The Green Knight's Quest

If I say ‘all I did was paint one chestnut tree’ I’m selling today’s work short.

Yes, I painted only one tree, but I _designed_ how to paint chestnuts. This strategy eventually collapses when the tree icons get small enough, but the goal is to create sets of trees that are similar enough to each other to be parsed as ‘the same tree’ (all elms, all birches, all chestnuts) while bringing some variety.

I’m borrowing from mapping principles where you try to design symbols that are distinctive along several axes - pattern and shape and colour and size are the ones that come to mind; I think there’s six or seven in total. So my elms not only have that wonky tall elm shape, I show the trunk and main branches in black. My birch trees have a teardrop shape, with trunks and branches in white (and a distinctive light colour). My chestnut trees are rounder and have marks for the candles; and I had to experiment so I have a _suggestion_ of candles instead of an accurate representation, because it has to remain readable at relatively small sizes.
I haven’t decided on shapes and styles for beeches and sycamores yet,

(The Sycamore tree is sprouting again. YAY.)

Not everybody makes a distinction between fine art and illustration, but I find it a useful lens. Creating icons for mapping, even though I use a painterly style (and you can make fine art with vectors) is about considerations that have nothing to do with the emotions of the viewer or telling a story; this is about clarity, ease of recognition, standing in for the thing they represent.


So, back to Hemingway. Last time around I looked at the legend: the Kansas City Star rules about 'short words, short sentences, short paragraphs' (but also 'positive language: 'his sentences were simple', rather than 'his sentences avoided complexity'.
( Musings on simple language )

In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river, there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The article calls this 'the ultimate example of how clear, concise and simplistic language can be extremely powerful.'

Does it work? Yes. Does it work because or _despite_ the simplistic language? Or is 'simplicity' a red herring, the first thing we notice because it's so strong here, and we should pay attention to other aspects of the text?
( This is long and convoluted and gave me a new appreciation of Hemingwaty and goes against all ‘rules’ )

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/writing-advice/

What I’ve seen of Brandon Sanderson’s writing I wasn’t overly impressed, and there is the whole problem with Mormonism and LGBTQ+ rights, so I’ve not been particularly drawn to seeking him out, but every now and again someone links to some writing advice of his, and I got curious.

I am currently working my way through his lecture series that starts as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6HOdHEeosc
(he’s doing this course regularly, it seems, and there are two other versions linked at the page above).

And… I find him surprisingly interesting. I’m not an outliner, but his method of outlining is an interesting one: brainstorming each plot and character arc separately, and then pulling plotpoints from them to form scenes. (It’s in one of the lectures. I’ve forgotten which one, as I’m watching on my exercise bike, and taking notes is difficult.)

What he says about Promises and Payoffs is sound, and I’m enjoying myself so far, though I have little interest in watching his other lectures.

(Ok, these include scene titles, so that’s roughly 60 words of text less, but I’VE DONE IT)

I’ve first signed up for Nano in 2003 (before there were underscores in names!) and have tried to write 50K in a month at least half of the time, Some years I started early, a couple of years I started late, one year I was on a roll and found that my writing got flatter and flatter and that I needed to stop and think about story more. The most I wrote in a November ever before was around 30K.

This year I
- started a new project (albeit Book 4) on November 1st
- wrote 50.000+ words before the end of November

One for the bucket list. It was definitely vexing me that, whatever I did, I could not write that fast, or rather, that I could not think that fast.

2019 has been an amazingly productive year for me so far. I’ve written 100K in non-fiction, I’ve levelled up my programming skills no end, I’ve written an app that I’m using right now, and I’m working on other, exciting things.

And at some point, probably around the time I wrote 50K of nonfiction in three-and-a-bit weeks, I wondered just what I could achieve if I brought the same focus, the same dedication, to my writing.

The answer is in the title of this post.

The downside is that I’ve spent the last three weeks more or less writing, and doing very little else. Ok, some laundry got done, and the house has been hoovered and the dishes done; I wrote about 5K of non-fiction, and solved, in theory at least, one problem in my current app, but that was not the most productive (and certainly not the most lucrative) three weeks I’ve had.

It’s not that I’ve never taken time off to write before, though it certainly has helped. And I probably needed to write my million crappy words and my million ok words to get to the point where I could do this. I have no idea whether I will do this again, ever (I want to push my programming projects more, and any paid work takes precedence.)

But this was definitely a bucket list thing, I now know what I *can* do. My average was 2519 words for the month so far. I wrote every day, and… yeah. I can do it, but only to the exclusion of everything else.

So here's a list of things I feel contributed to my success.

( How I dun it )
So that's a personal list. 16 years after my first attempt dabbling in NaNoWriMo, I wrote 50K in a month, with ten days to spare. (I will not write 75K this November.) It was immensely satisfying, I am happy with the novel so far, I probably will not do it again.

May Peterson (maidensblade) had a lovely thread about her writing process in which she talks about microdecisions and macrodecisions. While that is not a terminology I see myself adapting, and she does not qualify the scope of either, one thing did stand out for me:

The planning process is not about laying out a sequential blueprint of the book that I can just follow logically, but settling on some macrodecisions. […] What helps for me is that it *calms me down.*

( Cognitive Load, writing edition )

Must ponder more. (Today was a write-off for many reasons; I tried to meet my local MP's leafletting campaign, arrived a few minutes late, and saw no-one at all, so my grand achievement for the day was going shopping and writing a day's worth of NaNo words.

