Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘novels’

Percolation

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 24 Jul 2012| 2 Comments »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiNo, not coffee (though as a Seattleite, I have my opinions on that, too). Mental percolation.

Today, I pulled out my pen and pad, and read through the last bit I wrote yesterday. As I was reading I realized that I didn’t know where I had been taking the scene. Going further back, I read more. Still, no clue as to where I was going.

You might think that, after yesterday’s post about outlining techniques, I have it all down on paper, but even a detailed outline won’t tell you everything about a scene. I may have a five-page outline for this FC:V, with chapter breaks and notes on POVs, but there’s still a world of difference between that and the words and action in an actual chapter. The outline gives me the plot, but it doesn’t give me the subplots, the little “side trips,” or the variations from the original that pop up while I write a novel. It will give me the main characters and their general thoughts, but it won’t give me those subtle interactions or the conversational threads that are the fabric of the book.

In short, I knew where I was going, but didn’t know what road I had been paving to get there. 

Today, therefore, is a “percolation” day.

A percolation day is a day with more thinking than writing, where I remind myself throughout the day of where I want to go, and let my subconscious mull on the exact path I want to take.

It’s a strong tool. I use it to retrieve old memories (What’s that actors name?), figure out the answer to a question (Where are my keys?), or solve a problem (What is really happening in this scene?) It’s also a useful tool when I’m just starting to flesh out a story idea; percolation taps into creative processes that work best in the background, where the noise of language and logic is silenced, and where symbols and concepts can be swapped freely.

So, the pen and paper went away, and I pulled out my outline. I’ve changed a lot, as I’ve been writing Beneath a Wounded Sky, and have deviated from the outline at several points, but re-reading the original outline is still helpful. The original outline still has the excitement of that new idea, and the purest rendition of the roadmap I envisioned, so even after I hare off on a wild tangent, I can use that original outline to course-correct back toward the goal.

I’ll keep that outline at hand, today, and use it to keep the problem fresh in my mind. By this evening, then, I’m pretty sure I’ll know how I want to finish off this scene and close the chapter.

Percolation, baby…Percolation.

k

Read Full Post »

The Good, the Bad, the Idiotic

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , on 20 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

There’s a lot of chatter on the blogs about bad reviews and what to do about them (like The Misfortune of Wondering). Bad reviews are a fact of writing life; they cannot be avoided. You’ll get them from critics, from readers, from family and friends, and at times, from fellow writers (those are the worst). But no matter the source, there is only one acceptable response.

What is that acceptable response? Well, it isn’t is to fire off a flaming bitch-fest where you call the reviewer an illiterate berk and question his paternity. Despite the immediate satisfaction this activity provides, it is definitely not the way to go. If you must, write it and then delete it.

However, neither is it acceptable to write a reasonable, point-by-point rebuttal to the critique, noting how this scene is obviously an allusion to Homer’s “The Odyssey,” depicting the character’s inner journey, and how your hero’s deformed limb is a device to mirror Richard III, which should be clear to anyone with an education. These refutations always come across as whiny and insecure (yes, pompous can and often does come across as insecurity).

In short, a response is never acceptable, because (a) you never convince the reviewer you’re right, and (b) because you (the writer) never appear in a good light. A response always makes the writer look silly, pedantic, immature, petulant, patronizing, or just plain stupid. There are as many reasons for a bad review as there are bad reviews. Some people just don’t like the sort of stuff you write. Some may like the genre, but just didn’t like the book. Some nitpickingly comb through any book and tag the writer for any flaw, real or imagined. Some reviewers, including a few professional ones, are bitter, small-minded people for whom tearing down someone else’s work is a way to make them feel better about themselves. And then there are some reviewers who have read the book, considered it with a well-educated mind, and simply found it to be flawed.

No book is perfect. No book will please every reader. No book is immune from the bad review. Just go out on Amazon; even the critically-acclaimed and best-selling titles have bad reviews. I’ve had bad reviews a-plenty. One reviewer panned my entire novel because of one perceived factual error (it wasn’t an error). Another reviewer panned me because he didn’t like the historical Custer, and didn’t want to read a novel with him as a character (this is substantive?) I’ve had bad reviews of every stripe, and responding to these bad reviews is futile, useless, and possibly career-damaging.

The only acceptable response is to read them and consider them. Just like you would consider the feedback from a fellow writer or a writers’ workshop, consider the feedback from a bad review. In both cases, the feedback may be meaningful; the reviewer may have touched upon a flaw you hadn’t seen before. If the feedback is valuable, use it; if not, dump it.

Here’s the crux: if someone doesn’t “get” something you wrote, if someone doesn’t understand that character’s motivation or what that scene really meant, then you screwed up, not the reader. The book is perfect in your head, but it’s never perfect on the page.

k

Read Full Post »

Write, Don’t Edit

Posted in Writing, tagged , , on 05 Jul 2012| 3 Comments »

Heinlein’s First Rule of Writing is:

  1. Write

Sounds simple, right? Yeah, but really, really hard to do. And to this rule, I would humbly add a corollary:

  1. Write, don’t edit

This is even harder. What Heinlein meant was, “Don’t just talk about writing; do it.” What I’m talking about is what that “do it” clause means.

Admittedly, for most of us, just collecting enough time, energy, and mental focus to put words on paper is a massive challenge, but once you finally start to “do it,” don’t screw it up by wasting that precious combination. Don’t edit every written word. When you stop to back up and edit your work it before it’s done, you’re interrupting the flow of the story and the flow of your creative mind. You are letting your analytical brain stand there like the TSA, holding up every word for inspection, examining each and every phrase with a critical eye, making your prose (essentially) take off its shoes and belt and stand there, hands in the air, hoping its pants won’t fall down. In this instance, your mind is your own worst enemy, with one hemisphere fighting against the other.

The logical, left hemisphere gets in the way of the creative, right hemisphere. Of course, when dealing with language and the written word, you can’t go “all right brain, all the time.” No, you need that left brain to help you turn the movie inside your head into scribbly bits on a white page. The struggle is in managing that left side; you need to rein it in until it listens to you, and no “left brain whisperer” exists. You need to use brute force, smash-down, alpha-brain techniques here. You need to squash your every left-brained impulse to edit as you right-brain write. And believe me, it’s hard.

The reason this is so difficult is because when I say “edit,” what you should read is “second-guess.” That’s really what we’re doing when we write and edit simultaneously. We’re second-guessing our every word, every phrase, every metaphor, description, scene, and chapter. And boy-o-boy does that take time away from what we really want to do: Write.

As I said before, this is my own personal bugbear, my own monster in the closet. Even writing this post, I’ve had to struggle against it. The first third of the article was written with every line written twice or three times as I went back and rehashed my prose. For the last two-thirds, I forced my editing mind into quiet submission, only giving it the occasional typo to fix as I went along. And here’s the kicker: in the same amount of time, I wrote twice as much.

There is a time to edit. Editing is an important part of the “Write” portion of Heinlein’s First Rule. But put it where it needs to be: after you finish.

Write. Finish. Then edit.

k

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts