I’ve limped along since May or June on this book. It flew at first. Then—I swear it was two sentences. Break. Two sentences. Break. Erase two sentences. Write three. Break.
That has been the progress for two months. Enough to make a writer tear her hair out. Usually I’d think I was distracted. Well, there was A-Kon, that trip south…after which things began to go like this. But it’s not as if I don’t sort of know where the book is going. What’s the matter with my focus, eh? I pride myself on being able to focus down and get to it. Nothing’s going on in the house, really? Tranquility and pretty good weather. Walking for exercise. Gardening. Tending the pond.
I tried writing just one viewpoint in the set and leaving out the other, just to maintain continuity, to go back and write the other viewpoint as a sequence and then shuffle them into proper order later. With attendant rewrite to trim up loose ends.
Two sentences. Break. Two more sentences. Break.
Well, damn.
Then, all of a sudden, I decided to do the forbidden. Vault over the stuck spots. Write the denouement.
Part way through it I start flipping back and adding bits to scenes all through the book. Revelations start spilling every which way.
So I just write this book backwards. Sort of. I got only part of the way through the denouement before I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and write forward knowing what I know now.
Ah, the blissful expectations of the novice writer of old, who would sit down to the keyboard and envision doing a clean outline and just writing straight through to the end.
I’ve had that happen a couple of times. A couple…in how many years?
Whatever works … same with programming and genealogy. In the middle is “a miracle occurs!”
We often hear authors talking about characters going off on their own. Don’t suppose there’s some Law of Nature books can’t be the same, eh?
My own little effort hasn’t had an outline in any detailed sense. I’ve got the typical male bi-cameral brain, so this side just writes down whatever scenes the other side dreams up–mostly but not entirely in sequenctial order. I’ve had one of the late “goal” chapters written for some time, but the first of the novel is only 60%, or so, along. I’ve been given two later scenes but haven’t been able to focus on getting them written. I guess I need to commit them before I can return to the sixty-first percent bit. But then, this is my first–no preconceived idea how it’s supposed to go. 😉
I remember hearing an interview with a very well-known writer (whose name, alas, I can’t recall!) who claimed he always wrote the last chapter first, and then went back and wrote the rest of the book. The beginning chapter/paragraph/sentence/word is always the hardest, I think; this is one way around it!
Sounds like an interesting way to go about it…but whatever works for you. 🙂 Sometimes, you need to know where you’re going before you can get there?
When people ask me how I write, meaning, outline? just plow ahead? etc. I usually answer with: I write.
And leave it at that.
It’s because sometimes I do outline. Sometimes I don’t. Actually, mostly I don’t.
Because I often work in 30 page audio drama scripts I can, and do, quite often just sit down with the full basic story in my head and bang it out in about 8 hours. Then I go in and tweak. And tweak. And tweak. And get up at 4:00 a.m. to tweak again. My friends refer to me as the tweaking fool.
Could I do that with a book? I don’t think I could do that with a book. Uh uh, no way, not on your life.
I rarely have two novels work the same, even when they’re written back-to-back and in the same series. Novels are peverse creatures. Just when I think I have them worked out, they twist and turn and even the lovely outline I’ve written starts to look odd.
I usually worked out story problems on trips with Russ. He’s been living in New York for almost five years now, though. The work is far harder and seems less rewarding sometimes. But I’m still writing, at least!
The process is mysterious to me. I’ve told others I’m “reading” my story, being “transported” there, as I feel when I’m reading another author’s story. It seems to me my story exists, already complete in itself, somewhere I cannot explain.
I never dream it–none of it ever comes to me as I’m sleeping–my dreams are always about something else. I think it has a lot to do with the funny way my brain is wired (some Asperger’s Syndrome).
The thing is, I’m writing it down because I wouldn’t be able to remember it all, and I keep at it because I have to know how this story goes–I don’t know! It has already had episodes I would never have imagined when the first scene that started it all popped into my head.
The whole thing is quite unexplainable. I think either you understand what I mean, or I can’t possibly explain it to you.
Isaac Asimov said that he had to know how his story ended or he just got lost in some endless meandering. It was only shen he figured out that he needed to know the goal that his story was headed toward that he was able to write a complete story.
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!
–Kipling
One of my favorite Kipling quotes, and applicable to so many things!
And if you ask any given writer *how* he constructs a story, who knows? His methodology may totally change with the next story—or he is talking about the one he is working on now. All these convention panels on how do you write—are like that.
I think it would be interesting to have a panel given Macaulay’s title: ” ‘There are nine and sixty ways…’ How many have you used?” I think the audience would be amazed.
I heard John Irving (World According to Garp, etc.) say he always wrote the last chapter first and then went back and wrote up to it. I remember my jaw dropping.
