SUPER AWESOME BIG TIME REWRITE: Stop! Think About It…

Or better yet, just stop thinking about it.

I’m not one to stick too tightly to outlines. I do like having a plan of action, and that plan will be pretty specific - though not always followed - for the first half the book. But by the second half, I’m freeee. Free faaalliiiing. I might have my outline, but I forget to look at it. Probably because at this point all I have jotted down for the last few chapters is something like:

· Awesome stuff happens

and

· Even more awesomer stuff happens

I’m only half kidding.

So there I was in the murkiest part of my outline, the climax of the story, with one and a half chapters left to write. Just one. And a half. Friggin.’ More. Chapters! I knew basically what should happen (even more awesomer stuff) and in my mind, I could kinda generate a little bit of a picture of what that should like. And it’s the climax so it has to be better than EVERYTHING that has come before (as Michael pointed out in the comments section of my last post). And I’d given myself one week to finish this draft OR ELSE (though I don’t think I bought my threat. I know I’m a softy).

But mostly, all I was doing was banging my head against the wall and given myself brain damage. The ending was dragging itself out worse than a vampire Pee-wee Herman death scene.

Thusly, I decided to stop thinking about it.

I thought about a different story for a little bit. I read a bunch of excellent graphic novels. I worked on the skirt I’m sewing as a Christmas gift for my niece. I watched way too many episodes of The Millionaire Matchmaker and Cheaters.

Then one morning as I was brushing my teeth, I got it. I understood exactly how to resolve my conflict.

And it was so simple. Instead of trying to push forward into a new chapter, I needed to go back a couple of chapters and follow through on the action already in place. So obvious! Additionally, because of this change in my projected order of events, it meant I had my last two chapters already (basically) written.

Triple super awesome!

I couldn’t get over the incredible simplicity of my solution. So freakin’ simple that I couldn’t see it, and maybe never would have seen it if I hadn’t taken a step back and let the story spring forward at its own time.

Sometimes you have you have to do that butt-in-chair thing. If you never make yourself write when things get difficult you’ll never learn how to push yourself past your own expectations.

But sometimes it’s just as important to get up and go watch some reality TV.

So…yeah. I finished my rewrite.

Woot-woot!

(On to the revision!)

SUPER AWESOME BIG TIME REWRITE: Constructing Chapters

Here’s what I think about novel writing. You can read about it, you can talk about it, and you can think about it, and all that helps. Especially if you’re in a dialogue with other writers (whether in person or across the interwebs). But it’s the doing it that really teaches you how to make it happen.

Even writing and workshopping short stories, while educational when it comes to learning many of the mechanics of storytelling, doesn’t fully prepare you for the monumental undertaking of completing a novel. At least this has been my experience.

Chapters are one of those things I had to learn by doing. As I made my first attempts at writing a book, questions cluttered my head. What are chapters really? How long should they be? How much should happen in them? How do I know when I’ve done enough to end the chapter? None of these questions have one answer. If I pick up five books from my shelf at random, I’d find five different approaches to building chapters.

And that’s why we have to learn by doing. It’s the only real way to figure out what works for each of us and what works for each of the many stories we all have in us to tell.

With my SUPER AWESOME BIG TIME REWRITE, I’m approaching my chapters with a brand new philosophy. My previous approach was to keep putting stuff in until it looked like I had enough stuff in there to close that chapter, leaving enough stuff unresolved to warrant starting a new chapter. I didn’t always think about chapter goals or what I was accomplishing. The only rule I held myself accountable to was keeping in mind that it had to lead somewhere.

It was very scientific, and I even think that method worked pretty okay (for a first draft if nothing else).

This time around, just to shake things up, I'm thinking about each chapter as encapsulating a specific idea, concern or event and the actions and reactions surrounding that element. Interestingly, doing things this way has made for longer chapters with several section breaks in each and less chapters in the manuscript as a whole.

I’m really liking doing it this way. It’s put me in the mindset of not dragging things out for the sake of dragging things out, which maybe I might have perhaps have been guilty of once or possibly twice. That was back when I associated dragging things out with infusing a story with tension.

I’m not saying that there aren’t times when it’s necessary to delay gratification or a big climax. But it’s important to remember that by going ahead and throwing that big thing at your characters, it gives you the opportunity to raise the stakes, escalate the action, and throw your characters into an even bigger, more crazy climax that you might have never thought of otherwise.

So I guess what I’m saying is that my SUPER AWESOME BIG TIME REWRITE is going awesome (even though progress has slowed to a crawl these past few weeks because I’ve had to sluggishly and painfully chisel out these last few chapters with an ice pick) and I’m learning stuff from the process.

Yea, learning!

I’m curious. How do vous approach putting a chapter together and how did vous come to doing it that way?

When You Can't Retreat, Vacation!

I found myself on an impromptu mini-vacation this weekend. Naturally there are certain items I never leave town without. At minimum, it’s several books, a couple of notebooks, a couple of sketchbooks, and – last, but not least – my computer.

Because for me, the word “vacation” is synonymous with “writer’s retreat.”

Since this was just going to be a weekend trip with only one full day actually spent out of town and because it was a big group of people going, making this - in theory – a social vacation, I didn’t really think I’d get any writing done.

Surprisingly (or maybe not so surprising considering I’m me), I did manage to get in a few hours of alone time with my computer. My borderline-reclusive leanings helped in this regards. But seriously, watching a movie together doesn’t really count as a social activity, right? So it was okay to skip out on that. And I played a round of dominoes on Friday night so I didn’t need to join in on a game of cards on Saturday.