And then I promptly forgot to post this, so *today* I’m going out to meet a friend. I had been intending to go swimming, but I have a cold and feel generally meh, so I think I will grab camera and iPad and try to get some writing in before we meet.

How to begin

(This is supposed to turn into a series, so I will be checking back from time to time.)

I am sick and tired of the assumption that training yourself out of being a pantser is a good thing that leads to better books, more productivity, and a better writing life. There's a ton of advice on how to create outlines when you don't like outlines, and none on how to ditch outlines when outlines are helpful to you. I mean, why would you give up a mode of writing that works for you?

I mean, why would I?

This November I want to continue pushing back against the perceived superiority of plotting and want, instead, to collect resources for people who don't want to outline but who want to get unstuck and become more productive anyway.

Today was a productive writing day for me: I now know what will happen, approximately, in the next 5K words;, and it's complex and layered and beautiful. I have a few more characters and have named the people at the back of the bus.

This is an Event in Venna's life: she's going to be the fourth (or seventh) person to do a particular thing in the world EVER, and it kind of needs to be on the page. I can't just say 'she returned home, certificate in her hand, to go back to her ordinary life'. This is _interesting_. And it is relevant to the plot.

But my first ideas were all of the 'how to ramp up problems' kind: terribly mysoginist colleagues! Instant dislike! Incompetent teachers!, which… can we just not? I also don't want to place extraordinary weight on this event; it's a three-day course of _some_ significance, but if it throws Venna back by weeks, it's not doing its job.
So I did a lot of plot noodling, about what I wanted from it, what traits my character might develop better or move from an internal understanding ('this is what I should do') into external mode (acting in accordance with previous insights). I also thought about the antagonist(s) and how they might reasonably try to disrupt the smooth flow of the course.
And then I had to think how the course might mesh with the actual plot of the book: are there any characters, locations, skills, events that I can tie in with the main plot?

One way of not wasting words on something that's irrelevant is to cut it out. The other is to make it relevant. Here, I've got option b) and there's a lot of really fun stuff coming up (right now, totally vague) that I'm looking forward to writing, and which I would have missed if I'd simply tried to barrel past this course OR if I'd gone for cheap conflict.

I have a longer post/rant in the works on the topic of why every post about how to be a pantser ends up with 'outline, outline, outline', but that needs a little work.

I am more cranky than usual on the topic because I talked myself into - well, not outlining, but writing out of order to that I know how my character gets here and what happens to them next, which leaves me with having to write the current scene.

I know what happens in the current scene, which is functionally not far removed from 'being an outline'. And I have zero motivation to write it, and zero interest in writing it, and the character sits there like a lump of clay and the whole project has ground to an absolute halt.

I've tried to skip it and write on. That's how I got into this mess, and I can do no more of this.

I cannot summarise this scene and move on, or cut it, because it's so vital.

This is a heist that plays a really important role in this story. It's tough to pull off, there's got to be a certain amount of tension in 'will the protag manage this', and it should stretch them to the edge of their skills and end with the protag being triumphant.

In the next scene, they get screwed very, very badly, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is that I have the 'outline' part of this: I know the protagonist, their motivation, I know the antagonist (anti-theft measures taken by another character), I know the minor players; I have a good idea of the emotional arc, and, and and.


And this is where I, the not-outliner, am discovering the one glaring weakness of the million-and-three-quarter 'how to outline a novel' articles: They're all about 'how to write an outline'. From rough to the incredibly detail of the snowflake method, they all end up with a document that tells you what will happen in your novel, and then you sit down, apply bum to chair, and

Step three: Novel.


Yeah.


I've looked for resources that tell you how to take an outline and produce prose from it.


All I've found is more books and articles telling you how to write an outline. This is not what I want.

So, if you use outlines, if you _like_ outlines, whatever form your outline takes: how do you actually take that outline and create _story_ from it? On a good day, the words burst out on their own... but on a bad day, how do you take 'this, that, and the other will happen' and turn it into a lively tale?

My usual procedure is to follow the protagonist around and find out what happens and be surprised by it, but that is much harder when I know what happened and I want to get the protagonist to a certain place and in a certain mood.


I will eventually figure this out, but it would be nice to have some... catalysts, I suppose. Things I can do to light a fire underneath the story that has been congealing for too long already.

So, does anyone have helpful tips or resources on how to create story from outlines? Or, on a related note, because that _is_ a type of outline, on how to write historical fiction where you know some events and try to squeeze story into the gaps?

I don't like everything about NaNoWriMo - I'm not keen on the donation drive, which seemed to get more obnoxious every year; and I'm not the kind of writer for whom it is a good match, but I've made good friends through NaNo, and I love the energy.

But while I plan to attend some meetups this year, I won't take part. I'm trying to finish my current novel, and I'd love to get some advice on how to tackle it.

My main problem is that my protagonist had a tremendous story arc behind him. He's gone from being laissez-faire (and, to be fair, somewhat depressed) to facing up to his responsibilities and putting in the work. He's keeping his promises, he's dealing fairly with people, he swallows his resentments and uses his people skills, and...

I'm nearly at the end of the book. There's one thing that needs to happen - he'll face an old nemesis and needs to keep his temper, (he cannot win that confrontation, only come out of it with his pride and conscience intact), and then he needs to take all those newly-honed soft skills and face down someone who could flatten his home town should he want to: and right now, the guy is pissed off. With certain justification.

