Morrie's Meditations

Processing

"Processing" is one of those words that the clinicians with whom I work use a lot, and which is wonderfully descriptive for what I'm working through with Purgatorium.  When clinical psychologists talk about processing, the meaning I take away from it is the act of seeking out meaning, both personal and meta-personal, in what they or their clients have experienced.  It's mainly a client thing, or a trainee thing; we want people "processing" what they've discovered, to take it to a deeper level.  At least, that's how it always feels to me, the non-clinician listening to the folks who help others work through difficult problems.

In art, there's a lot of talk about "process," which I think is related to the idea of "processing."  If processing is really about a search for meaning, then one's process describes the way that we find and/or create meaning in our creative works.  When the process is clear, the meaning is clear; when the process is muddy, so goes the whole can of potatoes.

This blog entry isn't about muddiness, though.  It's more about the way that I'm trying to process all the elements of Purgatorium and pull them together into a coherent whole.  I know the meaning, I think; I just need to make sure that every scene contributes to the overall meaning and the gestalt of the narrative.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I was just looking through my three active documents - the current version of the Purgatorium manuscript, the way-too-detailed synopsis, and the five(ish) page outline - and trying to think through what all needs to happen to make the story flow properly, and to fit with the stories that come both before it and after it.  There's Mack's arc, which I mainly get.  There's the arc involving Mack's nephew, which I'm comfortable with but am not sure that I've not created inconsistencies within as I've added more text.  (Remember when this was a 420-page ms?  We're up closer to 470 now...)  There's an arc involving a small group of players, who primarily serve to give a different perspective on the action but ultimately are not as involved in the action as my secondary protag was in Penultimate.  There's a sub-arc with Mack and another character that now builds much more organically than it did (it was one of those "happy accident" moments that occur in writing sometimes, when a character is introduced based on plot necessity, then refuses to leave when the party is over and settles into a role you hadn't planned on filling), and there's an arc involving the antagonists.  Though I'm not completely convinced that gets to be called an "arc" of its own, overlapping as it does with the small group of players in terms of scene structure.

The bitch of it is, I thought I was creating something LESS complicated than Penultimate when I was writing this one, but because I failed to plan and outline, I ended up with, in some respects, way more going on.  And to capture it all, to rein it all in and produce one coherent work, takes a damned lot of time and energy.

I'm processing, then, how to make it all come together.  It's like I'm visualizing a beginning and an ending, and each is more or less a single point.  From the beginning, though, multiple threads reach out, interacting with other threads, overlapping, twisting and cavorting and creating these near-Gordian monstrosities that have to (somehow) make their way to the single point that is the final conflict and resolution.  If you're trying to imagine it as a spider's web, you're not far wrong.  Just feed the spider some LSD before you set it to spinning and you might even come kind of close to the complexity I feel like I've created.

It's so funny that, if I look back through this blog, I'll find myself saying that the editing and synopsizing process was much more straight-forward than I'd anticipated with Penultimate, and I might be able to do all four books by the end of the year.  HAH!  I guess I showed me, didn't I?  It's February now, and I'm still working on book two of four, still trying to get all the pieces wedged into place without it feeling like I'm "wedging" anything.

If I were to process my sense of frustration, I'd probably conclude that what I'm experiencing is ultimately a good thing.  I've had some real breakthroughs in terms of understanding what it is that my main character is learning over the course of the story, and how he's changing.  I've done some hard eye-balling of the story and its structure, and asked important questions about the nature of the conflict and whether the material all moves the story forward properly.  Doing "the work" (with apologies to Crowley, whose influence I'm sure is not enough to ever satisfy the Beast himself, but I think is certainly present) is making me a better writer.  Even when I'm not generating new text, I'm understanding the existing text in ways that I hadn't, previously.  I'm seeing what needs to happen to it, in a much larger-scale version of what I saw in that sophomore-year essay that took an honorable mention in some random AHA essay contest, and which I like to imagine could have been read by Isaac Asimov in the months before his death. 

Because, when you look at a text enough, you stop seeing the words, and you start seeing the overall story that gets told.  Then you can go back to the words, and look between them, and start to imagine what it is that you need to do in order to make the story the best that it can be.  Sometimes, things just click.

