My normal coffee writing consumption is the Michael – four shots of espresso in a non-fat mocha, in a twelve ounce cup. One barista always charged me less than the others, putting me into an OCD tizzy. She explained that the sixteen ounce is actually less expensive because it already includes four shots. So she would charge me for a sixteen ounce and put it into a twelve ounce cup.
I was duly awed by her thinking. I was due a free mocha today as part of the customer loyalty program so I went for a sixteen ounce mocha.
“You want extra shots?” Shannon asked. “It comes with four but we can bump it up to six.”
Six? Dare I?
Hell, yeah, I’m sixty years old.
Just call me a six shooter, an old son of a gun, a word slinger.
“I’m a cowboy. On a laptop, I write. I’m wanted, dead or alive.”
Sorry, Bon Jovi, but my words make as much sense as your lyrics.
Time to write like caffeine infused crazy, at least one more time.
I read a post the other daywith insight into Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’ writing styles over on The Writer’s Path in an article by Andrea Lundgren. C.S. Lewis was a planner. Tolkien was a pantser. Best was the comment Lewis made about Tolkien’s style:
Diana Pavlac Glyer adds, “Lewis’s writing process was quite different from Tolkien’s. While Tolkien wrote things out in order to discover what he wanted to say, Lewis tended to mull things over before committing anything to paper. While Tolkien produced draft after draft, Lewis completed his work rapidly once he had settled on a clear idea and the right form to express it. And while Tolkien reconsidered every word on every page, when Lewis finished a story, he was restless to move on.”
That summarizes my writing approach: I’m writing to discover what I want to say. I’d not known this about myself in such an explicit manner.
Further reading on process came about from Jenn Moss’ Meta Monday post about her process. She referred to another process, The Snowflake Method. I enjoyed the fractal snowflake reference enormously and considered it pretty apt to Lorenz’s thinking and the Butterfly Effect. Randy Ingermanson writes about how to design a novel by starting small and enlarging, using triangles and stars and ten steps.
From all this came a better grasp of my process.I like to write to understand what I want to say, as Tolkien did. I usually start small and writing like mad, I create a block of words. That result is typically dense, with poor punctuation and spelling, and ‘<TK>’ with notes where I need more reference or clarification. Although I’ve become more mindful about pacing, voice and the rest through exposure to writing and editing, I don’t want those aspects to slow me down; I’m out to capture the essence of the story at that stage. This is fiction writing at its stream-of-consciousness rawest.
I then begin shaping the finished scene or chapter. Like a wood carver or sculptor studying a block of material, I do the same and begin carving, to see what’s in there, what should remain and what should be removed but added to somewhere else.
The carving process is involved.I’m working on plotting, connectivity with the rest of the novel, flow, spelling and grammar, voice, point of view and character development. It is much like sculpting and carving, taking pieces here and there and stepping back to see what I’ve wrought and what remains to be fixed. I think of it as chipping because I’m sculpting but I’m adding words and changing them as well. That’s where the analogy falls apart, but, oh well. I consider the entire active editing and revising, but it doesn’t replace the editing and revising that takes place after the entire draft is finished.
This is fun and rewarding. Watching that piece being shaped and refined is greatly satisfying. Beyond that, the carving process and active editing and revising provides me clarity about the novel. I especially learn about the characters at that point when I’m doing this, actively questioning how they would react to words, activities and new information.
All accumulated in a herd of new dreams thunderingthrough me last night. I won’t recite them today, as people out there who read me are probably rolling their eyes and saying, “More dreams?”
Reflecting them on this morning took me into fractal thinking, and back into my novel writing process. I ruminated about how our brains are often creatively fractal, something I actively encourage my brain to be: I want new ways to look at old ideas and new ideas to present. To do that, I need to take the variables and spin them into a new direction. Like the butterfly’s flutter, you never know how one small input or variable will produce a new direction, if you can leave yourself open to it.
I call that writing like crazy, to which I owe Natalie Goldberg. Now four shots of espresso blended with chocolate and steamed milk is at hand. It’s time to do it again, at least one more time.