Only my protagonist will not - can not - engage in a power struggle. Instead he'll use headology to defuse the situation and broker a compromise.

There's a lot of sitting around and talking going on. Right now, my protag is acquiring the skills he'll need - knowledge, history - but it looks pretty much like a walk in the park. He's _competent_ (and I like that), and he's exercising that competence on a daily basis.

I have no idea how to write this well. I really do not want to raise the stakes and sharpen the conflicts and throw metaphorical rocks at him and all that - this is a competent person just coming into his own, so while he might be _feeling_ insecure, he gets over each hurdle as it appears before him. The final feat he'll pull off *is* desperate - but not particularly urgent, other than for a few people he cares about and in a general politics kind of way.

This book is part of a long cycle, so no single book has all of the answers. Something else I feel I don't have a template for.

So that's what I'll be doing in November, instead of writing shallow scenes for an as-yet unknown novel.

Writers often look enviously at painters because you can create far more paintings than novels in a lifetime, which gives you more chances to experiment.

And then I spotted this:

http://www.artistsnetwork.com/articles/art-demos-techniques/working-up-from-a-grisaille

Outline. Underdrawing. Grisaille (several passes). Background colour. Two layers of flesh tone. Colours and clothes. Final touches.

Go and read the whole post and then tell me that this is not every bit as much work as writing a novel.


Also, as far as I know (unless you want to count the Bayeux tapestry), the first comic:

https://twitter.com/JohanOosterman/status/534826416375087104/photo/1

from the Liber Floridus, whole mss digitized here

And if you have any interest in layout, *do* go and have a look at the mss, because the lines have not been erased, and you can see the full layout grid that any inDesign user would be proud of: capitals to _here_, numbers in margins to be placed _there_, page numbers up _here_.) Also, the stitching on 23r/24v...)

You can see how the format developed from, say, 34v, which is not uncommon in medieval illustrations - but round off the text panels and you have a veritable ancestor of comics/graphic novels.

(In other news: coding slower than expected, but still ongoing. Not doing NaNo meetups this weekend as I have a stinking cold.)

This one comes from Victoria Strauss (of Writer Beware):

When I first began writing, I’d start out with a premise, a setting, a compelling image for the beginning, and a definite plan for the end. The rest was a blank canvas that I couldn’t wait to fill, discovering the bones of the story as I wrote it.

(Spoiler: It didn't work too well for her.)

(Spoiler: various outlining methods didn't work for her, either.)

I decided just to tell the story from start to finish, imagining myself speaking to a rapt audience in the warm glow of a blazing campfire, with darkness pressing all around. This approach–basically, a very detailed synopsis without any chapter or other divisions–fit me much better. It felt creative; it had flow. I still took wrong turns and stumbled down blind alleys, but it’s a lot easier to fix those in a synopsis than in a manuscript. And when I was done, I had a clear path from my blazing beginning image to the ending I was dying to write.

If your problem with outlining is that you'll have told the story, then this won't work for you; if your problem is that your conscious planning mind is dull and comes up with clicheed plots, this won't work for you, but if you're the kind of person who can happily brainstorm with friends, a casual, chatty synopsis might be just the ticket.


And while we're talking about writing:

dancinghorse is having a NaNo sale:
http://dancinghorse.livejournal.com/324495.html

I've taken a course with her, and loved it - she's a very good teacher, challenging and supportive. They all sound good, but while the 'How Big is Your Idea' one sounds very useful to me, the one that made my heart skip was the Dialogue one - it's only recently that I've become more aware just how little attention I pay to speech patterns and vocabulary; I've been focussing on description for so long that dialogue is not something I've thought much about.

(Yes, it's December. And probably won't hit 30 until way into January, but I'd like to continue this series of articles.)


I've mentioned the three main types of plotting I encounter:

- exoskeletons
- flowlines
- patchwork

(I'm wondering whether there are others. I think I captured one a few days ago, but since that was at 3am, I didn't write it down, and obviously didn't anchor is properly in my mind.)

Today, I want to look at what I have dubbed 'Exoskeletons' - this is by far the most common way of plotting mentioned in 'how-to-plot' books and articles, at least in the sample I found (by using top google results. Very scientific, I know.)

I am using 'exoskeleton' because those writers start with a structure imposed from the outside, and then find characters and events to fit the pattern.

There are hundreds of articles about this. Some are very brief, some are very long, some involve a ten-sentence summary, some a month's worth of planning. There are even at least two computer programs (The Snowflake Method and Dramatika) that allow you to plot a novel by filling in your own content into a larger structure.

(You can use plot shapes as a revision tool, when a story feels slightly off, to see whether you can improve it by reshaping it a little. Have a series of four articles by Pat Wrede on plot shapes. But revision is not what I want to talk about.)

I don't want to rehash the arguments against planning out a plot before you write. But I do want to talk about the major way in which using an exoskeleton limits a writer, because I feel that is a major drawback inherent in the method.

On the positive side, a detailed outline is helpful for many writers, allows them to explore a story in microcosm and much faster than if they had to write detailed drafts, gives them something to write when inspiration isn't flowing, shows up flaws much quicker, etc etc, and for many writers enables writing faster by stomping hard on choice paralysis - the feeling that you've been dropped off at the airport without a map of destinations and you're not even sure whether you're supposed to go on holiday or pick somebody up. (What... you don't dream?)

