Tag: writing process

Grokking It

I grok the story but don’t know if others can. It’s the writing challenge: you see, hear, feel and experiences these stories being told in details and colors and sounds technology can’t approach. Your job, Writer, is to capture these events, people and places, and organize it in a coherent, satisfying and entertaining matter.

That’s my interpretation of writing. Yours may vary.

Grok is a word that Robert Heinlein created in ‘A Stranger In A Strange Land’. It’s a classic novel. His expression, grok, has spread like wildflowers in the spring, going far beyond a word in a novel to have other meetings. The essence of grok remains the same for me: to intuitively grasp and understand a matter. It has larger and more expansive definitions and usage, but that’s the essential distilled for my use.

I’m encountering the grok gap while I’m writing. It’s a pretty familiar with whatever I’m writing. I grok what’s happening in my novel. I need to explain it to everyone who isn’t me. That meant spending a few days further defining terms and relationships. The big one is the ideopat. It is telepathy among the Travail Avresti Forus and Seth, and the Travail Favrashi Forus and Seth but telepathy is but one component among the names, gults, vhylla and races. I needed another term for one of the other components because it doesn’t fit with human knowledge and experiences.

While researching my invention, which ended up being termed the phena for now, after reading about consciousness, phenomenon and epiphenomenon, I grok and researched it for a while. After all, phena and grok share commonalities. The insights I encountered about what grok meant and was used in the original novel opened my thinking. Such sessions are always the most satisfying and treasured for me.

I hope you grok what I mean.

5

Where Do They Live?

Just as I had to address “What do they wear?”, I’m now addressing, “Where do they live?”

My Travail and other intelligent species have evolved far beyond my initial glances. I can liken it to glancing at a cat and thinking, “Oh, look, a cat.”

What’s the cat’s sex? Male.

Does the cat have a name? Yes, we’re calling him Meep.

What color is Meep? Um…Meep is a ginger, a blotched tabby ginger with broad swirls on his side, white whiskers, amber eyes, pink nose.

Good. What’s Meep doing when we first see him? He’s sitting on the fence. He’s displaced a half foot of snow from the fence top. No other snow is disturbed so he must have jumped up there from the other side of the fence. Flurries swirl around him but he’s not forlorn looking. He looks relaxed and in command. His attention is fixed on something in the pines, something that I can’t see or hear.

Does he get along with the other cats? Meep doesn’t trust other cats and goes on instant alert, ready to warn, fight or flee, when another cat approaches. He prefers to warn them away. If they attack, he will fight back. Fleeing is the third choice. He considers it the smart choice but knows from practice that fleeing is better as a theory because other cats will chase him. So he stands his ground until the situation is dire.

I’m going through this with the Monad, Sabards, Milennial, Humans and Travail, especially the Travail. Part of that is because I already did a great deal of this with the Humans, but also one main character is a Travail, and their part of the story and activity is told through his point of view. This has forced me to delve into the Travail history, social structure, architecture, behavior, agendas, sex…everything known about Humans on Earth is required to be known about the Travail.

They have a complex structure. Their names end up reminding me of Russian naming conventions out of Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. But I didn’t want to just slap some Human expressions — or cats or other animals — onto my other civilizations. I wanted them to be unique.

They’ve responded to the challenge. I argue with myself about changing the naming convention and simplifying them for the reader.No; the book, the characters and the writer in me all resist this. Screw the readers. I think it was James Tiptree, Jr (Alice Sheldon) who said, “Let them catch up, if they can.” Okay.

Another big challenge was how and why did this species develop the technology to advance into space? Why did they want to go into space? That forced a deep dive into their history, as well as the history and development of other races.

It’s all challenging, daunting, and intriguing. It all builds the novel far beyond my first glimpses of it. That’s how it often goes. When you pursue a destination, details, paths, choices and accidents emerge that you never anticipated. Thinking it through enervates me as brain cells cry for mercy but afterwards, I sit in pleased satisfaction with what’s been developed and written. Each plot arc has its own beauty that touches me.

But now, yeah, my butt’s numbness informs me that time has passed. Mocha remains but it’s cold, cold, cold, with a skim of clotted chocolate like small clouds dotting its surface.

It’s been an excellent day of writing like crazy. Time to chug the mocha, take a walk and prepare for the next session. The words are already bubbling up. Were it not for my numb rear-end, I would pursue them.

But the words will keep until tomorrow, and another day of writing like crazy.

0

Part One

I completed Part One of ‘Long Summer’ today and reflected on that. It is the first draft.

Part One. Three hundred pages. Seventy-seven thousand words.

I began it July 9th, 2016. A down computer interrupted my work on it. I was without the computer for several weeks while it was sent back to HP for repairs and returned to me. Then it took a few weeks to find the groove again. I basically lost the end of July and most of August.

