preference would probably be a non-stop marathon, but we’ve compromised. Neither of us has seen BSG and considering I regularly quote Star Wars and we are both unrepentant geeks, watching BSG is one of those “It’s about darned time!” experiences we can no longer avoid. We’re still early in Season One [be dears and don't spoil anything!] and already Starbuck has filled a bit more of the complex, ass-kicking female character void in my soul. That, and where has Tricia Helfer been all of my life?! I am straight and married — but damn.)
The next steps are to finish my last scan of the document, pass it on to the next sets of eyes, then start the business end of things. This isn’t my first novel by any stretch, but it’s the first one I’m going to query. I’m both excited and terrified about that. Now that I have the entirety of the story written in a final form I love (…and tentative sequels mapped? AH!) I am looking forward to 2010 with a bit more enthusiasm and fervor than I did a month ago.
Good things are going to happen. My cheeky optimism says so.
And NaNoWriMo is over.
Tuesday December 1, 2009
I won NaNoWriMo 2009! Now all I need to do is get my winner’s t-shirt (or another, at least) and sit back, giggling over the ludicrousness of my accomplishment. Right?
Well, not really. I’ll explain.
The breakneck pace of my NaNoWriMo project this year was due in part to a lot of factors. It was a story I first wrote, in a version absurdly different from the way I see it now, back in 2000/2001. I’ve rewritten it top-to-bottom at least three times now, and in each version markedly different things happen but it’s the same world, same basic story. The three main characters are always the same three folks. I know them absurdly well. I even transposed their odd story onto a screenplay I wrote in college, for no other reason than I couldn’t think of what else to write for my assignment and these characters are old friends. But back in 2007 I imagined a vastly different background for the characters which gives a different gravity, a weight to the story that was never there. But I never wrote more than a vague scene and some notes on this new direction. I realized that this change was so big I had to delete certain characters I’d known for a draft or two, create entirely new ones, re-imagine old ones, and utterly alter the nature of the plot’s movement. (And that was scary and a huge thing to just… start one day!) My ideas for this draft were the same but the events leading to them were different, things like that. I was afraid to actually write it at last, I think. But I needed a project for NaNo and I think NaNo is the perfect opportunity for a writer to just take something off of their already large to-do list and just do it (as opposed to the way a non-writer approaches NaNo).
So I approached this year’s NaNoWriMo as my excuse to finally write this idea down, as I said a few weeks ago here. That helped my ability to punch this story out in 20 days, certainly, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pretty much flying by the seat of my pants every day all the same. I also devoted a good 8, sometimes 10 hours a day to the endeavor, and had a lot of output as a result of the time I put into it. (And no, my fingers can’t fly over keys for all of those hours straight. I am easily distracted.) Some fascinating things happened. I was confident in my point of view and its changes. (Point of view is usually my hardest single choice in a draft! I agonize! Not so in this one.) I seamlessly slid into the persona of these old, beloved characters, even though I threw things at them I didn’t even know I’d hidden up my subconscious sleeve. It was glorious fun.
But now that I’ve done all of that, finally written down the meat of the story (and I’ve outlined what the rest of the story will be) I am looking at December quite differently than I looked at October and November. I’m realizing that while I can probably sit and finish my NaNo novel and make it what I know it will be now, I also have an obligation to myself to finish my 2009 WiP, the very same one I started during my self-imposed JaNoWriMo last January, the one I’ve been working on in earnest rewriting and polishing since the summer. I’ve made the [rash?] promise to myself that by 2010, I will finish it. Which means… 31 days from now. It’s only about 20 or 25,000 words away from completion. That’s half of NaNoWriMo’s sheer output demand. Theoretically as I wrote 50,000 words in 20 days, this 20,000 word chunk should be… well. Shouldn’t be too onerous for a 31 day task.
Now that is a hell of a lot scarier to me than NaNoWriMo. My WiP is a rewrite. Granted, I’ve diverged [at times majorly] from my first draft in this rewrite, but I still know where I’m going and [pretty much] how I’ll get there. (Rather, I know the major things I need to hit and where it will end, but the details are foggy. I am a write-to-know details person.) But finishing denotes… finality. I think I need to do it to prove to myself that I can wrap this thing up tight. Then, once I’m content with that, I’ll go back to this year’s NaNo, revisit my other drafts set in that same world… oh, the many things I must do. Oh, yes, and begin the query process. For the first time ever. The funny thing is I’m not nervous about querying so much as nervous about what happens when (“when” because, recall, I am cheekily optimistic) it all happens. When this amorphous agent wants me as a client, when they sell my book to a publisher…. I’m nervous about being a real grown up. Not about being a writer — I’ve been a writer since I was twelve, for goodness’ sake; I have a degree in writing! — but about being a real freaking grown up. I am too old to be nervous about that! But… still. Part of me wants to go tell my story to my Barbies and call it a day, like I did when I was twelve. But I’m too old for that, too.
Oh, December… how exciting you shall be…
A whirlwind of… what, exactly?
Thursday December 4, 2008
The past two weeks have been just that: an inexplicable whirlwind. A strange combination of me being far too busy and alternately bored, but mostly filled with a desire to get things done that’s really pushing me to actually do just that. For a change!