( (Detailed) Example )

So I guess my takeaway from that is that I feel creating an outline from an exoskeleton is a bad idea, at least at novel length. (I have no idea whether it might work better for short stories - I guess there are more patterns for short stories, so if you start out with a sufficiently large library of possibilities, finding a shape that suits the idea you're having might be easier, because everything is closer together. But for novels?)

And maybe I'm getting it wrong, and writers gravitate to a certain type of story, and the exoskeleton is simply an embodiment thereof, but given that people who are starting out - who are still new to their craft and often haven't found all of their voice yet - are _adopting_ these things (and often looking for these things) I'm not sure that argument holds.

Since most planning seems to happen at either book or scene level, what about the exoskeleton of scenes?

( Nope - still don't like Bickham )

And it's not as if P&P is an experimental novel on the edge of novel-writing - it's fairly conventional, when all is said and done, but if you can't even get _there_, then you'll never go to even more interesting, even more individual places.

But why *do* writers turn to exoskeletons to write? (Apart from feeling they have to, or not wanting to face a blank screen, etc etc)

Maybe it *is* just mindset. When I thought about this, it seems as if writers who use an exoskeleton - any kind of exoskeleton, including one they make up from how _they_ feel an interesting story would work - are writers who _invent_ stories and characters - who go 'so I have a guy who wants to do X. Who will be standing in his way? What obstacles can he meet? This one sounds like a good idea, but in order to make it work, I need to introduce Y early on'; writers who can change a character (or combine two into one) _because they're making it all up_.

Whereas I see myself as a chronicler - characters walk into my head and although - like a historian - I might occasionally misunderstand them and misinterpret their motives, they're their own people and do what they like and frequently surprise me. So trying to shape the story clashes with my fundamental story-telling model; is *anyone* still surprised it won't work for me at all?

This means that there really is no point in trying to find 'the right exoskeleton' or 'a good way of constructing an exoskeleton' for me. It's not how I work; and I can move past that form of outlining and onto different forms of planning: planning that is oriented towards shaping the story I already have/get walking through my brain, not making up something.

My idea for the 'network' type scene was to have something that reflected the interconnectedness of the other characters; the idea that those people are meeting up and talking to each other without the protagonist, and that the protagonist's contribution is only one part of a whole.

Much to my annoyance, this did not come off. I found this much harder to write than the first two - it focuses intensely _on_ the character, rather than on the event ('everybody talks' in the first scene, 'Tack talks to everybody' in the second). I wrote a second version that involves a few more changes of scene - walking home from the school bus, room, dinner table etc - but that was just cosmetics, and mostly I wanted to lift, wholesale, the words I'd already written, so I'm giving you only one version.

( 'Network' scene. Even longer )

The other - unsurprising, really - insight was that in order to pull off the 'character is in one room essentially talking to herself (yes, she texts, and she remembers conversations, and I thought about actually showing her on the computer, but essentially, you see only her part of the conversation and her experience of what other people communicate.) Anyway, in order to pull this off, I needed a narrative - more than just 'character bumbles through her life doing this and that.'

( A spot of analysis )

So the most surprising, and most useful scene was actually #2, and I shall ponder that one a bit more, because I really liked it.

When I started writing, I just wrote. At some point to long after I internalised that 'scenes' should have a unity of time and place - which is a very theatrical thing. And on a stage, it's a necessity, but in a book (or film) you can pan and jump about and you can have as many settings as necessary: they're free. Well, almost free. Combine that with 'a scene must earn its keep' and I ended up writing a lot of scenes where everything happened in that moment: all the important things were thought about, all the interpersonal conflict was acted out, and then... summary and brief sketches until the next important moment. And the moments, because they had to carry everything that happened so far and everything the character anticipated but all of the resolutions (nobody leave the room until we've talked about this!), had to carry much more than they were able to, and quite frequently, they failed. (I've mentioned 10K of a character in a room, haven't I? He's there, he's doing a few things, he's having a couple of conversations, one with two people at once, but in the end, it's a character in a room talking and thinking for ten thousand bloody words. Argh.)

Some scenes _are_ happening in the moment, in one location. The cleaning-room-and-talking-to-friend scene is like that. But other scenes move through time and place - a character takes a journey and things happen along the way - and others still are dealing with a time period or a complex event (arrival of the delegation and how they're settling in, which may stretch out over several days and a number of locations, but they're all a thematic unit, and every single incident is less than a page. You could say they're point, line, and area features, but in the absence of better terms, they're all 'scenes'.

So how does that tie in with the previous post? Very loosely right now, in that they're all about how to not just fix up scenes in the best manner (while writing or afterwards) but how to create scenes that make it easy to write them well and hard to write them badly. Hopefully the next post will be back to planning and the many ways in which it can be achieved. There are two aspects to this: One is _finding_ the scene, and the other is designing it. And planning can happen in both stages (usually happens...)