When you process.

Variety

Despite some amount of moaning about not enjoying academic writing as much as fiction writing, I really do tend to be pretty varied in what I write, and what I write about.  This is good, because it lets me practice in different styles, lets me work on a variety of voices, and keeps me from going totally nuts by virtue of either (a) repeatedly disconnecting myself from reality or (b) never disconnecting myself from reality.

I've tried to decide on a few occasions what it is that writing actually does for me, whether it's meditation or therapy or catharsis (not much different from therapy, depending...) or something else entirely.  I think there's such a thing as "the need to create," but I don't know whether that describes what I do.  I enjoy putting words down in orders they haven't been tried previously (though, if Google's any indication, you have to put a goodly number of words in a particular order in order to come up with something novel - thankfully, the novel is by definition novel based on the sheer number of words required for its creation and the near-mathematical impossibility of creating a non-novel novel using even the most relatively limited vocabulary the form would allow).  And I like parentheticals, because they capture the essential non-linearity of human thought processes, which tend to be jumbled messes of a variety of decisions and conundrums with which we're dealing at a particular point in time, in addition to all the random bullstuff that happens to float in and out of our consciousnesses.

Not sure that last word really needed to be pluralized.  Well, except that it had a plural pronoun in front of it, didn't it?  Still doesn't look right.

One of the things I feel like the variety of writing "voices" I have helps me do is to capture some of that non-linearity.  Conversations - internal or external - don't flow like a river.  They flow like jell-o dropped through the blades of a helicopter at 500 feet, scattering and fragmenting and often splatting down to finish in places where they're neither wanted or needed.

You ever notice how some metaphors start out promising, then go nowhere good?

Yeah.  Me too.

Academic Writing

For a variety of reasons, I don't enjoy academic writing as much as I do fiction writing.  Part of it is the feeling that I'm being constrained, which is not incorrect.  I am.  I have to be able to support what I say.  I have to think about arguments and counter-arguments and the way that rejection can affect more than just my ego.  Or, how it could, back before I got tenure.  I appreciate good academic writing, and can provide what I believe is high-quality guidance on how to do it - but it's not a form of writing that I find particular joy in.  I mean, I just spent 3 hours cranking out maybe 500 words, because I get so easily distracted when I'm doing something I don't love.  (And because it's a team-written project, and because I don't have the other team member's parts yet, and because I am not completely sure that I want to say the things that the paper says because part of me is a big pansy.  But whatever.)

What's weird is, I've not initiated a lot of academic writing projects over the past 2-3 years.  The two that I have initiated, as first-author, have both been somewhat critical of my chosen field.  The last got published, and I received informal feedback from one of my grad school professors that it was a very interesting paper, so that was a nice feeling.  This one... well, it kind of has the potential to either piss people off, or get me offered the chance to edit the kind of book I think our field needs to be publishing more of.  Because there are some weaknesses that I'm observing in my chosen domain, and I'm at the point in my career where I am starting to get comfortable pointing them out.

It's so political, though.  My co-author and I have been gathering a little bit of data to support our arguments, and I can already see how some of them will be received.  Or, I can imagine some reactions, which involve the charge that I'm out of touch with the field, don't understand the way our science functions, or simply don't read the research literature broadly enough to know that what I'm saying is wrong.

I don't think I'm out of touch with anything, though.  I do understand how our science functions, and how the scientific enterprise in general functions, and I happen to believe that so long as we find ourselves beholden to private or public sources of funding to conduct our research, we may be compromised, and that so long as we train people toward a narrow "pinnacle" of achievement, we run the risk of creating very narrow experts who lack the potential to see how the science of psychology can be a single integrative discipline rather than a group of separate disciplines whose members use the same words to mean different things.  And I may not be as widely-read as some of my colleagues, but I read enough to know where the boundaries of our science are, relative to where they ought to be.  And the fact that there exists a difference means that I probably do need to finish this damned paper.

Three weeks.  Shouldn't be too bad.  And the worst case is probably that it gets rejected.  If it gets in, any conversation that it might generate is exactly the kind of conversation I think we need to be having.

