On life in 2020

Hello,

Long time no see. Sorry about that. It’s been an odd year — not just for me, of course. Life has a habit of getting away from me, and crazy times encourage that habit, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the state of the union, so to speak. The last few years have been transitional for me, in so many ways. I’ve covered a great deal of ground along several dimensions, and had a number of experiences that have proven transformative in ways I’ve not known since University. This will be a bit rambling, but too bad. This is my mental dumping grounds, and appropriate disclaimers are on the site header, so … off I go!

Since I last posted, I’ve had my third child. I am the proud father of two boys, 4 and 2, and now a little girl, 1 month old. It’s hard to articulate what becoming a parent means. What it does to you. I’m shocked to find that many of the cliche sentiments young parents shared with me back before I had kids were actually true to the experience. It does change you. It does change your purpose. Or at least, it causes you to envelope new goals and desires into your existing purpose, a process that inevitable alters your trajectory.

Having kids has impacted me in all the predictable ways. Most notable, here on my writing blog, is the amount of time I’ve chosen to re-allocate towards being a present father. When sleep becomes a rare commodity and days are consumed by work and family, one has to be incredibly parsimonious with the single-digits of hours left over for “personal time.” Cutting further into this time are daily chores and the maintenance of one’s household and finances. What’s left needs to divide itself rapidly in order to keep the marriage healthy, in order to sustain one’s circle of friends, and in order to participate in one’s wider family/community. What scraps of time or energy that remain when these responsibilities are serviced are all I have for “me” time. For writing, or reading, or exploring a hobby. Many things I used to enjoy have been selected for burial, during this process. Gaming, guitar, VFX, TV / movies, exercise, online communities, programming projects, and so much more.

I’ll be honest. In some ways, I find that very difficult to handle. Those things were a big part of who I was and what I enjoyed. It’s true, though to my mind, there’s nothing wrong with that observation. Every choice we make in life requires stepping through one of the doors before us and agreeing to forego the others, as we depart that junction. It is perfectly reasonable to be joyful and content with the course we’ve selected, while simultaneously acknowledging the roads left behind. That is how it feels to me. Do I miss hours of writing until 4 in the morning? Of course! Just as I miss being a 4th grader without a care in the world. I’d never go back to 4th grade, if I could. Nor would I rather be on the road where I was still staying up all night writing because my circle of responsibility was so much narrower as to only include myself. But here in this moment of reflection, yes, I’ll pause to lament those sacrifices.

One of the real joys of fatherhood, that nobody did mention to me, is that it’s enabled me to see the world anew, injecting novelty into the familiar in a way I’ve not experienced in 30 years. Everything is new and exciting to a 4 year old, and he takes me on his journey with him. I find old memories are brushing off dust, and common experiences are seen through fresh eyes. It’s a strange combination of phenomena: I’m simultaneously reliving my own childhood, and re-learning how to appreciate the present. This is rewarding in ways I can’t articulate, though if you, dear reader, are a parent, then I probably don’t need to. You know what I mean already.

The biggest down side of fatherhood is the stress. I’m a worrier by nature, and that was hard enough when it was just me and my wife. Although, the truth is, even if everything went to hell, the two of us could have roughed it and pulled through. Now, with three kids whose childhood and development hinges on my choices? It’s hard to relax, I’ll put it that way. I’m self employed, going on nine years now, and particularly in the last 3 years, I’ve done very well for myself. I thought if I ever reached the levels of business success I’m flirting with now, I’d escape the stress and worry. Turns out the age-old mantra about money buying happiness is completely true. My state of mind has not changed. If anything, the pressure to maintain the present status-quo is even more burdensome, and the fear making a mistake that loses it all (which this COVID mess very nearly did) keeps me up at night.

These are the normal tides in a father’s mind, I suppose. Worry, responsibility, purpose, and joy. I’m riding the waves and doing my best, as we all do. The amount of true “personal time” that comes out of this equation averages 5 hours per week. Roughly an hour a night, most nights of the week. When one of those hours coincides with a small excess of energy (which is, say, half of them) then I get some writing done. It is minuscule and pathetic, sure, but I don’t really mind. I never set out to be a professional writer or to eventually change careers to be a writer. I write because I enjoy it so much, and given 2-3 hours a week when I can choose my vice: Scrivener + Lunhina does it for me.

What is the current state of my WiP? A mess. I crossed the 200K word mark some months back, and still had 20% of the story to write, as outlined. This thing was going to land between 250-300k words. I spent a lot of time debating if I should push ahead and finish, then worry about the size, or if I should remap the outline and break this monstrosity into parts, then spend my time making part 1 a self-contained story.

There is a good argument to be made on either side, but ultimately I decided to break the thing into 3 parts. I’ve been working on a heavy cut/rewrite of part 1 to make it contain it’s own fully realized arc. It’s going okay. I’ve been exploring a new crit platform over at Scribophile. I much preferred the personal interactions I used to have on FWO, but for two reasons I’ve avoided that: 1) Almost all of the members I valued so deeply have left the site, and 2) I really don’t have time for a proper exchange, or even a chapter a week. I’m not in a position to maintain a workshopping relationship right now. Scribophile is nice because I can crit 2-3 stories at my own (slow) pace, which earns me enough “karma” to post a chapter of my own for crit. I can do this infrequently, and the nature of their exchange system still ensures I’ll get feedback, even if weeks have passed. It means different people are seeing each chapter, which has huge drawbacks, but it’s enough. My intuition has grown a lot over the last 6 years of working this craft, so I lean on that more.