At least if you write the last chapter first and then write forward to it, you don’t end up with some of those abominations in which the last chapter just doesn’t make any sense or you can’t figure out how the author reached that conclusion… The most dissatisfying books I have ever read are one where try as one might the end just doesn’t make sense because the body of the book didn’t have enough of the clues to make it sensible. I do a lot of technical writing where you have to “set the stage” as it were, so that the audience can follow the argument. I find I use a lot of different approaches, but I am not an author of SciFi or even a novelist where you have to make your world believable to your audience. Thank goodness most of my work is very heavily formatted. The hardest part is removing jargon and governmentese while ensuring the audience has the technical vocabulary and a background understanding…
I generally work with outlines. Sometimes they are very light outlines and sometimes they are extensive beasts with a little note on practically every step of the way. Add to that the world building and character notes and I can write 30k before I ever actually start the novel. This isn’t unusual for me.
That doesn’t mean the novel will flow without a glitch. At some point in nearly every novel, the author will find a spot where the story moves on a slightly different path, and that road map you made to the story has hit a detour. That’s not a problem. With the outline in hand, I can still work the story back to where I want it to go for the ending I want, and not go wandering off into the ‘oh shiny’ new territory until the story no longer works at all.
Outlines don’t work for everyone, but I know once I stopped thinking of them as those horrible assignments in school, I found they could be a wonderful tool. (I was recently told that authors who use outlines aren’t being creative — my answer to that one is here, so I don’t start ranging again. LOL http://zette.blogspot.com/2012/07/zettes-take-outlines-arent-creative.html).
For me, getting seeing the whole in an outline allows me to build on each of the smaller steps. Obviously, what happens before will affect what happens later in the story, but sometimes it’s important to do a little of that ‘foreboding’ that can add such wonderful depth here and there. Outlines are how I manage most of that work and keep the novel flowing. I write slow outlines and very fast first drafts, and then very, very slow edits. That’s the pattern that almost always works for me, at least for longer works!
There are some similarities to the process we were forced to use developing software under DoD contracts.
Their paradigm was “Top Down”. We did a few levels of design documents, but then for the code we had to start at what would amount to the User Interface level and work down to progressively smaller, more detailed levels.
There was only one problem, and that was when it all depended on certain interfaces provided by the operating system which had to be explicitly followed and couldn’t be changed to suit whatever design came up at the lowest level. In those cases we had to work both ends toward the middle–and not make too much of it. 😉
The story goes that Doc Smith wrote the final chapters of Children Of the Lens before he wrote Galactic Patrol. I don’t know if this was to prove to Campbell that he did have a definite conclusion in mind or to anchor that conclusion so that the Lensman series would not dance too far from the original outline.
Thank you! I’ve often envied your ability to outline and write so professionally. Now I’m so relieved to know I’m not the only one who writes things backward!
Cyteen has been one of my all time favourite books for a very long time. I’d love to be able to write 1/100th as well.
Don’t you just love it when your brain whips something astonishing out on you and when you goggle, it says, “Oh? I thought you knew that. Really? You didn’t know that?” And then there’s my BFF and I talking about a story over munchies in our local muncherie, I’m about hip deep in a plot synopsis, and say, “And then it was revealed to me that [story detail],” and look up, and this helmet haired lady is giving me the oddest look. All I could do to keep a straight face.
With programming I find that doing the easy bits first often helps. It sounds like storing up trouble the future (which I hate doing) but what usually happens is that as you work you begin to develop little snippets of code or the design becomes a bit more clear in your head.
By the time you start on the more difficult bits you often find you’ve built up some tools and ideas that make them easier.
Absolutely. You can also get a fierce desire to sleep when you’re trying to think. You lie down, head hits the pillow, eyes shut—hindbrain begins to work. Lizardbrain has an idea. Boink! You didn’t even get to sleep, you’re now wide awake, and you have the resolution.
My right-brain doesn’t talk much. It’s particularly obscure about HOW it comes up with its answers to things. I don’t know what it’s doing as left-brain runs daily life. But so far I’ve never had any part of my story turn up in any dreams at all. It has from time to widely spaced times about other things, but not this story.
And now left-brain says we should go to lunch and see if pissy-a** IBS tummy will accept my offering. 🙁
I’m almost to the last section of my (so far, one and only) novel, which I started because I, well, wanted to figure out how to write a novel. I had the character arc, her personal motivators and geographical movements broadly figured out in one long, wide awake night after snippets of the novel concept came to me in a dream. What that dream was now I can’t remember but it was fun and exciting and got me thinking. What I have found a major challenge requiring much creative cogitation are the “plot drivers” that provide the logical but unexpected and exciting external pushes which shove my heroine onto the next stage of each character development. The final plot kicker details are still not fully revealed to me but I now know broadly what leads to what and have a fair amount of faith based on experiences writing the earlier sections that I will work out those logical connections. In the past few weeks I have also been mulling over what I have to go back and tweak, insert and revise in the first written sections when I didn’t know the external, political motivators I have now worked into my story.
I’m really loving this writing process. It’s a great and extremely satisfying adventure!