It's still not "fun" writing, though.

I must outline

Dear god, going back and fixing continuity/tracking character development arcs/ensuring plot coherence becomes a pain in the butt when you didn't work from an outline to start with.  Purgatorium is coming along nicely, but this is WORK!  It's interesting and rewarding, and I can see themes emerging that make the entire point of the story much more clear than what I understood when I was first writing it (there's something to be said for revisiting the story with fresh eyes...), but holy crap, this is taking a while.

I've kind of kept a running update here on how things are going, and my conclusions about how my process needs to work are directly informed by how much extra work violating a process that seemed just fine is creating for me.

I read and edited the first draft while creating an initial synopsis that's about 10% the length of the entire manuscript. 

I went back to the synopsis and created an outline of the story structure, chapter-by-chapter, that's less than four pages total.

I went through the outline, with the final dispositions of the various storylines and characters fresh in my mind, and made notes on where things needed to be inserted to appropriately "set up" the book's conclusion.

I then started going back through the manuscript and making those additions, while further expanding on the elements that need to be expanded upon in order to have the story maintain coherence.

So far, I've added one entire chapter, have at least two more extended scenes to write, and am finding that every change creates more changes that are going to have to be made at various points throughout the story.  It's a damned butterfly effect, happening right in the middle of my story!

On the bright side, I only started out around 420 ms pages, so it could be worse.  I could be butterflying Penultimate.

So, after I get done with the round of additions and re-writes, I get to go back through the manuscript AGAIN to make sure that the additions make sense, and to remove things that never made sense or that I put in and, because I wasn't working with an outline, promptly forgot about.

Stupid dangling plot-threads.

On the bright side, somewhere around Act 2 I started realizing that I had too many characters to manage, and began killing them off.  So, yay for that.  "Too many characters" is also notably something that having a functional outline to start with would have helped, since some of them seem to pop up because I need an entity to speak a line of dialogue.  I suspect there will be some combining of characters in the next pass, because the story flat-out doesn't require all of the ones who are present.

All of that being said, I do see progress, I think the story is getting more clear, and the characters are becoming a little more consistent and coherent as I work back through this.  It's not the kind of thing I can bring myself to work on every day, because of how much more cognitive effort it is than sitting down and knocking out a few pages of first draft, but when I'm done I really feel like I've accomplished something.

Re-Writing

I think it's time for me to admit a dark secret:  I really didn't understand what was going on when I read stories about George R.R. Martin going back and repeatedly re-writing sections of his books.  I mean, I look at the final product and I think, "Dude's got it going on.  He clearly has a pipeline to his muse that can't ever get blocked, because these characters are so believable, and the scenes so vivid, that there's no way he didn't have it leap fully-formed from his head, like Athena out of the mind of Zeus.  I guess it's because I've never really gotten to a point where I felt like I had something that I needed to do other than get a story down on paper. 

Well, pixels.  You know what I mean, though.

The thing that I'm realizing, as I continue to work my way through Purgatorium, is that it's going to take some work to have it stand up to Penultimate.  I intend to publish these, and I don't want people to look at the two books and say, "He only had one in him.  The first was pretty good; this second shows none of the same skill."  And I'm not saying that I think Penultimate is particularly brilliant.  I mean, there's a lot that I like about it.  The characters are ones that I like, the story is fun, the structure is interesting (and to me, kind of unique), and there's are meaningful themes being explored.  I don't want to follow that up with something that just happens to be a bunch of interesting stuff that doesn't have the same kind of thematic or general quality, though.

