Get Dynamic

What I find to be ironic about very active sequences is that the process of writing them is so much slower and more deliberate than just writing about two people having a conversation. The physical logistics alone take me days. "What does that guy do while this guy's running up the stairs? How about the girl over there? What's happening in the rest of the room? How soon would the people on the second floor get sick of all the racket and come down to holler at someone? Would Soandso just stand there while all this is going on?"

Because in an action sequence a lot of things happen at once, and while you can show that in a medium like film (in fact, the more things that happen at once in an action-movie sequence, the better, apparently), in written fiction you can't do that unless you keep going back in narrative time over and over and explain what everyone's up to. A lot of writers, of whom I will probably be one, employ the time-honored phrase "Everything seemed to happen at once" to indicate to the reader that these things are, in fact, all happening at once; other writers, generally known among the intelligentsia as "better," just tell you the important things and use style to create the required sense of urgency or chaos.

The heavy logistics also prevent me from dictating scenes like this, since I so often have to refer back to one or more of the other things that are happening at once, so all else aside, I work at half speed just from having to type it all. It's very discouraging.

And where the heck is fall, exactly? Surely by this time of year we should be getting at least a couple of days under 70 degrees? I've got to get hold of whoever's in charge.

Word Count: 28,311 (+843)

Share It

I've been perking along pretty well on The Amateurs on the whole, although I've been fighting a lack of initiative for the last couple of weeks. It's easy -- or at least not hard -- to generate first-draft composition fairly regularly when I'm the only one who has to see it: I don't have to second-guess it, or polish it, or basically please anyone but myself. I can read it knowing exactly what I mean.

But now I've agreed to workshop some of it with my friend Danielle and ever since then I've been reading it as if someone else was reading it. And now I hate it. All of it. A lot. I've cut some things and put in some other things, and generally made it smoother and more readable. I still hate it. And I haven't even given it to Danielle yet.

I knew people were going to have to read it eventually, or what's the point, right? But until a couple of weeks ago, I had expected to be able to finish it, ignore it for a couple of months and then use my superpowers to turn it from a bundle of semiconnected scenes into a single, coherent piece of work.

I have to say, and I don't think I'm alone in this: when it comes to my own stuff I am the most blackhearted critic ever.

Word Count: 27,468 (+393)

Work for a Living

Generally speaking, my day job is the best one ever: it pays well, offers generous benefits and has the deepest possible appreciation of the work/life balance that is still compatible with actual commercial activity. The time-off package is unbelievable, and the corporate culture actively nurtures courtesy and collegiality.

But we've been really busy at work this week, and while my brain understands and accepts that it is not the firm's responsibility to provide me with plenty of downtime in which to transcribe my dication and update this blog, I'm still mildly shocked and affronted when it doesn't. I've also been fighting a little bug of some sort since Sunday, so I've been sleeping a lot, and it seems to have affected my initiative, because when I'm not sleeping I don't really want to do anything but read mystery novels and snack.

Anyway, I did get a little bit of work done. I'm almost finished replacing the scene that I cut out over the weekend, and to my pleased surprise it actually went very quickly and easily, so I guess it was indeed a Good Thing that I edited preemptively, after all.

Word Count: 27,075 (+1,112)

Edit Preemptively

Yesterday I reread my draft from the very beginning and came to the dismal conclusion that in order to move forward in the direction I want, I'm going to have to cut out and completely replace a scene near the beginning which had seemed to me merely expository, but which I've come to realize is a fairly major key to my protagonist's circumstances and character. It's certainly a good thing that I've recognized this now, instead of two weeks from now when I've written 5,000 more words that depend on this scene, but it's always depressing to see yourself going backwards.

However, in the process I've learned a lot about my protagonist and what has to happen to her. As a result of this scene, her trajectory will go from being largely driven by outside influences to being an internal conflict of personal morality, which is a lot less reactive. The rewriting of the scene, which will be accomplished over the next few days, will undoubtedly open up a lot of possibilities. So it is, overall, a Good Thing.

I suppose.

Damn it.