While my interest in writing hasn’t shifted much, other things have. I’ve experienced a lot of changes in long-held opinions, in a process that has been all together disorienting and confusing. I’m a liberal by upbringing, and typically fell on the left of all major political debates since high school. I’ve always put a lot of energy into being open minded, and over the years, that’s lead me to reconsider my position (sometimes more than once) on various things. The death penalty, religion, abortion, and things like this. While these are big questions, they are also fairly private, and the fact my opinions swayed one way or the other didn’t generate too much friction in my life. More recently, say starting around 2015, I found myself increasingly upset over the growing force of “political correctness” among my fellow liberals, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it bothered me. Around 2017 I found I just couldn’t watch the news any more. Everyone was so angry all the time, and finding the absolute worst examples of the other party in order to get more shocking headlines, not caring that they succeeded only in deepen divides.

It’s an interesting fact, but America is not more divided than it used to be, though you hear that a lot. America is presently, and has been for decades, about 50/50 democratic/republican. What’s changed is the contempt for the other. Each side hates the other side more. They villainize the other side. They increasingly see them as either stupid, racist, or choose-your-derogatory-dismissive-term. The media is nearly hysterical in playing their ideology games and demonizing the other half of the country, and I found that my stress level and even my general contentment throughout my day was worse the more I watched the news. Channels I used to trust started playing the same games, and eventually I just turned it all off. Enough. I couldn’t do it anymore.

Somewhere in late 2018, in the void that was left behind, I found my way into the “Intellectual Dark Web,” or IDW to get my take on the news. This is a term coined by Eric Weinstein to refer to a set of intellectual thinkers who, by simple virtue of their self-built media platforms, seem to be free from the ideological games that prevent many other people from speaking honestly. They can talk about things that would get studio-backed platforms cancelled. They can have important — even if controversial — conversations that would cause advertisers to pull out of a standard tv-slot out of fear of the twitter storm it might cause. It’s comprised of an informal set of people, about half of whom are liberal, a quarter libertarian, and a quarter conservative. Names like Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Eric Weinstein himself, and others. I’d include Coleman Hughes in this too.

The part of this that has shaken me is to discover just how much I’ve been missing by not actually exploring socially hard topics, up until now. So much is known, so much data is available, so many historical parallels exist, and yet the talking heads on the right and on the left seem to just ignore it all in order to toe ideology. The more I learn, the more I see the puppetry at work. It’s CRAZY. And it’s shaken me. I’ve found myself questioning many beliefs and world views that, not too long ago, shaped me. That I defined myself by. Now? I just don’t know. And it’s damn hard to find out, because you really can’t even talk about difficult subjects. You can’t even ask questions to try and make sense of things. To do anything except assert, forthwith, that some propositions are true, is to paint yourself a bigot and get you kicked out of the conversation.

The trouble is, real world problems are complicated, and require a lot of conversation. People don’t walk around with fully-formed understandings in their head… language is a part of how we think. We need to articulate our thoughts, try them out with different words, pair them with different reasons, bounce them off different individuals. It’s a process that means people are going to say dumb, uninformed things some times, but good for them. Unless they are a ideolog, they will learn something from the exchange. Their understanding of the nuance of the problem can improve, and they can get closer to truth. How is any of that supposed to happen if the immediate consequence for saying something remotely unpopular or misinformed is a mob assault to silence? How does that handling lead to anything except unidimensional analysis of what are actually multidimensional problems?

In some ways, this doesn’t matter. There isn’t anything I can do about the national tides, and over time these things tend to sort themselves out (unless they lead to a collapse). Maybe I don’t need to have clear opinions, but I admit it leaves me weary. It leaves me treading water, in a sense, to figure out how I fit into the world, all over again. What am I? I’m evidently not on the left, as it’s defining itself now. I’ve never been on the right, particularly with social issues. Does it matter? Do the labels count for anything? I’m not sure. Part of my journey the last 2 years has been trying to make sense of what I believe about the world, which is no small undertaking. I sometimes look around me and can’t understand why everyone else seems to have it figured out.

Times are strange, in more ways than one. I find myself navigating new ground on multiple fronts… kids, my world views, my business post/mid-COVID… but keeping ahold of writing is a good grounding force. It is something to return to, something I enjoy. Escapism matched with creativity and craft. The perfect hobby for such trying times.

I’ve ranted enough, so I’ll end it there. Hopefully I can post again to report a completed draft of the new book 1, and hopefully times will be less strained and confusing when I get there. Who knows. Until then, be well, and stay safe.

Lunhina: Status Report

I reached a milestone today that I felt warranted a quick post. After reworking my story early last year, I emerged with an outline for a 5-part story, with parts 1-3 roughly correlating to my earlier outlined material, and parts 4&5 rendering a proper conclusion, which was lacking in the early drafts.

Today, I finished the draft of part 2, bringing the manuscript total up to 132,385 words. In the final draft, I’d hope to get that down to 90k. Somehow.