However, just like I'm not saying that Penultimate is brilliant, I'm also not saying that Purgatorium is shlock.  It is not, however, up to the same standards.  It's briefer, it doesn't go as far into as many characters, the plot is substantially more straight-forward (in part because I don't have to engage in world-building activities; the game Mack created and the version of reality in which the story operates are already established and just need to be refreshed rather than re-hashed), and the themes are more mainstream.  Kind of.  What I'm feeling, as I go through it, is something I alluded to in my last entry:  It just doesn't feel as "planned".  Things Happen.  Mack Reacts.  More Things Happen.  I think that this was me rebelling against the level of structure it took to make Penultimate work, but I rebelled too far, and I've had a couple of full chapters that I had to go back and re-work.  I spent two days this week re-writing a key scene with Mack and a critical female character, because the way she presented at the beginning of the scene didn't mesh well with the way she presented at the end of it.  Her purpose in the scene, in the book, and in the universe of Mack Judas, shifted in those six pages.  I knew who and what she was by the time I was done, but when I started that section she really didn't "set up" correctly.  She needed to be more coherent, and I needed to be more on-message.

Which is why this synopsis is taking a lot longer than the last, despite the manuscript being about 2/3's the length of the first.  I'm reading and editing a chapter, writing a synopsis, and then potentially going back and re-writing the chapter so that the place it ends up is established by the actions throughout the chapter.  And when I'm done synopsizing the entire manuscript, I'm going to sit down with that synopsis, whittle it down to a brief outline, and go back through the book making sure that things at every step create a story structure that is meaningful and coherent for the reader.

If this sounds like I maybe - MAYBE - should have outlined more first, that's only because I definitely should have outlined more first.  And I'm glad I did more for Prophesied and Penumbral (too close to Penultimate? I may need another p-word... I think I've said that before...), though there may be some re-writing on those as well, because as I immerse myself in the manuscripts I'm finding that there are some continuity things I need to pay attention to.  Again, I worked hard before starting Penultimate and had my color-coded note cards to help me keep all the players and settings straight, but I didn't update those cards with later books.  I suspect this may have led to at least one character being killed and/or resurrected an uneven number of times, so that they are either more dead or more alive than should be the case, given the occurrences from one book to the next.

Which is fine.  We're looking at about 2000 manuscript pages, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 650,000 words.  I'm bound to have some screw-ups, and I don't have an editor or a devoted fan-base to point them out thus far.

All of which takes me back to the startling revelation that came along with reading a section of Purgatorium and saying, "My god, that really doesn't work at all."  And sitting down, knowing what needed to happen, and re-writing it.  And feeling when I was done that I had actually improved upon what I wrote the first time, and that doing so felt an awful lot like the part of writing that I so enjoy, the crafting of the initial draft.

That's kind of a break-through for me.  The whole, "I like re-writing things, it's kind of fun."  Because as I've said before, I hate editing.  I don't like going back and fixing things.  It bruises my ego.  To have it turn into fun?  To be something that I actually kind of look forward to doing?  To be able to look at what I've created and have it go from, "This is total trash" to, "I don't think I'm nearly so ashamed of this as I was" (which I suspect will morph to some variant on "total trash" when I go back to draft three, but whatever) is a revelation.

It also feels a little like work.  Which is good, because if I'm going to ever make a living doing this, I need to be sure that I actually sweat the requisite amount.  Nothing easy is worth doing.  No story is perfect in its first telling.  The beauty, as it turns out, may not be in the discovery of the narrative, but instead in the striving for perfection.

Or at least non-suckitude.  I'll be happy with that, too.

Purgatorium

I think - and I could be wrong - but I think that there was a lot more advance planning of Penultimate than there was of Purgatorium.  I say this because... well, there are a lot of reasons, but the main one is that Purgatorium doesn't feel as "grounded."  I know where it's going, but I'm half-way through the first editing pass and I'm not at all sure how it gets there from here.  There are sections that feel very un-focused, and the overall style of writing isn't as polished as what I saw in the first-draft of Penultimate.

Which is fine.  I mean, there ought to be variability.  I think that it may be the case that there was a really large gap between the two manuscripts.  A year and a half (just checked).  It's obvious that I didn't go back and re-read the first one all the way through prior to starting the second, since there are things that aren't quite right that I've been fixing throughout.  I'm also coming up, it turns out, on the point where I took a step back from this manuscript and let everything "gel" for me.  Which I mainly do when I'm experimenting with free-form writing rather than writing from a more detailed outline.

The chapter I'm about to edit is one that I'm not sure will get retained; I spent several days on it in the first draft, but looking back through my notes on it I found something like the following:  "This is a story without a point."  And it's one character telling a story to another because I decided I needed more exposition.