So that gives me a different way of eliminating the 'conversation in white room' and 'council scenes' problems: instead of writing four friends discussing what to see at the cinema and then trying to insert more grounding and actions (sometimes that *is* the right way to deal with it) I can also think about shifting the scene to a different mode, instead of 'everybody is in the same room at the same time' have a journey (character meets up with another, they go round to the next, the fourth person turns up there a short while later) or a patchwork involving something else (character cleans their room (again) - look, it's a messy teenager! Not my idea. Blame their mother! They do. - and maybe they think back to a conversation in school about which film to see with person #2, and they text #3 a couple of time, and go on Facebook to speak to #4 in the same interval.
And then, of course, there's the outside agency where a different friend calls and says 'so-and-so asked me out, so I said I was going with a bunch of friends, pLEASE, you guys, will you see [film] with me on Saturday?'

Suddenly, options. And some of them have been sneaking up on me for a very, very long time.

First, some terminology, because it's hard to discuss things when you might not be talking about the same things.

( Terminology )

So. I'll use the opportunity of November to look a bit more at various forms of planning. And I'll be looking predominantly at scene-level planning because that's just easier to keep in one's head than whole novel plots. First, the promised levels:

- book
- story
- scenes
- beats

( Explanations )

The last thing I want to talk about today are types of planning. And this is a taxonomy-in-the-making, based on my current understanding of it; I might well revise it in the future.

- Exoskeleton
- Flowline
- Patchwork

( Explanations )

Obviously, a lot of the time one mixes those methods - delving into motivations and logical conclusions to construct a set of scenes, reordering the collection of scenes to 'this is really tense, it's not much use at the beginning' etc, but they seem to be separate things, and just because one finds one of them useful (or not) doesn't mean that the others are useful (or not).

Long-time readers will know how much I've complained about the timeline muddle. I made a mess out of shared world novels: each novel on its own works perfectly fine, but when I tried to correlate them, it ended in tears of frustration. And now I have a huge chunk of things to sort that will probably take a couple of months to sort out while I develop the techniques *to* deal with three novels and all of their events.

To start small, because I have a WIP, and want to keep working on it, I began by creating a timeline for the WIP as I'm doing rolling revisions. And immediately ran into a number of things that I found worth sharing...

( Insights )

So, yes. I'll keep a timeline as I go, but it will be a very roughly-sketched one of 'these things happen in this order on that day' and I shall concentrate on other things.

First, a product endorsement. In the summer, I had some problems with my laptop heating up a lot - I was using some processor-intensive software and it was HOT, so I worried about overheating.

There are a number of laptop products available, but I disliked the idea of an external fan case, so I took a chance on the ThermaPak Heatsink: a gel-filled cushion that draws heat away from your laptop. It's not perfect, and it's not a panacea, but it makes a noticeable difference and is well worth the investment.

As I had a day off today, I decided to tackle a frog that had been gnawing at me for years. I have written a series of interconnected novels (collectively known as the 'Five Kingdoms' novels) where I wrote myself into a corner at some point: when I worked out the timelines for them all, I ended up with two characters needing to do two weeks' journey in two days.
Or so I think. Given the mess everything is in, I can't be certain...

It was, in short, a muddle. Multiple characters, multiple books, some events somewhat flexible, others - particularly when they intersect - are not. The Ofran of the Black sits twice a year on a given date, and I know who attends. And while the database I wrote for this helped somewhat, it didn't allow me to step back and view things from a greater distance, and it was lacking the flexible views. Over the years, I've tried numerous tools, including several timeline apps, and various incarnations of Excel sheets. I've written scripts and clever stuff for Filemaker which helped a little, I found a timeline app that I thought could work, but which failed at handling large amounts of data (also, the version I tried was more advanced than the version I could purchase, and two extra steps in data entry when you have 700+ entries in your database where two extra steps too many.

Today, having resolved the e-mail client issue (Postbox. $10, all the functionality I want, easy import of all my mail and settings, and apart from a couple of minor interface glitches no problems at all. Solved.) I ventured into the depths of timeline apps again. OmniChart looks promising, but maybe a little overkill, and with a $200 price tag... yes, you just *did* see the Nopetopus scuttling past. I downloaded one app with an interface that was so horrible I gave up minutes later - it made no sense, it rolled its own solutions for well-solved problems, and it complained about invalid values when it took the same values a couple of tries later - and ended up testing Aeon Timeline. (Mac *and* Windows.)

This is good stuff. I spent much of today playing with it, and have just imported 700 items into a timeline.

( Technical stuff )


I'll probably still use the database to quickly create new events, but yeah, it looks as if I have *finally* found a way to tame this monster (as well as a way to create timelines for all of my other books.)

This is big. This is as much of a break-through as coming to terms with description and in-the-moment narration is; in a different dimension, but an equally great advance.

I haven't wrote a single word of fiction today, but I sure done some writing.

(yes, I am a couple of days behind with these. And no, I don't know when I'll catch up with them - I am aiming for a thing a day, but this might not happen reliably.)

I was originally going to chose a title featuring 'writing slowly' for this post, but the longer I think about it, the less appropriate it seems. All too often - and particularly in light of NaNoWriMo, writing fast is equated with 'writing first draft quickly'. Ultimately, however, writing is finished when you have a book - something that's as good as you can make it.

For some people, that means a quick first draft, and several redrafts. For others, it means a first draft and edits. For others still, lot of planning and maybe some outlining or a zeroeth draft with [insert technobabble here] and [they go into the haunted house and find A Clue and then a lot of research. But just because you're writing first draft fast doesn't mean that you have a book quickly, and just because you write a little, think a little, research a little, plot noodle a little, and put more words down doesn't mean you're progressing slowly.