It’s like writing a history of the second world war. Politics, economics and personalities whirl around galactic and planetary fronts as technology causes surprises shifts and skews expectations. It can be overwhelming on some mornings, sorting out the players. Each time that the action shifts via a new twist or expands on an established twist, research and thought is demanded to understand the people, cultures and civilizations involved.
It’s hard work, and it’s fun. It’s fiction writing. It progresses, pleasing and exciting me. Yes, some boulders of frustrations are encountered, and a block ensues. I hunt around it until I find a way to carry on.
Which, if you read my posts with regularity, takes me to the doorstep of last night’s dreams.
Of course dreams are involved. I seem to be able to do little without my dreams becoming approaching the stage to provide their impressions. I accept their participation with little hesitation because the dreams tend toward the positive.
In last night’s feature, the first of a double-header, I was living under water. Not literally; this is a dream. It was an impression of living underwater. Sounds were murky and distorted, colors were diluted and glazed with an faint olive green hue. I lived as I would on land, walking about, but with the impression I was underwater. The sensation of being under intense pressure all around drove that sense.
And I was tired of it. I didn’t want to live underwater and under pressure. So I took up flying. It was that simple in the dream world, which, when I awoke and thought about it, made me long to live in a dream world.
The flying was pretty terrific. I was up and out of the water without thought (and without any splashing). Everything was sharp and clear. Visibility seemed like infinity. As I perceived the changes in the dream, I gasped and said, “I’m flying.” And a voice answered, “Of course you are.”
“But I don’t have wings,” I replied.
The unseen other laughed. While they sounded like they were located by my shoulder, I saw nothing of them. Their voice, while pleasant, intimate, soft and friendly, didn’t betray a sex. “Why would you need wings? You’re not a bird.”
I laughed on hearing that. No, I’m not a bird, but a human, flying above the world, going to wherever I selected. As dream impressions go, it was empowering cubed. In an aside, I noticed I looked like a younger version of myself and was dressed in jeans with a belt, polo shirt and shoes. Although it was all fully colorized, I barely remember those details except to know I noticed what I was wearing when I looked for my wings. I had no wings, no engines or contraptions attached to me, and was without strings. I was flying on my own.
After that, the other dream, about my home and decisions to make changes, and being overrun by animals from the neighbors amidst efforts of organizing and directing others (some took some of my FedEx delivery envelopes for their use from my big binders of organization, but I had them to spare), seemed as bland as reality, except the good mood from the main feature carried over.
As it’s carrying over now. Ready to write and excited with expectations, just the way I like it.
I started thinking about my novels’ bibles while reading Whitney Carter’s WorldBuilding Post today. Some good suggestions were in there and I’ve found and incorporated most of them on my own.
The one thing about naming and history conventions for me is to keep track of them. Not just what they’re named, but sometimes, why they’re so named. I keep a separate document for that, and usually have it opened and update it as I’m writing, or at the session’s end. The bible for ‘Long Summer’, sequel to ‘Returnee’, is over 7,000 words. That’s not really big; James Michener used to have binders of information.
More interesting to me is that I’ve learned that I do more research to develop and build the world than I do to write the story. While I will write from forty-five to ninety minutes on an average day (and end up with word counts from one thousand to three thousand words in a session), I spend several hours researching and developing the worlds, characters, settings and situations. This is true not just in science fiction, which is my preferred genre, but in mystery, which I also write.
For example, if someone was born in America in 1975 and the novel takes place in 2015, they’re forty years old. That’s easy. But what music did they listen to while growing up in America? Did they watch television, and what did they watch when they did? What significant historic events happened in their lifetime, and it were they affected? Technology is part of this, something that I remember from a comment my mother made. While she’d traveled across the United States during her lifetime, I flew on a commercial jet when I was eighteen, and she didn’t do so for almost twenty years after my first flight. As we work and live, it’s easy to forget that ubiquitous devices like computers and cell phones are relatively new to human existence. Our civilization and societies are rich with laws, technology and permanent solutions that no longer apply. It’s important for the novel’s honesty and integrity to bear these matters in mind to develop coherent characters and stories.