I'm guessing I can do that in a couple of paragraphs rather than a chapter, but we'll see how I feel when I get done editing it.  And I'm a chapter or two away from the moment that I love in "organic" manuscripts, where everything clicks into place.  Which means I'm probably going to edit to that point, then have to go back through and re-edit everything that happened before that point to make sure it's all internally consistent.  So, there's that to look forward to.

There's a definite learning point in this, though, and it's that I really do need to do a lot of planning before I start a project.  Of the four manuscripts so far, the second is probably the one for which I did the least prep.

For Penultimate, I used index cards.  A lot of them.  I had an index card for each character, with key traits and brief biographical sketches, index cards for locations in the game world, index cards for major plot points, and an index card for each chapter.  I knew, going in, what happened when.  I deviated here and there, but the outline kept me focused.

For Prophesied, I had a 36-page double-spaced document, half of which was a chapter-by-chapter outline, the rest of which described character arcs, POV issues, and general themes.  I probably spent two weeks (which isn't much, realistically) doing nothing but outlining the story.  We'll see when I get to it how that worked out.

For Penumbral, I had 33 single-spaced pages of notes, including a basic chapter-by-chapter treatment.  I shouldn't be surprised that it was the longest one since Penultimate.  Again, we'll see how that goes.

For Purgatorium, though, I have very little in the way of advance documentation.  I had two options for how to "build" the story crammed into one file, and the last half of it - a little over 2k words - is a basic pseudo-three-act structure for what would become the novel.  I had less to work with, as I wrote, so made more up on the fly - and it shows.  It's not all that tightly plotted and the characters lose focus right along with the flow of the story.  Which means that, instead of going straight through and doing Prophesied next, I think that when I'm done with Purgatorium I will immediately be going back through, picking apart the synopsis, and using it to figure out how to re-structure the underlying story so that it builds more cleanly and doesn't introduce so many random-seeming characters early on.  Everything needs a purpose, and right now that's not all there.

It's almost like work...

...but not quite.

The thing with editing is that, at least for me, it's a slow process.  It's also one that drains me, because editing, say, a single chapter, and writing a synopsis of that chapter, can take a solid couple of hours. 

That may not sound like much to other writers, and to be fair, it's mainly me going through and reading for flow and word-choice, then going back through and making sure that everything I originally included actually needs to be there.  Sometimes, I'll take out things that strike me as asides, but I don't like to do too much of that when I've been away from a project for over three years, because I may be taking out something I included for a reason I've since forgotten.

This story is more in Mack's head, so far, and is somewhat angsty for him.  That makes sense; even two years after the events of Penultimate, he still has a lot that he's trying to deal with, and immersing himself in a fake world doesn't help him deal with consequences in the real one.  (With "real," of course, being relative...)  It's harder for me to write a troubled Mack, because the guy is basically fun to hang out with.  There are consequences, though, to the things we do and the things we don't do, and if all he does is swear and rant and play games, he's really not all that interesting as a character.

So I'm beating Mack up a little more than I did last time, I think, and he's struggling with whether he needs to take out his frustrations on the people around him.  He's also realizing that he's kind of disconnected from most of those people, which I did on purpose in the first draft but didn't stick to as closely as I probably could or should have.  Again because I basically like the dude, and hate abusing him.

But it has to be done.

The bigger issue for me is what I'm seeing as some unevenness in my writing.  There are passages that read like I wrote them when I was 21 rather than when I was 35 or 36, long stretches where I'm clearly trying to paint a picture but end up falling into a voice that isn't all that interesting to read.  I think that, as I was working on Purgatorium, I may have been coming off a couple of manuscript false-starts.  I had a number of those in and among the Mack projects, things that I liked but that ultimately didn't work.  Or it might have been one of the ones that I saw all the way from beginning to end, and then realized that I just didn't love.  (The mermaid book being one of those.  I'll get back to mermaids one of these times, but I suspect it'll be more of Mack's perspective on them, which ought to be a hoot!)  When I'm writing something that I don't love, I can tell.  I know when it's happening, and I know when it's done by the way it reads. 