This is also the furthest I’ve gone, words-wise, into any previous revision of Lunhina (and this is draft 5 if we’re counting strictly). I like where this one is heading, I like how the world building is coming together, and I really like how some of the twists are getting staged. I am very excited to get the rest of this draft hammered down. Most critically, I don’t see any barriers between here and there, which was not the case in any previous outline.

I set some goals for myself this year, and if I can stick to them, I might, just might, have this thing “finished” by the end of the year. My work is somewhat seasonal, giving me a relatively quiet spring and summer, and the kids are getting a little older, hopefully promising full-night’s rest sometime soon. With these factors converging, I have high hopes.

Part 2 was not without its hurdles. In fact, just yesterday I paged back to reference a description from part 1 and was dismayed to find I’d written an entire reveal scene several months ago, then apparently shuffled it in the outline, forgotten, then re-wrote it just a few days past without realizing. It took some work to figure out what was supposed to go where and revise one of the two versions to work. I got there in the end.

Tomorrow I set out on part 3. The latter half of this section is particularly well outlined and should be a breeeze. The first half requires a bit more set work. With any luck, I’ll have a similar status report in a couple months.

A Day in the Life

A day in the life of a writer, a.k.a., me!

Let me present my completely fool-proof plan to accomplish all of your writing goals. It has worked wonders for me. Yes, a big steaming pile of oddly shaped wonders.

1. Situate

Work can’t get done if you aren’t in your work area. To start my day, I sit at my computer. I am pumped, focused, and eager to write.

2. Mentally Prepare

Before I start anything, I browse all my writing forums and other daily websites to “get them out of the way.” You know, so I don’t get distracted later when I’m writing.

3. Logistically Prepare

Now I open up my Scrivener document and re-read what I did yesterday. Sometimes, I also pull up my outline and character notes just to make sure everything I did yesterday is consistent, and so all my marvelous ideas are fresh in my head for today’s upcoming feat of written words.

4. Set Goals

Nothing is accomplished without goals. I look at where I am in the chapter or scene, and consider my goals for today. What do I want to accomplish? What problem do I need to solve?

5. Intellectually Prepare

It’s great to know what your goals are, but knowing how to accomplish them is even better. At this point, I visit various writing websites, watch various youtube videos, and review various podcasts, seeking tips and advice on how to accomplish my specific goals for today.

6. Physically Prepare

Break for lunch. Nothing gets done on an empty stomach.

7. Back to Work

It’s been a few hours, I’ve covered a lot of ground, and I just took a break. This is when distractions will try to strike. The key to success is to be able to mentally re-focus after changing gears. I find it helpful, at this stage, to redo step 2, so I don’t get distracted anymore. Sometimes, instead, I’ll go write a blog post to really harden my grasp of the new lessons picked up in step #5.

8. Writing is a Business

Here’s the thing: writing is a business. It needs to be treated like one, which includes making good decisions about allocating time and resources, learning the needed skill set, and keeping an eye on the big picture. Often, by now, I realize I’m kind of tired. With all the tricks and tips I learned in step #5, I have a lot of new information to reflect upon. Being hasty is bad for business, and truth be told, a nap now will probably do more good for my story in the long run than a few hundred words I’ll need to redo tomorrow. This is a business decision.

9. Smell the Roses

All this work can be intoxicating, but it is important to remember to stop and smell the roses. Life keeps moving, so take a little time to enjoy it, between all the other stuff. To accomplish this, I tend to stay up very (unreasonably) late handling “life.”

10. Stay Positive

When I get into bed, exhausted though I am, I always take a moment to think of the potential ahead of me. I quickly get pumped about how much I’ll accomplish tomorrow and how many words I’ll crank out. Sometimes I do a little math. I’ll easily get 5K words down tomorrow, and if I do that every day, my novel will be done in no time! What’s more, I can just feel how EASY it’s going to be to write tomorrow, now that I’m ready and soon-to-be rested.

11. Keep the Momentum

The next day, I wake up, shower, and begin again from step 1. It is all about sticking to the routine.

 

Good luck, and happy writing!

2018 New Year’s Resolutions

Happy new year, everybody!

2017 was an interesting year, to be sure. It marks my first full year as a dad, as well as my first full year with the serious intention of writing a publishable work of fiction. Hopefully I succeeded in the first charge better than in the second.

(The cat’s tolerance of this show of affection expired about 4 seconds after the photo)

The demands of work surged rather unforgivingly in 2017, and several of my goals in the writing space were sidetracked. While I don’t expect that to change much in 2018, I do plan to compensate for it.

As the year closes, my NiP weighs in around 70K words, out of an estimated 300k (in this draft). While this is a great milestone in progress, it is also, relatively speaking, a long way from the finish line.

As I look ahead to 2018, there are a few things I’m eager to accomplish. What better way to commit than a new year’s resolution? I resolve to the following goals in 2018:

  • In April, my wife is expecting our second son. I hope to make sense of life with two kids running around.
  • I’d like to get back to the gym, or at least, feel guilty about not getting back to the gym.
  • I’d like to finish the current draft of my NiP by mid summer, and send it for beta feedback to my inner circle of critters.
  • I’d like to complete any rewrites, as well as a polish pass before year’s end, allowing me to begin either 1) submitting to traditional houses, or 2) sourcing covers and editors for self-publication.

