Morrie's Meditations

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.

Finis

Penumbral (working titles Penumbralia and Shadowside)

198,788 words, on 654 ms pages

First draft completed September 17, 2011

So close...

I am, conservatively speaking, within a week (maybe a weekend) of finishing Penumbral.  One of the things that I've decided, as I worked my way toward the end, is that however nice it is to have that sense of finishing a story, I need to get the product together so that I can do something more than just write words that nobody ever reads.  (Not counting my wonderful wife, who actually hasn't read all that many of the Mack words in the grand scheme of things, but who's the only reader I have so far.)  So my next step is to take all four of the Mack books and create a set of synopses.  The synopses will have two purposes.

The first, and maybe the most obvious, is that you need to provide a synopsis when you send a manuscript out for agents to review.  Agents, and the people agents send prospective novels to, do not have the time to read through every manuscript that comes in.  It may be optimistic to expect more than the first paragraph to get read, but if that first paragraph is interesting, there's got to be an expedient way for the reader to determine if the rest of what you've created is worth their time.  Hence, the synopsis.  It has to get done, so I might as well do it.

The second reason is that I need to do some coherence checking.  I have written, by just about any metric, a damned lot of material relating to Mr. Mack Judas.  Penultimate was over 650 ms pages.  Purgatorium was mid-400s.  Prophesied was also in the 420 range.  And Penumbral?  So far, around 650, with another 5-20 pages to go.  Conservatively, we're talking 2100 manuscript pages.  If we called that just 300 words per page, that's 630000 words (using the "counting by spaces" method MSWord uses, not the 5-character definition of a "word" that you learned back in your intro typing class).

630,000 words with a couple dozen characters, multiple distinct settings, and  a lot of relationships between and among characters and settings. 

There's a lot that I can screw up, with that much ground to cover.

There are, in fact, things that I know I've screwed up, that I need to be able to go back through and identify, to figure out how to fix.  And, now that I know some of the hidden agendas characters have been carrying with them for a while, I can make sure that the first three books do the best possible job setting up the fourth.

The weirdest thing about Penumbral was the realization that this is, in some respects, the end of at least the current line of Mack Judas stories.  I'd have more trepidation about admitting that if anyone read this blog, or if there were currently a market for the stories that would have people wailing and gnashing their teeth and sending me hate mail for even suggesting that I could stop writing Mack.

To them I would say, "Where did I ever say I was going to stop writing Mack?"  This is more like an arc that's reaching its logical conclusion, but there are other arcs that can be built.  I need to slow down aging Mack a little, to keep him in the picture, but there are a ton of things that can be done with the world I've created here. 

You have to be able to recognize good stopping points.  Self-editing is as important as anything else in the writing process, because if you can't self-edit well you can neither detect imperfections in what you're doing (because you're so in love with your creation that you can't believe it could be other than perfect) nor possess the objectivity to know when you need to stop messing with it (because you're so in love with your creation that you can't allow it to be other than perfect, even if your definition of "perfect" changes over time and results in your alienating portions of your fan base by changing key moments in a beloved series of films in ways that undermine the essential characteristics of key players in your universe).  At some point, you have to be able to look at what you've done and ask yourself, "Do I love this?"  And then, when you get the obvious answer (because you wouldn't be to the point of asking the question if you didn't love it), you have to go with the follow up:

"Do I love this enough to let it go?"

Because past a certain point, your creation?  It's no longer yours.  It belongs to the reader or the viewer or the player.  I took a lot of lessons away from my work writing for "Living Force," but the most important was that it didn't matter what story I thought I was telling, if the story didn't connect with the players.  I could write my fingers down to little nubs, but if people didn't have fun with what I'd created it wouldn't matter.  The typical consumer of entertainment doesn't care about the process, doesn't care about the hard work, doesn't care about what it took to get that entertainment in front of them.  They care about whether the work made them feel something.  If it did, it's a success.  If it didn't, well...

The point I'm trying to make is simply that you cannot make the art all about yourself.  Because it isn't.  It's about the people who read or watch or taste or listen or otherwise appreciate it.  You have a responsibility to create something that is beautiful to you, and that you believe will be beautiful to them.  A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending.  One of the things that concerned me about the middle two books is that, although they ended, only one of them had "an ending," and that was still somewhat ambiguous.  I've found a stopping point, and so I will stop, and do other work, and try to get these into a shape where an agent might find them of interest.  I'll be re-reading old material, writing new material, and trying to make sure the universes I've created fit together as well as such things can.

Maybe as soon as tomorrow, Penumbral's first draft will be done.  I look forward to the work that comes after.