Word Count: 25,963 (-1,074)

Cheat

Today's dirty little secret is that only about 600 of the new words in the word count are first draft composition. The rest is a section that I wrote months ago for an earlier conception of the novel and pasted in from the kill file. It's not technically cheating, I suppose -- I did write the section, just not recently -- but I still kind of feel like I'm getting away with something.

Anyone else ever noticed how dramatically different a scene looks on paper from the way you pictured it in your head?

Yeah, me neither.

Word Count: 27,037 (+892)

Read Someone Else's

Right now I'm reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and I'm considering instituting a moratorium on the reading of good fiction, at least until I finish a first draft. Crap, now -- that's different; all the Patricia Wentworth mysteries ever written won't impact my work on The Amateurs, except insofar as time spent reading crap is time not spent working. But good fiction inspires in me a deep insecurity, based on the following syllogism:

The New York Trilogy is good fiction.

The Amateurs is nothing like The New York Trilogy.

therefore

The Amateurs is not good fiction.

In general terms, that's OK -- I'm not trying to write good fiction in the sense of trying to make a literary statement or comment on the human condition or win a Pulitzer. All I aspire to for The Amateurs is a good well-paced story with strong and interesting characters in an amusing, slightly flip style. Beach reading for the moderately intelligent, I call it. But reading real literature while I'm trying to write decent fiction always makes me feel like a fraud, and even a strong but not necessarily literary narrative (see the Harry Potter books) makes me jealous to the point of weeping (which is why I didn't get past The Prisoner of Azkhaban). Is this the character flaw that will stand between me and a decent novel? Only time will tell.

In any case The New York Trilogy is totally depressing. All about hermetically isolated outsiders living in one of the developed world's most dehumanizing cities, nurturing ingrown obsessions with other people's lives. Don't read it right after a massive humanitarian disaster, is what I'm saying.

Word Count: 26,145 (+846)

Reach a Milestone

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway mentions one of his sure-fire writing tricks: always to stop writing for the day before he'd emptied his brain, so that when he sat down again the next day he'd always have something in there to start with. It's the most practical piece of writing advice I've ever heard or read, and the proof of its utility is how it's made the rounds -- I think even Hemingway had gotten it from someone else.

Last week, I reached a small milestone in The Amateurs: roughly, the setting of the scene and the introduction of the most important players as well as the problems that will be addressed in the plot. Not that I've been writing nothing but exposition for 25,000 words; plenty of things have happened -- but the course of the story, which has been moving in a straight line, will now take a sharp bend and go over some rapids.

Naturally, I finished the Straight Line part last Thursday and then took a nice long Labor Day break to "brainstorm" about the Bendy Rapids part. I stupidly thought I could do this somehow subliminally, in the downtime between the championship CNN-watching and experimental martini-drinking I also had planned. Needless to say, I started today's writing task with almost no clue where I was going with it, thereby proving, if it needed proving, that Hemingway was a lot smarter than I am.

Word Count: 25,299 (+534)

Worry Your Pretty Little Head About the World

Something that's been rightly taken to task by the liberal blogosphere is the idea that the people of the Mississippi Delta hardest hit by the hurricane (a) somehow had it coming, (b) certainly don't deserve help from the rest of us, and/or (c) are basically unworthy anyway.

Although I must say that people shooting at evacuation helicopters are not at all challenging the logic of (c), I'm always amazed at the thought process that would blame the victims of a situation like this, until I remember that victims of injustice are nearly always blamed, no matter what the situation. It's common for people to assign a moral component to a perceived failure -- it's a defense mechanism for their consciences, their worldviews, and their pocketbooks. At its basis is the totally understandable unwillingness to believe that bad things (often very, very bad things) can happen to absolutely anyone -- looters, thugs, hardworking families, office workers in high-rises. And if "failure" to put a plastic bubble around one's living space to protect it from Lake Pontchartrain is a moral "failure," then we don't need to feel badly about it, offer help to people who've experienced it, or imagine something like that happening to us.

Because if we imagine it happening to us, it might be too much for us to bear. And then we might become the kind of person who spends money, or vacation days, or house room to help people in need -- good people and bad.

It's might be cheaper the other way. But somehow I doubt that it makes us richer.

Word Count: 24,765 (+0). For some reason, I couldn't keep my mind on it.