I’m happy that I went back to my room, slipped on my earphones and commenced to writing because I had a pretty exciting character revelation as I tipity-tapped away on my keyboard. This thing that I realized fits right in with the other dynamics already on the table for these characters and the back story that’s already been established, and while it doesn’t change the events I foresee writing in future chapters, it adds to everything an undercurrent so awesome that it makes me want to hug myself and squeal with glee whilst I do a little happy dance.

I’ve been working on this story for what feels like a lot longer than what should have been necessary, and it has been a pain in the butt to write, I mean really. It. Has. Sucked. But now I’m thinking, maybe I’m glad I didn’t finish it sooner. If it took me this long to come to this wonderful, wonderful realization, maybe it’s better I didn’t finish it months ago…but if I had finished it months ago, would I have come to this realization anyway?….or maybe the story would have been completely different because I would have never hit upon other slow-to-come realizations and therefore I would have never reached this weekend’s awesome insight? And oh, the circles of thought continue to go round.

It’s the same thing I wondered when I used to wait to the very last minute to write what turned out to be an excellent paper in college. Did it turn out brilliant because I waited until 2am to write something due for my 8am class? Would I have been able to string these same thoughts together if I did it slowly over the course of the several weeks I was given?

Inspiration, when it comes to putting together a story, is a series of thoughts falling into each other like dominoes, except that it isn’t a single, predetermined line of dominoes but a journey with many forks in the road that could lead you anywhere. At least that's how it seems to me; and sometimes, they’re slow to fall.

I don’t exactly advocate waiting for the muse to hit you upside the head with inspiration, but I do believe that there are times when you just can’t – or shouldn’t – push a story that isn’t ready to go anywhere. Like so many things, it’s about learning to balance between the two, getting a feel for when to push on through to the other side or when to take a break.

I’ll tell you one thing. When the dominoes are consistently slow to fall, when you have to stop pushing and take a break for no other reason but for the sake of your sanity, it really makes you appreciate every page, every little line of dialogue, every period at the end of a sentence, every space between two words.

Image by Justina Kochansky/articulatematter.com

There has been many a day that I’ve hated this particular story. Capital H-A-T-E-D, HATED with a deep-seeded passion that sat in the core of my being like a lump of dry, stale bread stuck in my throat, but on the other hand, by the time I get to the end of it - if I ever get to the end of it – I think I’ll really feel like I’ve earned this story. That this story decided that I was going to work for and, boy, have I—like a dog works for his tail.

…I just hope it doesn’t suck.

Webcomic Update: Preview of First Completed Page Posted! (Click on image for larger version)

Where Chaos Reigns Supreme! (Inside This Writer’s Notebook)

I originally posted this post on my process of writing a comic book script on that other blog o' mine, but I thought it a good idea to re-post it here. (I am not being lazy! Shh!) There are lots of ways to write a comic book script and a lot of different types of writer-artist relationships. Sketching out page layouts are a part of my writing process, but I think of it as presenting the vision floating around in my head with the artist I'm working. It's not set in stone. Once the artist has my sketches, he'll use his own artistic acumen to improve the visual storytelling. Go, collaboration!

When starting something, I usually at some point come up with a very rough, bullet-point outline.

You have to write ideas down on whatever is available. Even if it means scribbling on the back of receipt paper because you were at the registers at work when genius struck.

I may flesh out the outline or go right into sketching out scenes. Often times I go back a forth between the two because as I begin to write scenes I get a better idea of where things are headed, or should head. And of course, as I begin to get some scenes down I also begin sketching out thumbnails so tiny and indecipherable that sometimes I barely know what they represent.

As I mentioned in my post about thumbnails, I’ve been writing dialogue and doing the thumbnails at the same time. This worked for several scenes as I wrote chapters two and three, but somewhere along the line my notes got a little crazy, and it’s hard to sketch out thumbnails for a scene when you can’t track the dialogue because it jumps around three different pages in ten different ways.

It was time to sit down at my computer and so I could turn the chaos of my notes into an orderly and easily read pseudo-script. (It’s not really a script at this point. I don’t even have all the page and panel breaks written in, let alone scene description). I’ve learned from experience that I should put a slash through the sections of my notes I’ve already typed up. I can’t tell you how much confusion that simple practice has saved me from.

I printed out the pages with a wide left margin so I'd have plenty of space for working out thumbnails and then turned the nice, neat, orderly typed-up pseudo-script into this.

Good times.

Translating text into visual beats is one of my favorite things about storytelling through comics, but like any aspect of any creative process, it can be frustration at times. When I got stuck, I found myself sketching different panel layouts. I basically knew what I wanted to happen in this particular sequence, but the ideas were slow to fully form. (This by no means was the toughest spot I found myself in when it came to writing this story.)

Sketching out the different ways the panels could interact with the story kept my brain churning until I finally figured out what I wanted to do.

Another useful trick was to work backwards from a place in the dialogue a few beats ahead of the section that was causing my indecision. This worked for me because I knew what I wanted the bottom of this particular page to look like. Once I sketched the arrangement of those panels, figuring out what to do with all the stuff written before that point pretty much fell into place.

Eventually, I have to incorporate all the chaos I’ve written on the typed page into the script I started on my computer...if I can make any sense of it.

Continuing in this vain, the first draft of chapter two really came together.

So...what does your process look like?

(A brief note on the names: these are characters who - for the most part - only appear in this chapter. Since they're minor characters, I didn't bother to give them real names, but I had to call them something. So, no - in case you looked closely at the scripts or notes and are now wondering - there aren't really characters named Gidget or Moondoggy in this story.