Tag: drafting

The long and the short of it

Most writers seem to consider themselves either short story writers or novelists.  Before I knew anything about writing, I always thought the only real difference was length (or, as Elizabeth Bear likes to say: novels are works of fiction, longer than short stories, and flawed).

When people ask me why I write short stories when I seem to prefer (and be more comfortable with) novel-length fiction, I usually say I think writing short stories is good practice for writing novels.  But how true is this?  Short stories require a tight plot and coherent structure, and they need good character development and character arcs.  Developing these skills will improve your writing, regardless of length.  Plus, since it takes much less time to complete a short story, you can practice writing complete works more often than if you were writing only novels (in which you could invest a year before realizing their fundamental flaws).

Despite some overlap, however, short stories and novels make fundamentally different demands on the author, especially with respect to world-building and pacing.  In a short story you have neither the time nor need to create a complete world (though generating the illusion of reality still remains important).  The pacing, too, is totally different.  Even though both short stories and novels need beginnings, middles, and ends, the way you structure and build towards each will be very different.  Finally, with novels you not only have a broader, deeper canvas to work on, but you must fill it with sub-plots and a larger cast of characters.

So, does writing short stories really help you prepare for writing novels, or are the two forms of fiction too different to be truly comparable?

Even if the answer is no, there are still good reasons for novelists to write short stories.  For one thing, many critique groups are less inclined to workshop novels.  If you write short stories, you can remain active in your crit groups and garner valuable feedback from (and interaction with) your peers.  Another advantage I’ve found is that having short stories out to market keeps you feeling engaged while you toil away on novels.  Novels take a lot longer to come to fruition, and its easy to feel as if you’re not making progress.  Completing the occasional short story and submitting it to markets gives me (personally) a feeling of short term accomplishment.  This might seem like a poor reason to take time away from your novel, unless you consider the very real impact your emotional state can have on your writing.  If you’re feeling productive and upbeat, it’s going to be a lot easier to keep that novel draft moving forward.

I know others feel differently, though.  So, tell me, do you consider yourself a novel writer or a short story writer?  Do you write exclusively one length of fiction, or do you do both?  Do you see the necessary skills sets as complementary or divergent?

The absurdity of it all

I’ve reached a point in the first draft of my novel “Absent” where I’ve had to stop and ask myself:  is this absurd, or is it brilliant?

It’s not a question of shitty first drafts, in which you give yourself permission to suck in order to plow ahead and finish the wretched thing.  The quandary I’m talking about is a different animal altogether.  With a shitty first draft, you know the story is a mess.  You recognize its awfulness and choose to ignore it for the time being.  What I’m experiencing is a complete inability to objectively assess whether the story I’m telling is laugh-out-loud ridiculous or utter genius.

In all probability, it’s somewhere in between.  The fact that I’m incapable of determining this, however, makes me nervous.  I’m usually pretty good at working out whether a story has potential or not.  And while I can step back and identify certain structural problems with the unfolding of the narrative, point to places where character development is inconsistent or where plot holes might be forming, I just can’t  suss out if this damn novel works or not.

This has happened to me once before, and looking back I think I’ve nailed down a possible culprit.  In both cases, when I couldn’t determine if the story worked or not, the underlying problem was a scientific improbability I was struggling to make seem plausible.

In the case of “Absent”, the improbability is time travel.  In the other example (a short story still languishing in a file folder) it was near-future space travel.

Speculative fiction is all about creating worlds where the improbable (and often impossible) seem real.  The trick is to avoid obvious hand-waving in making your speculative elements believable.  I think I have a tougher time doing this with sci fi than with fantasy.  Upon reflection, I suspect this is due to a lack of confidence.

Unlike anthropology (a discipline I think lends itself particularly well to the creation of fantasy-based worlds), science has never been my forte.  Even when I engage focused research on a specific scientific topic, I come away feeling tentative and unsure of my efforts to spin it into a believable speculative world.  This insecurity is surely transmitted when I craft the plot and write the story, calling attention to itself like a big red winter nose.

To solve my problem, I know I need to simply keep at it, to dig in harder with my research and read and dissect more science fiction novels to see how they succeed where I fail…assuming, of course, that a lack of confidence and practice are my problems.