Still, in thinking about this novel as it evolves and expands, I believe this novel could have three parts. More parts are conceivable as I learn more about these other worlds and civilizations, and the multiple, complicated plots develop. I don’t want to release or publish any of it until the entire novel is completed. As large as Part One is, I’ll probably release each novel as a part, but again, I don’t want to do so until they’re all done.

This could be a very long haul.

2

The Mojo Exceptions

I’m pursuing the opposite strategy. This is embracing and doing the opposite of your normal choices. The thinking is, if what you’re doing hasn’t been working, then the opposite of what you’re doing should be successful.

This approach was successfully employed by George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander on ‘Seinfeld’ in the television series’ eighty-sixth episode, during its fifth season in 1994. Jerry Seinfeld’s character articulated the idea although George began it by deciding to order something other than his usual.

True, Costanza is a fictional character. We  don’t want to start modeling our lives on fiction, do we? But some real value to this method could exist because it’ll take you out of your usual ruts. In a sense, this can help you face your fears.

But —

There are always ‘buts’.

But, I went to write yesterday after several opposite choices and the buts started flowing in. One, I don’t want to mess with my writing mojo. I got my writing mojo working. So I needed the Mojo Exceptions to the opposites.

  1. I can continue to go to the coffee shop and write. Otherwise, taking the opposite path, I would stay home and write. Although, by Costanza’s Rule, that’s exactly what I should do. In my feeble defense, I used to stay home and write. It wasn’t working. I decided to do the opposite, and go out and write. See how nicely I’m trying to rationalize that?
  2. I can continue drinking my quad shot mocha. The Costanza Rule decrees that I’ll have something else, like tea. Again, I began drink the mocha to embrace the opposites because I used to drink black coffee without cream or sugar.
  3. I can still write like crazy. The opposite of that would be to write with restraint. I used to try that and abandoned it to write like crazy.

Expressing the Mojo Exceptions make me appear to be a coward. I write to learn what I think, and I learned why I wanted the exceptions. I see how fear from change is really behind not wanting to mess with the writing process. I see how comfortable I am in it. And yet, I can convince myself that I was already doing the opposite with that aspect of writing, and that’s why it works.

I see inconsistencies about following the opposite strategy that trouble me. I think, ‘Don’t post that post,’ because I’ll be exposing my cowardice and inconsistencies. That, of course, would be the usual. I have to do the opposite, except for the Mojo Exceptions so I post this entry. I figure the Mojo Exceptions define the one area that works really well and can be excluded. But Mojo Exceptions are not unlimited. After wrestling with this aspect, I agree with myself that three is acceptable, but no more than three.

After all, you don’t want to mess with your mojo. Of course, it can be argued that your mojo isn’t working if you’re pursuing the opposite strategy because it’s purpose is to take you out of your comfort zones by doing the opposites.

I’m getting a headache.

2

Novel Sculpting

I read a post the other day with 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 thundering through 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.

 

6

The Novel Bible

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.

I want to know what happens.

2

How It Works

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.

That’s the way it works.

0

A Dark & Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

My psyche has been talking to me for the last few days. With some reluctance, I recognized what my psyche was telling me. Being a stubborn soul, I preferred ignoring my psyche for as long as I could. Yet, I’d come to a fork. I could continue to the right, along the path I’d been following. I already knew that was rocky. The going was treacherous and uneven. When it comes to writing, following a treacherous and uneven path is mentally and emotionally exhausting, especially if you know that following the other path would be a smoother journey. But —

Exceptions exist. But, the other path was the one my psyche was telling me to take. But the other path didn’t directly relate to the novel I was writing.

Yet it did; I needed to know what happened with Phileas and Brett. Generally, I knew Phileas is a highly respected scientist. Working for a major corporation, she led a team searching for the latest God Particle, a project known, with matter-of-fact drama, as the God Particle Search Project. Significant progress was slow, so another project, private and personal, the stuff of her childhood dreams, drew her.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Phileas first read those words when she was two, but once they were read, everything was changed. ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, by Madeline L’Engle, was the first book she read more than once, and in fact, went on to read a dozen more times. By the third time, she knew all the words and didn’t need to read the book, but settling into bed and opening up a screen above her face soothed her. Being in bed and secretly reading under the softly glowing faintly blue panel was cozy. It was a romantic escape for someone who was otherwise ruthlessly determined, logical, practical and mathematical. In fact, it was a dark and stormy night on Castle Prime, while visiting, when the weather control system in one of the domes malfunctioned, that crystallized the epiphanies that initiated her turn toward her personal project.

It was a dark and stormy night. 

For me to understand what happened with Brett and Phileas, I needed to know more about Phileas and then learn about what happened with her and Brett. I knew many basics. Brett had a son. He didn’t know he had a son. The son, Kimi, had been illegally conceived.

Kimi worked for Phileas on the GPS Project. Brett was a fourth-waver, inhabiting newly terraformed planets on the corporation’s behalf to prove it was safe. Kimi’s ‘fake’ father had manipulated the genetic maps related to Kimi and Brett. The systems had caught the errors but flawed results ended up reversing the maps so the systems thought Kimi was Brett and vice-versa. That’s the basis of the first novel, ‘Returnee’, available on KDP.

While writing ‘Returnee’, I established that the systems thought Brett was Kimi. What I didn’t establish but I knew was that as part of that, Phileas had inadvertently taken Brett when she thought she was abducting Kimi. She took Kimi, along with the rest of her team, because she’d traveled into the future. While in the future, she’d learned things, and now she was covering her trail, and attempting to keep others from following her path – because she knew, in science and technology, that major discoveries like hers rarely happen without like discoveries being made elsewhere.

The result was that the GUFIN virus was created and brought back from the future. And this is where the next novel, ‘Long Summer’, (the work in progress) comes into play. To know what happened with Brett, Phileas, the GUFIN virus, and the Travail, I had to know what happened when Phileas abducted Brett and wiped out his knowledge of what had happened.

And that’s what my psyche was ordering me to do: write that out so I fully understood it. Naturally, I had to write it out in story form, because I think in story-telling form when I’m writing fiction. So, thinking about Phileas and her background, and her literary hero, Meg Murry from ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, I was able to begin:

It was a dark and stormy night.

As I knew, the first line is actually homage to another novel — and Snoopy, of course, loves it — but once I wrote it, Phileas leaped to life.

Time to shut down and call fini to another day of writing like crazy. No words were written in the novel today, but so much progress was made.

0

For Those About to NaNoWriMo….

I never did the NaNoWriMo. It’s a terrific idea. It started in 1999 but I didn’t hear about it for a long time. By then, I’d established my writing habits, understood my preferences and was working full time for IBM and didn’t embrace the idea.For a long time, I believed there was one way to write and searched for the magic formula. The magic formula appeared to be research, plan, write, edit & revise, polish and publish. I’m being simple. The formula was much more complex.

So I worked hard on planning, researching, outlining. I created huge outlines, detailed drawings and maps, and entire histories of characters. After months and months of work, I’d have an enormous wealth of information, and nothing written. Discouraged, the next time I had an idea, I thought about it for a while. A scene came to me and I jumped in and started writing. I later discovered that others do that. As a process, it’s referred to organic writing, or being a pantser. I’m still refining my writing process but I’ve come a long, long, long way.

I admire those out there jumping into NaNoWriMo and salute you. Have fun.

9

The Progress Reports

“How’s the writing going?” I’m asked after a session.

“Did you have a good writing session?” another asks later.

“How’s the book coming along?” a companion queries me when I meet.

And I want to respond with a lot of information. I’ve written sixty thousand plus words. The book excites me. The ideas, characters and settings are all lively, energizing me when I sit down with it. That’s how it is on most days.

But some days, my writing sessions aren’t about the laptop’s clicking keys. Some days, I sit and talk to myself, or I’m walk and talk to myself. (Walking is a great way to write.) “Why did this happen? Because that happened. What did he do? What did she do? So what happens next with her?”

On those days, I’m likely to do a lot of spot editing and polishing, re-reading what was written about one of the story lines to find the path and generate enough light to look ahead to ‘what’s next’. Paradoxically, these are often the most exciting and enjoyable sessions because I’m solving a problem, and I also see clear progress of the novel being written. It’s all coming together. I’m assembling the puzzle, I’m learning the fuller story, and gaining greater understanding of my characters and the setting. I’m fortunate to write another 800-1,000 words on those days.

These sort of days prove, it’s not about the word count.

On all writing days (which is about three hundred sixty-one days of the year), though, I answer the questions with the same non-committal, almost laconic manner, “It’s going good.” I know they’re being polite and supportive. It’s like asking, “How is your day?” A full report isn’t expected, just a general summary, brief, if you please. We’re all just being polite. I hold back for the blog posts to wax more enthusiastically, but even there, I restrain myself. I’m just one of seven hundred gazillion writers posting and writing, gluing my sanity back together and casting the tea leaves, trying to make something out of the voices in my head who urge, “Write this down.”

But sometimes, when I’m writing, I can’t help myself, and I laugh out loud at what I thought or wrote. Nobody looks up, because, you know, I may look harmless, but I might be crazy. You can never tell.

They don’t know that I’m just a writer. I leave my badge at home.

0

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