( Draft speed, writing speed )

So right now, rather than putting more words onto the page I am working out which words I want to put down, which I find much more productive. There's another reason why my wordcount isn't going to go up much in the immediate future, and that's because I'm trying to fix the problem of not coming up with action/description in the first place, but that will definitely be the topic of another post. And I'm not writing it now because it would definitely fall under writing avoidance, because testing that theory is going to be hard, and uncomfortable, and I'm looking at my non-existent cat (and the living room floor) and thinking it could do with some hoovering...

It's *that* time of the year again, and opinions differ, although I am seeing far fewer posts - I guess that much of this has already been said?

Anyway, here's my stance.

I've made fantastic friends during Nano, so I'll always feel fond of the institution. Which does not mean I approve of the way it is run: the year-round NaNoing (Camp NaNo this, that initiative that) waters down the 'everybody gear up for November'' thing and I dislike the pressure to donate, which is getting more and more obnoxious, or maybe just feels like that because I've seen it so often. (If I have money to spare, I'd like to use it to support people who need it, not an organisation that is raising huge amounts of money for something that's... coming across more as a fundraising machine than a charity, if you get my drift.)


But here's a list of things that people do during NaNo, in no particular order:


- push themselves to write instead of planning, revising, plotnoodling, or a thousand other cat vacuuming techniques
- meet new people (November is a fantastic time to move to a new city!)
- get into a habit of writing daily
- work out how they can make more time to write during their ordinary life: get up sooner, write at lunch, take notes on their phone or carry a notebook
- use November as motivation to write more on an established project
- try a new genre, project, POV
- try a new tool or software, writing location, writing time
- hold themselves accountable by posting metrics


So even if you don't want to churn out 50.000 words during November, if you are in the middle of another project, or if you need to write more slowly and revise as you go along, NaNoWriMo might offer you something.

I have a deadline today, so will be quiet, and then I have a scene to rewrite on last month's book.

In the last few days, my own writing speed has picked up. I've been getting 1-2K a day since the 29th, and...

( Progress Report )

The main incentive for this post was coming across a link to a novelist who improved their output from 2K a day to 10K/day, and who finds the pace sustainable.

http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

( Details and thoughts behind cut )

(Don't look for the missing ones. I'm having major internet troubles which means what little bandwidth I get is used for important stuff, and right now, looking for interesting writing links to share doesn't qualify. I've got a couple of things in hand and hope to post regularly until the end of the month.)

First, a disclaimer. This post is about _me_ and my process. If you can write faster than I can right now - if you can _think_ faster - then more power to you.

I wanted to take a month off from my WIP because I had gained the impression that my process had changed; and I needed to test that with a new book - new world, new characters, new everything. And the way I work isn't the only way to get to where I want to be; but I am absolutely certain *that* I want to be there - and the books I love best are there, too.

The transition I am making it to write with more depth.

( Background )

So that's me coming up from a long way behind and learning to see settings. And learning, furthermore, how to sketch them in words so the reader has grounding and the story takes place instead of having a painted backdrop and all that.

I have - in my opinion successfully - made the transition to interweave all layers in the first draft. This has made my first drafts excrutiatingly slow, and for now, that's just something I need to put up with. It's not just the Swamp Thing, it's _everything_ right now. (There's a tremendous payoff for me, and I hope payoff for the reader, so I'm happy with that. Eventually, I'd love to have words flowing better - it's beginning to come with the Swamp Thing, but with a new world, I'm literally back to zero.)

So that's the first point. It's a cognitive shift, and it is taking hard work - where are the character, what is the setting like, what are they doing, and instead of watching my mental film I am looking at it almost frame by frame. So of course it's slow.

( Preplanning )

It turns out that the magic ingredient wasn't to plan-before-writing, but the sitting down and thinking about things in great detail.

Yesterday was such a moment, and that's the main purpose of the post, to show the process and what difference it has made.

So. One of my characters - the one I'm not sure should be a POV - is getting bullied. Not sure by whom or why, but she's just complained about it. She mentioned a 'chores plan'.

( The chores plan as an opportunity )

This kind of writing needs more leisure than I have at times, I can't do it in fifteen-minute increments, so this is very slow indeed. On the other hand, after worrying for a while that I might be writing a temple intrigue, I now know when and by whom the first victim will be found - fairly soon - so in a way, I feel I'm on track.

Right now, I've written about 4K words on this, (and more on everything else), but it is starting to feel like a viable novel idea and I'm looking forward to making the time to write it properly some day. I'll keep at it - I definitely want the murder and at least one more viewpoint - but come December, I'll give the Swamp Thing more attention again. Even though 4K does not look productive next to the 40K and 100+L some people have written, I'm extraordinarily happy with it. I'm meeting all of my goals other than wordcount, and wordcount is the least of my worries.

Watch m_stiefvater talk about setting and character development and mood, with coloured lines.

Right now, I don't have time to dissect it in detail - I will pay more attention to it later - but I guiding the reader into a specific direction without hitting him over the head is an art, and one well-worth studying.

Hah. I meant to post this a while ago. Now I get to use it in a post without looking for something to share. Win.

aliettedb shares her character sheet for her main character and I took notes.


As a non-visual person who does not pay much attention to physical traits, tyical character sheets have always struck me as an afterthought - it's not something I need to know before I write a character and often something I write down when it becomes important. How tall someone is - do they look up or down on someone else? Do they need help reaching high shelves? Do they hit heir head when entering buildings?