I like substantial verisimilitude to novels that I read, and I include it in the novels that I write. Some people would say that I put too much in but I love tangent explanations. It’s largely because I think people are complicated. Little is black and white to many. They may state that it’s black and white, and they may act like it’s black and white, but most are offering a sketch insight to their true beliefs. Some of this is driven by people being politically or emotionally sensitive (or the opposite, attempting to be deliberately rude and crude), acting out, or displacement. More often, people struggle to untangle the skeins of history, thinking and emotions. There is also a large contingency of lazy people, and people who are just too tired, worn out, or impatient to figure out what they think, so they take the easiest courses of thoughts and actions.
All of this is recorded, in shorthand, in the novel’s bible. In ‘Long Summer’, as in ‘Returnee’, it’s easy when addressing future Human development. Corporations dominate, so corporate structure and thinking dominate. These are calcified, turgid organizations driven by reducing overhead and increasing profit, crying out, “We are a team,” or, “We are a family,” when they need to encourage hard work and cooperation, shrugging and noting, “We are a business,” when they cut jobs. They’re governed by wealthy people living in bubbles. However, factions who oppose corporations do exist. They cite multiple issues with corporations for their existence as individuals and groups. They’re more challenging to develop.
Even more challenging are the other intelligent races that emerge in ‘Long Summer’. Six races, including another branch of Humanity (seven, if you include Humans that have spread out from Earth), dominate the known and settled galaxies. One of these races is a long gone race. Traces of them are found everywhere but there isn’t any evidence of where they went or why. Such vacuums aren’t acceptable; naturally, theories abound about what happened to them.
All of this is recorded in the novel’s bible. Brief entries are made about the order in which these races encountered one another and their relationships with one another. Two of these races (besides Humans) dominate but the others are written into the script in various manners. All of this is organized and recorded. My bible itself is an organic record, growing and changing shape. It began, as they always do, with a few bullet lists. I always go with what I need for the moment to move forward. As more information and understanding was demanded, I developed a more complex structure to impose order so I can easily find information (what colors was his/her eyes/skin/hair again?) without exploding with frustration.
It’s an odd confession to make as a pantser. Pantser is the term often applied to writers who don’t plan and outline their novels in advance. I prefer the expression ‘organic’ writing, in that you plant the seeds and let it grow. Others call it writing in the dark. That works, too, as your mind’s lights find and illuminate the way.
In a way, I think of this novel writing approach in the same way that journalism works. A story happens: scandal, an explosion, an attack, an arrest. We have the big picture. Details are needed. Motivation and other questions about what, how and why happen arise to be answered. Reporters rush to the scene. Interviews are conducted. Research is accomplished. Investigation are launched, and layers are peeled back.
That’s how I like it. I tried to be a planner. Frankly, I lacked the discipline. My ideas and characters excited me. Scenes and dialogue bloomed, and I was urged to rush right in. And I did.
Whatever works, is my motto. There is the perfect way, the classic way, the artistic way. Mine is an imperfect way, and I’m continually addressing it. Each of must survey and inventory ourselves as writers to learn our strengths and weaknesses and develop our preferences for how we write. And after we write, we learn to edit, revise, polish. Writing is a tangled endeavor.
Now, a quad shot mocha is at hand. Time to write like crazy, one more time. Tauren just encountered the Travail Avresti for the first time. This is an historic moment, the first time that Humans from Earth are facing another intelligent civilization.
Car appointment today, 12:30, in Medford, down the asphalt river seventeen miles. Wife asks, “Are you going to go do your writing first?” Because this is the standard, this is the norm, this is the way it works. Whatever else, go write. Michael must write. Not writing makes Michael a cranky man.
“Yes,” I answer, “but I need to have some coffee first.” Because this is the standard, the norm, this is the way it works. I must have a cup of coffee to go have my coffee and write.