My current draft began in early October, so I’ve managed 70K words in 3 months. To accomplish these goals, I’ll need to hit about 45K words/month through to July. This is aggressive — it will require about double the output, monthly, that I managed in December. While difficult, I do not think it is unreasonable.

With that, I am off! My posts have been (and will continue to be) rather intermittent, as I dedicate my writing time towards my novel, rather than my blog. Stay tuned for progress reports!

And happy new year, my friends!

Pantsing vs. Outlining

I am an outliner. I need a plan, I need to know I can hit my beats, I need to know where my characters are going. Therefore, I plan in advance.

Yet, the further I get in this journey, the more I realize what a useless label that really is. The supposed distinction between pantsing and outlining doesn’t exist, as best I can see, and the strange worries that outlining squeezes the life/inspiration/organic chemistry from a story is total nonsense.

The truth is, even the most obsessive outliner is actually a pantser! We just pants from a different distance, before zooming in to find the details. You might say, outlining is pantsing on acid. Pantsing at such a scale and pace it makes me dizzy sometimes. After all, I don’t know anyone who sits down and recites their fully-formed outline from start to finish. In practice, the whole thing is a piecemeal jumble of ideas and scenes, a schizophrenic knitting of random connections from here to there, thoughts that inspire other thoughts that lead to cool problems that suggest fascinating backstories that uncover better connections that… BOOM. Look away, kids, stories are being made.

I build my outlines by the seat of my pants, just me and raw, unfiltered characters wrestling with sparks and conflicts. If you can organize all that over the course of 50K words, and have the patience to do so, then I sincerely applaud you. I can’t. I’m far to hyper and way too impatient. I need to make it cool NOW, so I pants and pants and pants some more until I have an epically cool story. Just one that happens to be missing all the words.

If that isn’t pantsing, I don’t know what is. When it is time to write, sure I’m mostly following my plan. You could say I’m just expanding each point it from sentences to pages. I still discover the precise ways and means, the details of the conversations and the intimate feelings that appear at each turn, but I already did my pantsing. This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped myself from having any fun or I’ve taken the life from the story. Why should it? It just means I was too impatient to deal with all that along the way, and had to pants it out ahead of time.

I am an outliner and my outlines are pantsed-AF.

What makes a story… a story?

I’ve spent a great deal of time wondering about the difference between “a story” and, “a sequence of events that happen to a character.” Those might appear to be synonyms, but they are not. A story — a good one, anyway — is more than just a slice of someone’s life. It does more for the reader: it comes together, it builds, it is ultimately satisfying. Each step in the story matters, and only together, do they create the outcome. A story is made up of a series of events, but not all series of events rise to the level of a story. I have a growing sense of this, and yet, I have a terribly hard time understanding how to separate the two. I often stare at my freshly-scribbled chapters unsure if I’ve just built onto my story… or if I’ve merely extended some lifeless “sequence of events.”

Context

A lot of my writing (more so earlier, I like to think) suffers from what you might call, “outline steering.” I’m sure there is an actual industry term for this, but I don’t know it. What I mean is: my characters undergo a specific journey because the plot demands it, even if the character does not.

This is mainly a consequence of being an inexperienced writer. My intuition for how much a character can and will change through certain events is not perfect, so I often expect to be ready for these scenes, only to find I’m not (or rather, the character is not).

The solution I’ve found is to let my characters take more of a driver’s seat. Trust their nature. If I reach a fork in the road that doesn’t make sense for them (and isn’t a small matter of revision in the chapters leading up), I’ll go with the character and shift the outline.

This is how I first came across the problem of defining a story. Without my outline in charge, I was doing more pantsing, inventing scenes and events to move things forward… and more and more I would find that the result seemed to be missing something. Did this scene really need to happen that way? Is this just a scene for the sake of the next scene, or does this advance the story?

So what makes a story… a story?

In case you are hoping for an answer at the end of this, I’m afraid there isn’t one coming. I don’t know what makes a story, and this post is more of a rant than a guide. In any case, I do have some ideas and I’ve spotted some patterns, but there is still a mystery to all this. Here are the things I can offer:

Change

Each chapter should act on the character in such a way that something has changed. In other words, you can step back and say, “I needed this chapter because it changed X,” where X is either the stakes or the character. One of those two needs movement.

Maybe new information has made the situation more dire; thus, we have greater stakes. Maybe a romance took a step forward; thus, a character has moved along their arc. Such changes can be small, forward, or backward, but they must be enough to leave the character in a different state than they began.

Moving a character from one town to another doesn’t do this, unless (for example) they learn something along the way. Solving one problem only to face another doesn’t do this, unless (for example) the stakes have also changed.

When you start comparing your character’s state of mind on the first page of your chapter to the last page of your chapter, it should become clear if something actually happened within them, as opposed to merely happening to them. I’ve found this a very useful guide.

I think the dichotomy between a story and a mere sequence of events comes down to that. If every chapter causes a change, building on the previous change, you end up with a sequence you can’t really break or substitute. You end up with a sequence that is also telling the story of a character’s changes. This helps to create the ending that ties it all together, instead of just adding words or scenes that didn’t carry their weight.

The Ending

Endings are an important aspect in this as well. A story has a climax and a conclusion, and those two need to reward the reader (in one way or another) for the effort they’ve dedicated to reading. Without something to tie together what came before, you may well find your exciting and action-packed chapters fizzle into nothing when considered as a whole.