In the comments, I added:

I'm having the feeling that this might be why so many writers are reaching for white characters: I find that I don't have the vocabulary to pick out features that would easily distinguish one black/Asian/other face from another. I'm not very visual at the best of times, but I've absorbed the 'western' vocabulary to a degree that I can fake it. When you have only a couple of POC in a book, it's easy to be sloppy (the black guy doesn't need more descriptors to be identifiable, however problematic the practice is. And now I want to go and make sure that every time I describe him I describe him _as a person_ whom you could pick out from a group of other black characters.)

And it just occurs to me that these character sheets pass up on a fantastic world-building opportunity: they contain the things Westerners notice: Height. Weight. Hair colour. Eye Colour. Clothes.
Smoothness of skin, for instance, has fallen out of fashion as a marker, calluses are never mentioned (and hardly anyone has them), scars are rare, and most people in Western countries have relatively even teeth.

So, I'm thinking what would people in *my* culture use to describe a stranger? A lot of the things we look for are status markers or perceived status markers: how rich people look, how privileged parts of the population look. So my people would probably not go for noses or facial shapes _unless_ there's a history of these things mattering, but how much a person eats and how much time they have to look after their bodies/complexion probably still plays a role.

I ended on

Hm. Must ponder *that*.

Well, I'm still pondering. I just feel that I've hit something important, one of the things that will help me to cross from writing generic stories to writing from a POV of deep immersion, because this kind of cultural detail - what do they notice, how do they judge where the other person is in relation to them? - is important. It's a bit like 'what would this person notice about a room? about a landscape? only adding another dimension.

And, well, I've _done_ this, I just have never done it consciously, and I could not have formulated what that _means_ for getting to grips with a different culture. And this probably is where the value of NaNoWriMo 2011 will lie for me: forcing myself to experimet at novel length with something new, to dive into a world that I don't know at all.

It's hard work. This is not an attack novel - I was briefly tempted to write one that was - and so it is slow (940 words today) (I also had other things to do.) This time round - it's a long time since I've written in a new world - I'm thinking a lot more about the culture of the place I'm writing in; and I'm trying to immerse myself even more strongly than I have previously done. And I can kind of see why people - myself included - aren't doing this all the time, and in great depth, because I spent an awful lot of today thinking about the _geography_ of my story and what cultural consequences it would have - how many people could live in my remote mountain area - oops, a stranger would be known - etc. If I wanted to write lots and lots and lots of words, I'd just have been reaching for the nearest clichee. And I suppose this will get easier once it becomes a habit - people who are immersed in the culture they are writing in will have it easier - but for me, right now, stopping and thinking is the way forward in order to have characters who don't just have a quick veneer of Otherness but are white stock characters underneath.

And dancinghorse will be pleased to know that there was no reason for my first POV character to be male. So she isn't (and opened up in response). She still has a wife, though...

Made it through the month! Not always on the day, but there's been a writing post for every day, which is an achievement. I don't want to keep up this strict schedule - I don't want to feel _forced_ to to find something, anything, and blather about it - but it was nice to delve back into writingwith that much energy.

And then I didn't like the post I'd written, promised myself I'd fix it later, and forgot....


I'd love to hear how you were doing.

I tried to ride the wave, rode too fast, had to slow down considerably, and found what I hope was a happy medium. I wrote 25K on the Swamp Thing, worked out the shape of the climax of this novel (need to move forward to get to it) and worked out how Book III starts - that should speed up writing further.

I'm also currently bouncing with excitement because I think I've grokked what a short story looks like. I'll write more on that later - early lunch today, as I need to go to work and it's going to take me much longer than usual - I think something said 'click'.

I hope. It would be exceedingly nice to understand short stories after <mumble> years of writing trilogies.

Every time your fiction is more restrictive, more opressive, less exciting than history, you need to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. Ok, you yourself might not phrase it in those terms, but it's worth examining fiction whether it lives up to the rich caleidoscope that his history.

Take, for instance, gendered stories: _'his'story_. History books are all too often written by men and from a male perspective, and that perspective still pervails. It makes a tremendous difference whether you write about the wife of Henry II and the mother of Richard and John, or whether you write about Elinor of Aquitaine, queen of two countries and powerful ruler in her own right. You can explain away every single woman who does not fit into the 'men hold all the power' trope as an anomaly, but at some points you've gathered enough exceptions that you need to ask 'who made the rule'?

And yet, in fiction...

- men go and have adventures. Women stay at home, are supportive, need rescueing or hide behind a man when push comes to shove: the climatic battle is almost inevitably 'man vs man'.
- men go and push the boundaries of knowledge; women write up results, are supportive, admire, and stand by their men.
- society are modelled on the worst, most restrictive gender relations. There were plenty of times and places where women held property, became guild members, travelled, and otherwise were valued members of society. There often was a backlash against this, (think of WWII where women found out they could be drivers and engineers *and like it* and the 1950s 'a woman's place is in the kitchen' movement), and sometimes there were legal loopholes (if a single woman could not hold property, but a widow could, some women reinvented themselves _as_ widows elsewhere.

The Guardian has a fascinating article on on where the wymmenz really were

(For 'gender' also read 'race'. Again, if history/reality are less restrictive than fiction, you have a problem.)