I think there was a part of me that didn't love Purgatorium, to start with.  That's reflected somewhat in the fact that I didn't settle on a title for it until probably 80-100 pages in.  The working title of the ms was Fires and Choirs (I think I mentioned that before), and that's the title it still had on it when I opened it to start editing.  I played around with The Bladed Legion as well, and that's a more "Mack" title, but just didn't quite fit because it put the focus on the wrong aspect of the story.  And at some point, I realized that I liked one-word titles that started with "P" for this first round of Mack Judas books, which is why I ended up following Purgatorium with Prophesied and Penumbral.

At any rate, things are moving along.  I'm not able to bring myself to do more than one chapter a day, when the editing/revising can be so involved, but given that it's a shorter book than the first I should still be able to be done with it before Christmas.

One Down

I finished synopsizing Penultimate last week.  Well, the first-draft synopsis, at any rate.  It came in at something like 29 pages, single-spaced, which is about 1/10 the length of the full manuscript. 

That's less a "synopsis" and more a "novella".

But, that's fine.  I can cut-and-gut and make it into something more succinct as needed.  The important part is that I got a much better feel for the story, its flow, and where the biggest pacing problems were.  I cut somewhere in the neighborhood of 7k words from the full manuscript, I think.  I'll be making up for that now that I'm working on Purgatorium, since one of the things that struck me almost immediately was that Purgatorium started off more slowly than I'd have liked.

One of the things I did with Penultimate was shift back and forth between game and non-game scenes.  With Purgatorium, I don't really have a second protagonist or a reason for Mack to get really immersed in his game world.  So as I read the first four chapters, I found myself struggling.  There was a gap - a novel or two's worth of gap - between those two books, and I didn't ease back into Mack's world all that readily.  It's choppy, not all that well-crafted, and frankly a little slow.  I started re-writing scenes almost from the get-go; my editing turned into, "Why did I write this?" which was informed by, "That's not consistent with how the characters were in the first book, or in the fourth book," and a couple of times inspired by, "What the hell was I thinking?"

For example:  At one point, Mack decides to stand up to his board of directors, and shocks them with the revelation that if they tell him he can't do what he wants to (talk to the media), he is immediately removed from the board and loses his vote, but doesn't give up his majority stake in the company.

I read this, got confused, re-read it, got more confused, and sat here trying to figure out what in the world I'd been trying to achieve.  I didn't see the up-side for Mack, or the down-side for the board.  Still don't.  So, that had to be re-worked, and I'm adding in short scenes that may or may not be inside the game world to help build tension.  There needs to be a more palpable threat in the second book than there was in the first, I think, and it needs to be distinct from my first baddie.

Or, to put it differently:  Purgatorium is going to be more work to get through the first draft on, because it needs way more than just tweaking.  The basic plot is fine, and the story builds to where I want it to build - but it's started out rough, and I suspect that I'll end up scratch-writing at least a couple of chapters.

The weirdest part? 

I'm looking forward to it.

Lessons Learned Synopsizing

I decided, prior to finishing Penumbral, that my next task would not involve starting a new story.  I've got a lot of stories already drafted, and as should be clear to anyone who stumbled across this blog, I kinda stink at getting past that "draft" place.  Coming up with stories is easy.  Finishing them?  That's harder.  That's why I have a pile of first drafts saved on my hard drive, most of which will never be seconds.

As it happens, though, I believe in Mack Judas and the stories that surround him.  So what I'm doing with my writing resources for the time being (when I'm not engrossed in writing things more academic, or doing detailed reviews of papers, or things of that nature) is starting the process of synopsizing Penultimate, to be followed by Purgatorium, Prophesied, and Penumbral.  My process of synopsizing also involves a little - or a lot - of editing, and goes a little something like this.

I read a chapter.  As I read, I make edits - mainly word deletions, or changing the abundance of "seeming" statements to something else.  For some reason, things "seem" to be particular ways a lot more often than they wind up actually being anything.  It's some weird writing quirk that I'm trying to figure out.  I'm curious how many instances of "seem," "seemed," and "seeming" I would find if I were to do a replacement on the word "seem" with "seem".  You know, just for fun.  I also find tense issues here and there, but those don't bother me a huge amount since mainly it's switching between past tense and past-perfect tense, and for the most part it's not inappropriate.  I don't think.