I’ve identified three items that have a place in almost all good endings, each for intuitive reasons. I speak in absolute terms below for simplicity, but obviously, exceptions to each point readily exist.

Inevitability

The plot needs to reach a point of no return, one that forces the ramp up into the climax and the inevitable fallout after.

This makes sense. You don’t want your characters to be able to walk away. If they can, why don’t they? Something about their nature, or about the situation, ought to lock them on their course. You are telling a story about something, after all, and as you approach that key essence, you want the tension to escalate and the stakes to escalate in order to do it justice. How can you do that if the entire sequence was optional to the invested characters?

This ties back to the idea of every chapter making some change. The changes are working towards a goal, and after a while, there is no turning back from slamming into that goal for better or worse. If you haven’t reached that sense of “no return,” then maybe your chapters aren’t changing enough or else they aren’t converging.  Which leads to…..

Convergence

At some point, your character arcs need to align with the plot arc to converge on a common cause (or on various sides of that common cause). This is the essence of the climax, the “it all comes down to this” moment. More than that, all this work to build your characters was in order to deliver a payoff scene at the end where they succeed (or fail), learn (or don’t) and ultimately face those consequences at the end of their arc. If nothing in the character’s personal journey relates to the overall motion of the story, then instead of complimenting each other, the two arcs miss.

What, then, was the point of all that building? How does your climax pay the reader for the struggles the character has faced? How can you possibly tie things together and justify their common inclusion in your story if they don’t mesh in any way? Without some sense of payoff for these subplots, the ending won’t be very satisfying. Which leads to…..

Satisfaction

Just as a story needs to start at the right place and make the right stops along the way, it has to end at the right place as well. When it does, the result is satisfying. A story leaves you with something, and every part of the story contributed to that resonance. What makes an ending satisfying? This is a broad topic on its own, and one I don’t claim any qualifications to answer in a satisfying way (see what I did there?).

For starters, you need to address the promises you laid out in the book. Close your arcs, address your themes, and resolve your conflicts (as appropriate). I suspect the really satisfying endings feel that way BECAUSE of the above attributes. Chapters moved the characters, the climax was part of an inevitable spiral, and the arcs converged for payoffs after the climax. If each chapter was an indispensable part of the journey of changes that brought about the ending, I expect it will hit with a lot more punch.

Final thoughts

If only there was a simple formula to create compelling stories, but alas, there is not. This is a topic that continues to fascinate me as I experiment with situations, twists, and complexities, only to find out after the fact what worked and what did not. In any case, the above bullets are quite helpful to keep in mind while plotting and have helped me spot opportunities for convergence and moments of change. It remains to be seen if the end results of this effort will reach the lofty goal of “satisfying” but we’ll see. In the meantime, I intend to just keep swimming.

Just Keep Swimming

Time for a(nother) quick writer’s block rant.

There is a fair amount of wisdom in Finding Nemo, believe it or not. As a new father confronting the world of hyper-protective parenting and we-don’t-keep-score-at-games-so-nobody-ever-has-to-lose mentality, etc, I’ve given a little thought to Dory:

Marlin: I promised I’d never let anything happen to him.

Dory: Hmm. That’s a funny thing to promise.

Marlin: What?

Dory: Well you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.

Right indeed.

But this is not a parenting blog entry. I’ve been back and forth through a strange fog of writer’s block the last few weeks, partially due to an overloaded schedule, and partially due to an inability to break into new chapters. A creative chasm I can’t seem to leap. I frequent a number of writing blogs and hardly a week goes by when someone doesn’t voice a similar issue. The creativity just isn’t there, or it’s an off week, or they just can’t find the best way to come at their scene or chapter. I posted a similar thread myself on one forum a little over a year ago, and yet here I am again.

Well, there is another bit of wisdom in Finding Nemo that I’ve found quite useful, and so long as I remember to keep it in mind, I can push through. Most recently when I reminded myself of the magic formula, I managed to break out a 10K+ word charge!

The magic formula? Here it is:

Dory had it right.

Howard Taylor and his crew over on Writing Excuses refer to this as BIC HOK: Butt in chair, Hands on keyboard.

The instruction is simple enough, and the concept, but I am more interested in the mindset.

Why the stumble?

For me, there is a lot of inertia when beginning a new chapter. Some of this comes down to how I outline. I have a huge piece of paper that lists all of the arcs unfolding in my story and the key scenes that take them from start to finish. Each character might have two or three lines down this chart, non-character movement might get a line, a mystery plot or discovery plot will be there. Together, the chart represents all the strands of DNA that will eventually form the living, breathing story. Once I have that worked out, I start organizing these key scenes into chapters and identify where I need additional scenes to bridge two points on this map. I’ll try to combine things in ways that make sense and hammer out the order. When it is all said and done I have a list of chapters for my story along with bullet points of what each arc looks like going into each chapter, and what each arc looks like going out of each chapter.

That sounds just delightful I’m sure, but there is one little problem: Nowhere have I figured out how I’m supposed to get from the input to the output. This is where my discovery writer wakes up and helps keep my story organic.

Or at least, he’s supposed to wake up. Turns out he’s more the wildly indecisive procrastinating type.