As I write this, it strikes me that another element in the mix might be basing a story in the real world and inserting just one speculative element in it (as opposed to creating a largely speculative world).  Getting readers to accept a world just like ours except for this one, single, crazy thing might be much harder than selling them on a completely speculative world.  Perhaps I haven’t yet accrued sufficient writerly skill to pull this off.  In which case, practice and study still seem like the appropriate route forward.

So, has this happened to anyone else?  Have you ever started into a novel or short story only to realize halfway through you’ve got NO IDEA if it’s working or not?  And, if so, why do you think it happens?

Tell me I’m not alone in this…please!

Those voices in your head

As many of us know, the act of getting a story out of our heads and onto the page requires forcing the two unruly siblings living our in our brains — the uptight, fussy Internal Editor and the wild, emotive, elusive Beast — to work together.

I’ve long known (and squabbled with) my old frenemy, the Internal Editor, but I didn’t have a term for describing the Beast until I went to Viable Paradise and heard Laura Mixon lecture about the ancient, buried part of your brain that plucks patterns from a web of emotions, sensations, and evolutionary cunning.   It is from here that the well of creativity springs to nourish our storytelling.

For me, activating the Internal Editor is a breeze.  In fact, sometimes it’s a bit too easy; before I know it I’m putting off advancing the plot in favor of obsessing over the structure of a single paragraph.  As I’ve already blogged about, this year I’m trying NaNoWriMo for the first time, and the experience has brought the push and pull between the Editor and the Beast into even sharper focus.  After all, the point of NaNo is to shut the Editor up altogether and let the Beast have free reign to drive the story along at top speed.

On the one hand, I’ve found it physically painful not to go back over what I’ve written.  It’s hardwired in my DNA (perhaps a hold-over from grad school days?) to tweak the wording, revise the dialogue, and insert new scenes to shed better light on the characters and their behavior.  Plus, I staunchly maintain there’s solid value in this type of revision — more often than not, editing can help illuminate the path ahead and open doors to new plot developments you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

On the other hand, embracing the NaNo approach (as best I can) has liberated my Beast.  Telling the Editor to shut up and just pour the story onto the page without looking back is thrilling.  And the stuff that comes out is often surprising.  Of course, it can also lead thousands of words in the wrong direction, fingers taping in a frenzy of Beast-driven madness.  When I come back to myself, I find my characters have said stupid things and done even stupider things, and the Internal Editor is waiting, hands on his hips, saying “I told you so.”  Which sucks.

The real trick, I think, is to get your Beast to talk to you while you aren’t writing.  Coaxing him out and encouraging him to whisper yet-unrevealed plot secrets is about as hard as getting a cat to perform tricks.  I find it happens (the coaxing of the Beast, that is, not the cat tricks) most often when I’m in the thick of working on a project but am currently doing something else – especially something requiring minimal active engagement with the world around me.

For instance, in the last week, my Beast has visited me with gifts while I was:

  • sitting on the subway staring at my own reflection in the window against the blackness of the tunnel
  • sitting under a dryer at the hair salon with my head full of color foils (and without my glasses on, rendering me essentially blind)
  • walking outside on a route so familiar I didn’t need to look where I was going

In all three instances, I fell into a sort of trance and followed the Beast down new and deliciously twisty avenues of storytelling in my novel.  When I snapped out of it, for a moment I had forgotten where I was.  It’s possible I was even talking to myself (which on the New York City subway would put me in good company).

Thus far, my Beast flat-out refuses to appear when directly invoked, so, naturally, none of these episodes of Beast-contact were activated on purpose.  Nor did any of them happen when I had a pen and paper convenient to hand.  Thanks a lot, Beast.

Though, I’m finding there are certain activities that will usually lure him from hiding – including long walks and (ugh) trips to the gym.  Washing dishes, folding laundry, and ironing are also good bets.  Maybe the Beast just likes a clean house?

What are your tricks for getting your Beast to communicate with you?

Drafting and Revising: Patience really is a virtue

Congratulations!  You’ve had a genius idea for a story.  You’ve even managed to get it all written down, more or less in order.  You’ve gone over it once or twice, tweaking the wording, deleting pesky adverbs and restructuring awkward paragraphs.  You went so far as to print it out, read it aloud, and fix everything that sounded stupid.

Awesome! You’re ready for feedback.

No, I’m sorry my friend, but you are not.

get out your editor's pen!

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way several times.  It’s natural, of course, to finish up a newly drafted story and want instant feedback.  Or, worse yet, to want to cross “submit to market” off your to-do list.  Natural, but a big mistake.