The male gaze is a problem that I personally am working on. Whenever I am looking for characters to go and have adventures, they tend to be male. In the Five Kingdoms, that's become a plotpoint: society has, in many ways, moved beyond 'only men count' and magicians are stifling themselves by gearing the whole education towards fully comitted male students (also, towards relatively wealthy students) Over the course of the novels I am chipping away at the male domination, but it's there to start with.
The quadrology has two male wizards as main characters, with a large amount of mostly male minor characters. The main female character is anything but weak, but there's only one of her. Source of Evil (same world) has one female character among the main set, with a second minor-but-important female character, and a male protag who questions his attitudes - but it's still mostly-male.
The previous WIP had one girl and two boys (ok, 1 boy, one half-boy/half-tree character)
The WIP has a female protag in a mostly-male oriented world which is slightly lagging behind in terms of gender equality - there *is* a female lecturer and a number of female students, but they're nearer the 25% mark, and many of my protag's friends are male.

Obviously, this is still an issue for me. Not as bad as it used to be, but single-female in male-oriented world is *also* problematic.

So tonight I'd like to ask you to go home, examine your stories/story ideas/favorite characters, and ask yourself what the recurring tropes are, and whether you are inadvertedly making your stories less inclusive than you could.

If unconscious -isms aren't a problem for you, I'd love to know how you avoid them.

nycshelly asked how I tighten a scene in revision (and sometimes as I write, or the next day etc.)

This is work I do in Apple Works - the best tool for collapsible outlines I know, because I can use colours and different fonts and assign keystrokes to styles.

I go through each scene and add a top level of scene questions to them:

Who is involved?
Where does it take place?
What happens?
What's at stake?
Why does it matter?

This usually gives me the place of the scene, and it addresses both warp and weft of the scene. (The weft being 'what happens' - this is the flexible part, the warp being 'why does it matter'.

( Placing the scene in the narrative )

This work gives me the general shape for a scene - what happens, what I want it to achieve.

( Revising the scene itself )

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, yes it is - it's also the best way I know to get to the best book *I* can write. I don't resent the work, though I do resent the time it takes; but I end up with something that is considerably better than my first draft, and that is better than my drafts would be if I merely read through scenes.

This comes back to 'span of control' I think - I simply *cannot* hold my books in my head - they are not just too long (a trilogy usually runs around 350K) but also too complex (I love lots of little subplots driving events rather than a clear-cut challenge). I just don't have enough brain to do those books justice if I don't condense them.

On the other hand, once I have my scene questions in a row, writing a 3-5 page synopsis tends to be a piece of cake. (Writing a one-page synopsis? A skill in itself, and one I haven't mastered.)

(Yes, I have checked the calendar, but I missed yesterday's)

heleninwales said in the comments on my last post that she didn't like the use of 'conflict'. I'm in a different camp: I love it as a concept; it helps me to tighten up scenes and make them more interesting.

Something interesting happened.

I started to write this post about how useful conflict is in developing scenes, and found that I don't like it much either...

Undoubtedly conflict - vs themselves, vs society, vs nature, vs another person - (not 'man vs msn', however obnoxious the site might prove!) - can provide some of the dynamic in a scene. If you google for 'conflict fiction' you find pages over pages (>12million!) telling you that conflict is important, necessary, 'the whole point of a book'. And when you boil down storylines to nothing else, you-

... very often get storylines about people growing in their skills and maturity until they are able to overcome whatever obstacles life throws in their way. So while conflict might very well be part of the driving engine of a story, it's not the only possibility.

So here's a rough draft of what drives a scene for me:

The protagonist needs a goal. This isn't always stated, or always known *to* the protag, but it's necessary. The protag's goal - they want to get somewhere, they want to achieve something, they want to do well at their job, they want to be a supportive human being - provides some of the tension - because it carries with it a shadow of how the protagonist can fail. Add internal and external motivation (the protag wants to find the MacGuffin in the Evil Overlord's citadel but without going baresark and killing innocent guards) and you have plenty of potential for interestingness.

I think this is a better way of looking at a scene than say 'protag is in conflict with citadel builders' (must outwit their traps), evil overlord & his guards (must avoid being seen), evil overlord (must find the thing he's hidden), their own pacifist streak (does not want to kill).

Or rather, for me the first way leads to being able to brainstorm plenty of story possibilities, while the second feels forced and artificial; mileage may vary.

So goals are one aspect I keep in mind when writing (or rather, revising) scenes. Related are the obstacles a character can face, which is, maybe, just a fancy way of turning 'conflict' on its head, but obstacles for me have a close cousin: the opportunity for the character to develop, be tested in, or fail at a particular skill. The difference between 'what does the protag want and who (or what) oppses them' and 'what does the protag want, what obstacles do they encounter, and what opportunities does this offer' might feel like nitpicking - I certainly am having difficulty articulating it - but I certainly perceive a difference.

I think the closest that I come is that in using the term 'conflict' you focus on what hinders your protagonist, who opposes him, whereas I prefer to think about what the protag strives to achieve, and what they learn/how they develop along the way.

I think the main point for me is that I don't consider these things too much while I'm writing (at least not consciously), but they help me to sharpen scenes in the revision - instead of two characters talking and moving the plot forward, I might have one character wanting to encourage his former student and nudge him back onto the right path, while the other wants his former teacher to go away so he doesn't have to examine his numerous failings.