As I stare at the blank Scrivener document–the bullets noted over on the right–I start trying to find the best way to get from A to B. The problem is, there are a million ways to get from A to B. How do I find the right one? How do I find the one that will serve my story best? The one that also brings in world building and tension? The one whose setting most captivates the reader? The one that hits every beat just right?

I know what you are thinking: “But you are such a brilliant writer, you probably find the best solution on your first shot!”

Oh, you weren’t thinking that? How rude.

In any case, moving right along to…

How to write your scene perfectly.

You can’t. Quit writing and get another hobby.

How to write your scene.

This is the tough bit, the part that stops people from making headway. The story in your head feels like the perfect story. It feels like you just need to find the right words to get it out. It feels like the wrong words won’t do the story justice.

None of that is true, I’m sorry to say. There might be concepts in your head, movie-like scenes even, a sense of the characters… but until you write something down, there is no story, in your head or otherwise.

 

The story is only what you can get on the page. So what happens when the version you write doesn’t seem to fulfill your conceptual expectations?

Just keep swimming.

That comes back to the crux of the issue. In order to write your scene, you have to be okay with writing a crappy version of it first. Give yourself permission to have a little literary indigestion, and don’t worry about it. The way forward–the ONLY way forward–is to accept that much of your first draft will stink. The ideas will be overdone, off the mark, the characters will act inconsistently, you’ll leave out things you meant to include, you’ll include things you meant to leave out, you’ll pick crappy settings, your tension will be off the mark, etc.

That doesn’t mean you’ve sabotaged your story. It doesn’t mean much of anything, except that you are a little closer to your goal.

This cannot be understated. The key to writing your scene is to just write it and don’t give a damn if the thing you end up with stinks like yesterday’s garbage.

I know I went with the Finding Nemo thing, but let’s switch quickly to golf.

Think of your first draft as your driver. You’ll cover more yards with that first swing than any subsequent hit, but there is no expectation that you’ll land in the hole. That is no excuse not to swing. You take the shot, you see where it lands, then you start from there and figure out how to get closer. It might take a few hits, each with a slightly different tool, each employing a slightly different technique. Each hit will also take you closer and closer until you end up right where you want to be.

So what does it matter, really, if you botch the drive? Who really cares if you accidentally send the damn thing for a swim fifty yards off the course? When it’s time for the next shot you’ll just pull out your nine-iron and hit it again, in the right direction this time. Maybe there are a few scenes you’ll have to hit pretty hard in that second draft, but so what? On this course, there is no par. Play until you run out of bird-names to grade the strokes. Doesn’t matter at all.

Give yourself permission to not be perfect. Accept the fact that your second draft will be way better. Your third, better than that. No matter how you feel or how impenetrable a new chapter might seem… Just. Keep. Swimming.

A page stuffed with crappy, amateur words, in a big stinking messy pile, is nothing at all to worry about. It is closer to the goal than you were before, and that’s what you want.

… Even if you are writing in Whale.

Finding Time to Write

So this is a new challenge for me. My wife works nights, I work days (I work nights too, often, and we both work weekends), but there was always a reliable half-dozen hours a week where I was home alone on a given evening, and bored out of my mind. From this idle time hatched my love of writing. Soon all these regular hours helped me to generate the 200K words in novels I’ve so far written, and nearly a million words in revision, some great crit circles, and a growing involvement on a few writing forums. Some nights I banged out 3K or 5K words, some weeks 15K. My craft was improving, my intuition slowing growing… all was well and moving forward.

Check out this chart from my progress tracker for Lunhina:

As you can see I had a nice strong take off, a little writers-block lull in April, and a beautiful recovery (if I do say so myself) right up until about….. August 18th. Since then my pace has tanked and my progress has stagnated.

That’s because on August 18th this happened, which has been absolutely fantastic, but it has dramatically altered the profile of my free time. For the first time in my life I am facing the challenge many of my like-minded peers have faced all along: how the hell do you find time to write with a job and a life?

Moving to Mobile

I remember an episode of Writing Excuses where Brandon mentioned a fellow writer he crossed paths with while on tour (I think? I don’t remember her name) and she was constantly writing on her phone whenever something else wasn’t going on. This is not how I’ve worked in the past. I like to sit down, clear my head (have a drink) and spend a few hours. How can you do 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there?

Well, it turns out you can, if that is all you’ve got to work with. The first major breakthrough was coughing up for Scrivener for iOS. It turns out if you put your manuscript in your hand (or your pocket, as it were), you’ll find yourself adding to it all throughout the day. My mind tends to wander into my fantasy worlds while I’m doing trivial or repetitive tasks anyway, but now those random wanderings translated into actual words in the MS.

Making Tradeoffs

We all need to prioritize the tasks that bid for our time, and often when you are tired or overworked, it can be easy to choose iPhone games, TV, or sleep. While at least one of those might be healthy for you [citation needed], I’ve decided to cut into them all. My lunch breaks are no longer purely for lunching, my nighttimes are no longer purely for sleeping, and I’ve diverted as much entertainment time as I can manage towards one goal: writing some damn words!

This definitely gets exhausting, and at times, fighting to schedule writing in this way almost feels like work. But I suppose, that is how all personal commitments feel.  Going to the gym wasn’t always fun, but sometimes you just make yourself go because it’s good for you. Side note: I’m no longer going to the gym either.