One of the things that I routinely do, though - and my students could (and would) vouch for this, if they heard me say it - is kill words.  There is a tightness that I value in my writing, which I'm sure doesn't come across in my blog because (a) it's a blog and (b) I don't do anything but first-draft on it.  When I'm editing, though, I'm looking at every word and asking myself the question, "Does this really have to be here?"  I have the blessing/curse of "hearing" things in my head as I read them, so words that don't fit or don't belong are easy for me to excise.  Sometimes it's little words, sometimes it's big words, sometimes it's sentences or paragraphs.  More on that later.

Anyway, I'm going through and editing the chapter, and when I get done I swap to another document and write up a synopsis of what happened in it.  I don't have a target length at this point, which I know is going to lead to a synopsis that's too long in its initial form.  That's fine.  I can edit it down to something more succinct once I've got it together.  I view this first synopsis both as a document that can be provided to an agent who wants a detailed synopsis and a tool to make it easier for me to track plotlines and spot continuity problems across multiple books.

How long is a chapter synopsis ? For me, the chapter synopses are currently ranging from 300-500 words per chapter, with a chapter being anywhere from 10-25 manuscript pages.  This is clearly too long, which is why I'm not shy about saying that I'll be editing it further to get it to an ideal submission length.  But, stages.  Having a detailed synopsis allows me to further solidify in my own mind what's happening and when.  On the next pass I'll probably bring it in line with the only other synopsis I've written, which had chapter descriptions that ranged from around 50 to around 300 words.  Probably 50-150 per chapter is ideal, since I've got a lot of chapters and don't want the synopsis to be too "weighty," but I'll have several versions available to me by the time I'm done.

I guess I ought to get to the "lessons learned" part, though.  Other than my fondness for "seeming" and "had," there are a few other things I've picked up on. 

First (and this doesn't surprise me, other than how evident it is when it happens), there are times when I don't want to rush to a particularly difficult scene, and spend a day, or two, or five, writing a long scene that has a lot of description but that doesn't particularly advance the story.  I think of these as "Tolkien days," with the difference being that Tolkien could get away with long, flowing, extravagant descriptions of this fantastical world because of when he was writing and how novel everything was.  If I spend five pages on a guy taking a cab ride from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky airport out to the burbs, it don't have the same impact.  In fact, it's kind of dull.  I know why it happened; the scene after was emotionally intense, and I didn't want to get into it.  I hate to feel like I'm rushing to the end of a story, and feel obligated to make sure that the reader and I take our time getting there.

Not every reader appreciates that sentiment, though, and when I start to get bored with a scene I know there's a problem.

Second, I don't always realize when I've already written a thematically important scene.  So far, in Penultimate, this has happened twice.  Two different characters have had to explain the same thing about Mack's game to two separate questioners.  Which is all well and good in the real world, since two people answering the same question in different parts of the world happens all the time.  But it's freaking dull to have to listen to the same conversation twice.  The second time - and I have no idea how this happened - my second protagonist ends up in an almost identical mundane situation in both the first and second acts in the book.  Same character, same basic setting, same type of concerns, same lack of resolution.  I read that second chapter and said to myself, "Did I actually write the same thing, 200 pages apart?"  As it turns out, the answer was "Yes."  So I deleted the second chapter entirely.  It wasn't bad, but it did nothing to develop the character, and in fact made her appear to have not grown at all in 200 pages.  That's an awful thing to do.

Starting tomorrow, I have a short break from synopsizing.  Well, I guess that would be starting today, since this is my self-set writing assignment for the evening.  But I'll be back to it next week.  I hope to get through all four books by January, then do another "tightening" pass on Penultimate and begin work on figuring out where to send it by next summer.

JBB on writing

Joe Bob Briggs and the "Write Every Day" article

Because for whatever reason, Facebook screws this up and redirects to his main page.