Firstly, NaNoWriMo was a success. It was fun, it was painful, and it’s over. I can’t wait until next year’s attempt (I have learned, O NaNo, to respect thee and come into November prepared for thine total domination of my mind, ha) but I also, somewhat desperately, want to get back to what I was working on before NaNo took over my life. I recently re-read my draft and got excited about it all over again. I asked my friend to read it over and she’s given me some terrific feedback that’s given new zest to the fire under my butt to get it done. Also, because this is probably, at present, my single most interesting novel, I’m fascinating by the whole creative process — I, by and large, write to discover — but I’m also daunted by all of the things I simply don’t know about this plot yet. I have a vague, overhanging notion of where it’s going, how it will end, what happens to get it there — but it’s vague.
Thus writing to discover’s weak point… the whole vague part can’t really be wholly sharpened until I get there. It’s not that I have so many “things to do” that daunt me. Things are things: tangible, visible things. It’s my lack of certainty, of knowledge, of the plot that’s truly daunting. I hate looking ahead in my imagination and seeing this tangled Black Cloud of the Unknown I now have to plunge into, because while it can be fun, I also do like to have an idea of where I am going as I am getting there. There’s the famous E. L. Doctorow quote, that writing “is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” That’s true, but I also like to be aware of landmarks on my route to know that I haven’t gone astray from the path that’s leading toward my desired conclusion. Sometimes the journey there has changed that conclusion (it’s happened more than once that while getting there I realized my vague desire was irrational and needed to be changed). Even so, it’s not an entirely comfortable feeling for someone like me, who tries to go into most things in life as completely prepared for all exigencies as possible. I traveled to Europe with lots and lots of guidebook information both with me and in my head and though we didn’t have a lot of hotel reservations, I worked my butt off before hand so I knew I could survive traveling into a city without being prepared with a bed to sleep in that night. Bryan’s confidence in himself and in me helped me a lot, and he’s been helping me get through writing the same way, with the same faith and confidence in me.
I know I have that same faith and confidence in myself, too. It’s somewhat cheeky, my view of my own future success. I know I will do it. I know it with a pure, palpable, ferocious certainty that will not be undermined or driven off course. I am too stubbornly determined to be a success to not succeed. But there are levels of success, there are levels of perfection — or perceived perfection — and it’s hard, so hard, to be able to plunge forward at this early stage in the game and not want what I am producing now to be as polished and perfect as the end result will be.
To that effect, NaNoWriMo’s Chris Baty had some brilliantly simple advice on the site the other day:
Do not spend a single second making your prose readable until you’re absolutely, positively sure that you have your story locked down. This is the single most important bit of advice I have, and I ignore it all the time and have wasted years of my revising life because of it. The impulse to snappy-up dialogue and make sentences eloquent is almost irresistible at every point in the revision process. It makes sense: We’re surrounded by so many big, messy plot and character problems that it’s nice to seek solace in tidying up sentences. It’s a finite task, it’s instantly gratifying, and it makes us feel like we’re making progress on our books. The sadness comes when we spend six months transforming our first three chapters into Pulitzer-worthy gems, only to realize that none of those chapters will actually end up in our novels because they don’t work with the ending. This happens over and over and over, and it will kind of make you want to die. My advice: Think of your second draft as a house that you’re building. You need to pour the foundation, frame the walls, and get a reasonably waterproof roof over your head before you start to think about putting art up on the walls and installing the basement bowling alley and aviary. Let the art-hanging and bird-bringing be the treat you give yourself for all your manual labors with the cement mixer and nail gun.
When I read that, I sort of snorted and said to myself, “Yep, that’s exactly what you do. Exactly.” Reading the first few chapters of my draft, I noticed how tight and well-written they were. I was proud of myself. Then reading through successive chapters, I saw how much looser the prose got, how much more rambly the dialogue became, how vague the scenery was… and I realized, I’ve spent so much time revising that draft, and not plunging forward, that I’m undermining myself. Every time I make the beginning more perfect, the Black Cloud of the Unknown gets thicker, murkier, and less certain of successful navigation, simply because I keep crystalizing what comes before without first determining what comes after. Katherine Patterson said it in her NaNo pep talk, precisely:
I live in Barre, Vermont which calls itself the “Granite Capital of the World.” Outside our town are enormous quarries, so when I speak in local schools every child has a mental picture of a granite quarry. “You know how hard it is to get granite out of the quarry,” I say. “You have to carefully score the rock and put the explosive in to make the great granite block break loose from the face of the stone. Then you have to attach the block to the chains so that the cranes can lift it slowly out of the hole and put it on the waiting truck. That’s the first draft. It’s hard, dangerous work, and when you’ve finished, all you’ve really got is a block of stone. But now you have something now to work on. Now you can take your block down to the shed to carve and polish it and turn it into something of beauty. That’s revision.”
So I suppose it comes down to this: NaNoWriMo taught me that I am capable of ridiculous output. Make that output now a weekly goal of a certain number of words — or actual time spent world building, researching, outlining/plotting, or developing characters — and I can certainly tackle this beast effectively.
Add to that revamped desire my absolute cheeky optimism, brash confidence, and unwavering determination… yep, I can do this.
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