Tech Compensation

I’ve had the good fortune of some modest success in my business ventures recently, and so I decided to splurge a little (woohoo cyber Monday!) by grabbing an iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. Now that I am in the swing of Scrivener on the phone, I figured the iPad might give me a little more power. Mobile enough to pull out and jump in, fast and easy to pack up, quite unlike a laptop. Then I’ve always liked freehand writing over typing. On a computer I can type faster than I can scribble, no doubt, but not the case for a phone or iPad with a virtual keyboard. Thus I used the Apple Pencil with this app to let me truly write my stories, right into Scrivener! Each of these additions has increased my word count, letting me cram the most productivity I can from the spare moments I run into.

All that together has helped to keep me moving, but there is no doubt things are much different in terms of my productivity and my pace. There might be no way around that, but I continue to look for tricks or habits that can make sure this hobby doesn’t fall by the wayside. If nothing else, I can at least now stand in solidarity with so many other novice writers who have to fight for the time of day for each and every word.

Friends, I feel you.

Scrivener Sync Conflicts

I’ve been absent for a couple weeks, thanks to the adventure unfolding beyond the page with my new son Evan. He is doing great and fatherhood is proving a most unexpected delight.

What little writing I have managed in the last few weeks (and I actually have strapped on a couple thousand words) has been *almost* entirely on my iPhone, using the mobile Scrivener app I wrote about a couple months ago. Typing on a phone is far from an ideal experience, but it is working for me, and letting me use free minutes here and there in a more productive way.

Sync Problems

Today I hit my first issue. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I fired up Scrivener on my laptop and was met with a dire warning: the Mobile Sync encountered conflicts! Scrivener then closed out my project, made backups, did who knows what, and popped back up with a new folder down at the bottom called CONFLICTS.

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Eeek. I have plenty of experience resolving conflicts with source control frameworks and diff utilities, but what can I do with Scrivener?

It’s okay! Nothing is lost!

So I did some research and eventually figured this out. The first thing to do is take a deep breath and realize that nothing was deleted. When Scrivener is unable to merge changes together, it just saves the two conflicting copies of the file. All your words are there, you just need to figure out which file they live in. In some cases you will need to compare the two versions and manually merge the differences together, if they both contain some new changes and some old changes. It takes a little patience, but rest assured it can be done without losing any valuable words.

Snapshots

This is a cool feature in Scrivener that I’ve not really played with before. Basically, you can save versions of individual files and keep track of the changes as you go, including the ability to roll back to older versions. This is the functionality we’ll use to quickly figure out how to merge our files.

What you want to do is pull up one of the conflicted files, then choose Document->Snapshots->Take Snapshot

This will save a copy of this particular version off to the side for us to compare to later. If it doesn’t open the snapshots sidebar, you can click the camera icon next to the notes area, or choose Document->Snapshots->Show Snapshots.

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What you should see on the right is a list of all your snapshots for this file, in particular, the one we just made:

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Copy & Paste

Believe it or not, that was the hard part. Now we are going to use a little trick to let us see the specific changes and decide what is the correct version, without missing anything.

My naming convention, as you can see in that first screenshot, is not the clearest. However, from looking at the text I know what chapter each of those files comes from. I just made a snapshot of the first one in that list, which happens to be my chapter 1. Now I scroll up and find the real version of chapter 1 under my Manuscript:

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Once there, I do Edit->Select All, then Edit-> Copy

No, go on back to your conflicted version, the one you just took a snapshot of. Once there do, Edit->Select All, Edit->Paste.

This changes the contents of the conflicted file to match the contents of the Manuscript file, but because we have a snapshot saved, we can drill in to see exactly what those differences are. To do this, click the “Compare” button (no need to save a new snapshot).

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Now on the right you will see a version of the document with blue writing indicating new text that was not in the snapshot, and red strikethrough indicating text that was in the snapshot, but has now been deleted by the manuscript version. You can use the arrows to jump from difference to difference, and manually copying the right bits back up to the Manuscript version of the file.

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So in this case, I can see my “Conflicted” version had an extra line, which has been deleted in the “Manuscript” version (e.g., it is in red). In this case that line was supposed to be deleted, so I don’t have to do anything, my manuscript version is right.

You can go one by one until you have them all resolved. When you are all done, right click on the Conflicts folder and move it to the trash.

*whew.* Crisis averted.

Get Beta Readers, then Ignore Them

Sidestepping the flippancy of the headline, I invite you to follow me on a brief rant of why you absolutely should get beta readers for your work, and then you absolutely should learn how to ignore them.  If you happen to be a beta reader of my work, don’t worry I still want to be friends. This post comes after I provided feedback to someone, and it inadvertently disrupted their vision.

Beta readers

People have different names for the different stages of critiquers. I’m talking about the first round of readers… the alpha readers, the workshoppers. The ones who are probably writers themselves. Since alpha reader doesn’t seem to be a commonly used term, for this rant I’ll just call them beta readers.