What were once indulgences are now habits. But come on, that first cup, black and hot, French roast, untainted by milk, cream, sugar or anything else, is awesome. Yeah, it would seem like there’s a chasm between drinking strong, unadulterated black coffee and then indulging in a mocha with four shots of espresso. But I believe – and belief is important – that the coffee pleases my muse, and that helps my writing. Gotta keep the muse happy.
There is the moment when you’ve turned off the lights and the television, because actually, you had fallen asleep. Or you finally quit reading blogs, surfing the net and playing games, and turn off the computer because it’s time to go to bed, you have to get up in a few more hours. Or you were reading, and your eyes had closed.
Signals had been received that the day is done and it’s time to retire. Your pets have recognized it and have assumed their positions, and the sounds of sleep from the remaining household are already percolating.
Then, as you’re accepting the moment and preparing to sleep, writing strikes. A scene, character, moment or idea that’s been troubling you has found its way into your thinking, shoving you awake. You see and know what you must write.
And you rush out to the notebook, the computer, the typewriter, and capture those words, that thought, that explanation, and more, because that was a block, a logjam, and now that it’s broken, the words are thundering out.
Or, there is the moment when you’re in your writing space, carving, hammering, defining the work in progress and it all comes together in sublime beauty, and you laugh aloud as you write, chortling on because you’re pleased — or crying because the scene affects you, or gulping down a breath, sweaty with fear and tension, because the scene has affected you.
And, there is the moment when you’re spent from the energy release of realization and creation and you sit back, returning to this space and existence that you left when you began to write. And you look around, assimilating where you are and what you’ve been doing. And you’re pleased and want to share it with someone, and must restrain yourself from grabbing passing strangers and servers and saying, “Hey, listen to what I just wrote. Isn’t this great?”
You can’t go home and tell others. That might jinx it. Also, they’re not up on the creative mind and its idiosyncrasies. They’re existing in the real world, dealing with the minutiae of being. Or they’re asleep and wouldn’t appreciate being awakened to be told what wonderful words you’ve discovered.
So you sit,pleased with the achievement, sighing with joy over what you’ve done, before turning out the lights and going to bed, as you planned — OMG, two hours ago.
Or, so you sit, sipping old, cold coffee and listening to reality reclaim you, finally acknowledging that you’ve spent a few hours doing this and that, oh my, you need to pee, so now would be a good time for a break.
But you don’t want to break, you don’t want to stop, because this is so wonderful as a feeling.
And there it is, the conundrum of writing, that so often, you’re writing alone and celebrating your achievements alone, and that your body and existence stops you from just writing on, and on, and on, as you want to do.
I used to sing this ditty in the evening during my corporate existence:
“What shall I wear tomorrow? What shall I wear tomorrow? What shirt should I don, what pants should I put on? Oh, what should I wear, what should I wear?” I added more verses over the months, and then some dance steps. It became a whole Gilbert and Sullivan thing.
My wife hated it. I don’t blame her. She has good taste. Her only lapse is me.
The cats also weren’t pleased, giving me the look shared when they deem the food in their bowls unworthy of being eaten.
A confrontation is happening on the Wrinkle. I’m dressing my aliens as part of the scene, as it’s their first full on appearance, forcing me to regurgitate my old song. What do my aliens wear? Novel and movie aliens I’ve known, loved and despised darted through my thinking. My aliens are pretty uniform, partly be genetic exercise, so should they be uniformed? How much clothing is sufficient clothing for these travelin’ space people?
(Could Travelin’ Space People be a punk folk group? “She was on my ship; I shot from the hip. She had four eyes; they were full of surprise.”)
Dressing aliens isn’t an easy exercise, requiring thought about the many roles clothing can play an how these roles are parlayed into their mighty structure.
I think I need more coffee for this. Add some Irish whiskey to the four shots of espresso, please. It’s time to write like mad.
I dreamed last night about the power of eight. That is literally and explicitly what the dream was about, no B.S. I remember all of this thanks to a cat.