A better strategy is to set that story aside.  Forget it exists.  Do this for a minimum of a week, two if you can bear it–solitary confinement in the filing cabinet.  Then pull it back out and give it a read.  Chances are the first line will strike you as horrible.  If you make it to the third paragraph you’ll probably have found at least five instances of “that” you can cut.  You may have also realized nothing happens on the entire first page.

Crap.

This is why patience is a virtue.  Draft.  Set aside.  Revise.  Repeat.  Then send it out to your writer’s group.  Only then will your story be at a point where higher level feedback will be valuable.  Plus, your writer’s group will thank you for doing the extra revisions 🙂

This one is always hard for me.  I love my new stories (after all, their newness makes them awesome by default).  They’re like perfect newborn ducks, fluffy and delicate.  I want to send them into the world so that everyone can see how amazing they are, how brilliant.  But I’m too close to them to recognize their awkwardness or see that they aren’t yet capable of swimming, let alone flight.  Maybe, just maybe, if I nurtured and fed them and waited for them to grow a little they might not get eaten by the neighborhood dog.

Just sayin’.

NaNoWriMo, where’s the love?

This is my first year giving NaNoWriMo a try and one thing that has surprised me is the general chatter out there regarding whether NaNo is for “real” writers or not (by which folks generally seem to mean published pros).  My feeling is that every writer, newbie or pro, will benefit from the practice of daily writing, so I’m frankly not sure what the fuss is all about.  Nevertheless, here are my thoughts on NaNoWriMo’s pros and cons:

NaNo’s advantages:

  • I’m nearing the end of Week 2 and am several thousand words behind of where I should be to “finish” on time…but, I’ve also written about 15K, thereby kick-starting a novel I might have otherwise never begun (and one I’m really enjoying writing).  Whether I reach 50K by the end of the month or not, I’m chalking this up as a win.
  • I write, revise, research, or otherwise work on my writing regularly, but the habit of putting down 2000 or so new words every day is a valuable one to develop.  NaNo has helped me develop this habit.  Again, a win.
  • Lets be honest, we all have goals we’d like to meet that fall forgotten into the gutter where they molder and die alone.  But when we announce those goals to the world at large, post our progress on a website, and read about the progress of our friends on Twitter, Facebook, and the like…well, the social pressure of something like NaNo can be very motivating (though also occasionally disheartening).  It’s a little embarrassing to see your buddies’ word counts grow while your status bar just sits there stagnating.  I’d be willing to bet social pressure plays a pretty big a role in how many people “win” NaNo.

And, for the cons:

  • The biggest drawback of NaNo, in my view, is that when you’re cranking out 50,000 words in one month and the NaNo cheerleaders are shouting “keep going!” “don’t edit!” “go!”…well, you get a frantic sort of feeling that isn’t conducive to reflection and revision.  There’s more to drafting a novel than just word count.  Giving yourself time for ideas to percolate, mutate, and grow into something more twisty and gorgeous than you first envisioned is an important part of the drafting process.  NaNo might not be the best means to facilitate plot and character development.

Some are quite critical of NaNoWriMo and say it’s a waste of time engaged in by only unprofessional writers who will produce mostly drivel.  While I don’t doubt a huge quantity of drivel is produced by writers during the month of November (and could provide whole passages of said drivel from my own manuscript), there are also plenty of examples of novels that go on to be finished after NaNo ends (50K is not really novel length, after all), revised, edited and eventually published (famously, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, but also (for speculative fiction fans) Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal and many others).  For many of these authors, the salient point is that NaNo provides a forum for setting a meaningful deadline and getting that first draft (or a big portion of it) down on paper.

NaNoWriMo isn’t really about finishing a novel in a month.  It’s about publicly shaming yourself challenging yourself to internalize what really amounts to a professional writing behavior: getting down a daily word count.  This is the advice that EVERYONE gives newbie writers: write, write, write.  Try to carve out 30 minutes, an hour, whatever, each day and write.  All NaNoWriMo is doing is saying to try this for a whole month.  All the rest about finishing a novel and so on and so forth is just window dressing.

So, bottom line.  If you struggle with producing a regular, daily word count and you want an external task-master (ah, that ever-helpful social pressure) to assist you in making it a habit, NaNoWriMo is an excellent tool for achieving your goal.

That’s my two and a half cents.  What are your thoughts on NaNo?