There are tons of reasons you should get beta readers. I’m not going to spend too much time on this point, because I think it is well understood. The bullets are as follows:

  • Outside opinions are indispensable for calibrating mystery plots
  • Outside opinions are essential for gauging foreshadowing and plot twists
  • Beta readers will catch tons of obvious mistakes to which you were totally blind
  • They will help you see pacing and arc issues from a fresh perspective

The list really speaks for itself. No matter how much creative distance you give yourself, there is no way to approach your own work the way a reader would, and the feedback a good beta reader can provide will help turn your story from good to great.

Protect your head

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Here’s the rub: mixed in with all that great feedback will be — inevitably — a lot of things that should just be ignored. Things that appear to reflect on the quality of your story, but don’t really. Your job is to keep those things from getting into your head.

First of all, no book you write will be a perfect genre match for someone else’s tastes, it just can’t ever be. The reason is simple. No matter how brilliant the story is, a book’s prose are only half of the equation that forms the “experience” of a book. The other half is the repertoire of beliefs and experiences brought by the reader. When these two combine, each reader has a unique experience of a given story mixed with their emotions and imagination. An experience surely guided by the author, but unique nonetheless. There is no one-size-fits-all, so there is just no way to write a story that works for everyone in all ways. This does not imply a problem with your story.

Then there are the high level preferences that are unlikely to be a perfect match for all readers. Your style of descriptions and prose, your use of voice, the length of your chapters, the characterization of whoever, the way you pace and plot… in that enormous list of “things you do in your book,” at least one won’t perfectly match a given reader’s preferences. This does not imply a problem with your story.

Both of those compatibility issues are normal and expected. Not a problem. A casual reader will love a book even if it wasn’t a 100% perfect genre match to their taste. They probably won’t even notice if this or that stylistically wasn’t perfectly their ideal. These things are overlooked by the casual reader, who just remembers how much they loved your book. These things probably won’t be ignored by your beta readers!

Finally, exceptionally few people will really know what you are going for until they’ve finished your book. Because beta readers often give feedback along the way, they will — thoughtfully and with the best of intentions — identify places where they perceive the story is veering off course. Off what course? Well, the one they anticipate. Probably the one they themselves would write, or at least the one they expect you to be writing. Whatever the case, they are almost certainly wrong, and their nudging doesn’t serve to steady the ship so much as confuse its vector.

In all of these cases, the related feedback actually has nothing to do with your story, it is merely a reflection of subtle mismatches between your story and your chosen readers. Recognizing when feedback is bubbling up from these sources is crucial, so you can safely dispose of it. We’ll return to this observation shortly.

Seek, and you will find

New writers often become new critters as part of the initiation into the world of writing. If you have workshopped other people’s writing, let me ask you something: has it changed the way you consume published fiction at all?

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In other words, have you ever slipped on your workshopping hat while reading a published book, perhaps and old favorite, and been surprised to see that you could make a list of issues if asked? I recently had this experience with Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss as well as The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Don’t get me wrong: those are both fantastic books, and well worth a look by any serious fantasy writer. Nonetheless, I could find issues… things that didn’t move as well as they could have, unbelievable character statements or feelings, etc.

Of course I could, but so what?

All this should demonstrate is that the goal of the author is not to construct a story that is immune to feedback, it is just to construct a great story! The two are not mutually exclusive.

I think, at its heart, it is an issue of “academic” issues vs “actual” issues. In workshop-mode, all the rules and guidelines and best-practices are swimming about in our heads, and when we see something that deviates, we notice. We point it out, because that is our job as a critiquer. Yet many of these academic things do not imply storytelling problems, not necessarily anyway. It might just be that you want a chapter to meander a bit to set the tone. You want a character to overlook something for reasons revealed later. You want tension interrupted by flowery metaphors. It is not bad that beta readers will point many of these things out, it is bad when the author decides they need to “fix” all of these observations categorically.

Ignoring beta readers

Which brings me to the thesis of the rant. If we reduce all this to an actionable summary, it would be this: just as important as workshopping is learning how to filter feedback.

I’ve heard Steven King quoted to say he takes one in three comments. For newer writers with less experienced writing groups, I’d say forget Steven King, and be even more stingy.

Look for trends, ignore the rest.

Watch out for feedback that stems from simple incompatibilities between your readers and your book. These are all the things we talked about above: stylistic or genre mismatches, big-picture nudges, and anything else that threatens to veer you off the course you intended to walk. These are rarely real issues with your story, and are unlikely to be repeated by other readers.

Furthermore, remember that a lot of feedback will be pedantic in nature. This is nothing against the beta readers — their role is to make sure you notice these things! But all you need to do is look for patterns, not specifics. If there are no worrying patterns overall, go ahead and stick to your stylistic choices, and disregard the feedback saying otherwise.

Finally, remember that your story is done when it feels right to you. You might still have a pile of “unfixed” feedback, but that does not mean the manuscript on your screen isn’t fantastic and publishable.

Note

I hope none of this is construed as an excuse not to reflect on the feedback you receive, or to otherwise make a less than stellar book. I merely hope to impress upon you that it is all measured to your standards; you the author, the creative force. It is to your judgement this book must yield, nobody else’s. Consider what they say, be aware of the types of feedback that are unlikely to help your story, then decide for yourself and discard the rest.

TL;DR:

Don’t lose track of your vision, and make sure your beta readers don’t inadvertently steer you the wrong direction. They are an invaluable resource in many ways, but never the final word, and never the golden standard against which your writing must measure.

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