I know that will surprise you.
In the dream, I was in a class with others but not a classroom. I don’t know who the others were. Someone unknown was explaining that the power of eight shapes everything. Basically in a ‘Matrix’ reveal, I was shown how streaming digits make up reality. Then we were told, “If you can find the power of eight in the numbers, you’ll unlock the power of creation.” Then, as we all talked and looked, I grasped that within the threads were sequences that added up to eight. As I realized the implications and began bubbling with the thrill of knowledge, I began showing them to the rest of the class and elaborating on the instructor’s explanation about how to see and capture the power of eight. As example, I explained, laughing, “Like this one.” I captured a sequence. “That’s eight hundred thousand dollars.”
At that point, whiskers, licking and kneading awakened me. Quinn the Black Paw was hungry. The food in the bowls didn’t suit his mood. It didn’t matter that it was oh dark A.M. Resigning myself the power of the cat, I fed him, and then used the opportunity to pee and ponder the dream.
I was pretty much at a loss about what it meant then. Like, what was I supposed to do? Take a pill and find an eight? Returning to bed, I resumed sleeping.
The lessons about the power of eight continued with further dreaming.They were explaining how the power of eight was part of a balance. But now, instead of being in a class room, I was standing atop stairs. Others, like my wife, accompanied me, but they were incidentals. Dark, dark, dark cheery red, these steps were worn smooth. Like contoured hillsides of rice paddies, they extended in either direction, leading down to something that I couldn’t see. In fact, the only other thing seen was a blue grey sky.
I knew I was to go down the stairs, and I did. This was a learning expedition, and I felt pretty good about the whole thing. My wife and a few others accompanied me. At the bottom was a land, and people who…well, they identified themselves as the common people. They explained I was to kill two of them.
That shocked me. It could not be right. But no, they were comfortable with my intentions. I’d done it before and others did it, too. They liked the way I killed them, demonstrating empathy and kindness when I did. Besides, they told me, I often gave others gifts. Which was true, I remembered then, as I absorbed it all. On the way down, I’d left and given packages as gifts.
Then, my instructions were to return to the top of the stairs and resume my lessons in the power of eight. I returned to the top of the stairs and awoke, confused.
What in the hell is the power of eight, and how am I supposed to harness any of that dream information in this real existence?
At that point, I wanted to return to dream with instructions to myself to provide further explanation. But sleep eluded me. Instead, I thought about my recent state of mind.
It’s been that time of month, when I’m coping with my darkness. Essentially, my darkness has a mission statement that I’m to feel so depressed and miserable that I question, why the hell am I even alive? Arriving in this depressed state, I become all, J’accuse: Thou art a shite writer writing shite fiction. Nobody wants to read the hot sloppy piles that you write, so why do you torture myself with this pursuit?
I know, intellectually, I’m coping with an emotional state that affect huge swaths of population. None of that really helps. I’d been reading to manage it. In the marvelous way that the world works, I’d come across a T.C. Boyle interview and a John Scalzi post. Both helped bolster my resistance to quit.
2. The .357 Magnum. The second tip goes (if you’ll forgive me) hand-in-hand with the first. In recognition of the fact that all writers are manic-depressives, alcoholics, drug-addicts and fixedly specialized degenerates, it’s always helpful to keep a loaded pistol on your desk, perhaps located conveniently beside the ballpeen hammer, depending, of course, on the size of the desk. This acts as an aide-memoire, a spur to creativity and, of course, the ultimate solution to writers’ block.
The other post, by John Scalzi, was Rejection. He closed:
In the meantime, I’ve already sent a query off to another agent. You can’t sit around moping after a rejection, you have to rush into the arms of the next rejection. Because who knows? It might not be a rejection at all.
Heartening words, the words that every writer embraces, the essence being, who knows when you’ll get your break? It’s a strange brew where writers reside. As other writers have written, we’ve developed good taste about what we like to read, and we’re attempting to envelope that good taste in what we write in a difficult and often lonely, and solitary endeavor. And I, being of low self-esteem and a person who eschews attention, struggle with writing and wanting attention for what I write against being a solitary creature who is pretty happy writing in his isolation. It’s a messed up, strange brew. And again: I know I’m not alone.
I told my wife about my dream this morning.She suggested I hunt down meanings for the power of eight. Doing a web search, I came across Christine DeLorey’s website, Creative Numerology. She’d specifically written about ‘The Power of Eight’.
Reading her post reinforced my understanding of the dream. Frankly, I was startled by having such a dream and then discovering such explanation on the web. I’d wondered if I’d read about the power of eight before, and had simply regurgitated previously required knowledge.
I don’t know. My wife’s book club met last night. Their book in discussion was ‘Ordinary Grace’. As always, they investigated the author, William Kent Krueger. They’d discovered some good interviews with him that she shared with me, where he discussed his frustrations with writing novels and trying to become published. I mentioned that’s what writers, including me, are always seeking, that perfect strange brew where the good taste that we’ve acquired through reading is blended with the good taste we infuse in our writing, but also with the good taste that civilization displays by finding and reading our work. It’s a very, very strange brew, and none of us are sure of the exact ingredients.
But my wife closed, “Well, you can’t stop writing. Writing is part of the Perfect M. Writing is your drug, and it keeps you balanced.”
M is my private nickname, BTW, to clarify. I began using that initial to sign things like a zillion plus years ago and she adopted it as her term for me. But she’s right. I write because I need to write. Everything else is just the strange brew of being.
And now, since it’s the song that I sang to myself while walking down to write, here’s another shot at today’s theme song: ‘Strange Brew’, by Cream, 1967.
On a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990, Rowling wrote her initial Potter ideas on a napkin. She typed her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on a typewriter, often choosing to write in Edinburgh cafés, accompanied by baby daughter Jessica, now 19, named after Jessica Mitford, a heroine of Rowling’s youth. ~ J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and other novels.
In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books. ~ Kathryn Stockett, author of ‘The Help’.
After she wrote Still Alice and was ready to get it into the market, Lisa spent a year trying to get literary agents and editors at publishing houses to speak with her. The editors all treated her as yet another aspiring writer not worth their time, and the few literary agents she managed to reach thought her novel wouldn’t sell. ~ Lisa Genova, author of ‘Still Alice’.
The situation was improbable. Just one year prior, Weir, a computer programmer by trade, had given up hope of becoming a professional writer after failing to get a single agent or publisher excited about his work. But then he posted The Martian online, and it generated such buzz that now here he was, signing mid-six-figure deals with both Crown Publishing and Twentieth Century Fox. His self-publishing success story—well-paid tech nerd becomes really well paid novelist—made him the envy of every would-be author who ever fantasized about ditching his day job. Even critics were on board. (“Brilliant. A celebration of human ingenuity and the purest example of real sci-fi for many years,” said The Wall Street Journal.) ~ Andy Weir, author of ‘The Martian’.
He pitched the book and was rejected 27 times before a chance encounter with a friend who had just landed an editing job. Geisel told his friend about his book, about the rejection, and told him he was fed up and about to destroy the book. The friend read it and Dr. Seuss was born. ~Theodore Geisel, author of ‘The Cat in the Hat’ and other books.
It’s just something to think about. You, and your good taste and writing skills, may be unknown and yet still be a brilliant writer and yet still be unpublished and unknown.
And you, along with the editors, publishers, agents, family members and critique group who rejected you, might all be right. You don’t ‘deserve’ publication. And you do.
If you go into Amazon and read some novels, you’ll discover scathing reviews of great classics and best-sellers. And there are books like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, which I didn’t like, that began as fan fiction published on a website and ended up as a best seller and movie.
You can’t predict what will happen so invest that energy elsewhere. Write like crazy. Plan and write. Revise and edit. Establish a process or system and keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Write because you enjoy writing. Write a book in a month in November. Do what it takes. Believe in yourself. Keep believing.
