Morrie's Meditations

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.

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.

How to listen

So, a brief follow-up to the last posting (from oh so long ago...).  The new computers were built successfully, and have improved many things about our online experience, not the least of which being that I know exactly what should and should not be running and was able to configure my security as I wanted it.  The lack of crap-ware installed at some factory by some guy who just sticks the same DVD full of product placement into every machine as the OS finishes installing is phenomenal.  If there's a downside, it's only that I have no one to complain to when something doesn't work right.  I currently have four different versions of the video drivers for my computer in a folder on my desktop, and have been playing "Musical drivers" to try and get the video to be 100% what I want it to be.

Still, though - overall it's a success.  We're happy with our new machines.

Tonight's topic isn't tech-related, but is writing-related.  Not a huge surprise, since that's the theme of the blog, but still - I drift from time to time, and haven't done a whole lot of writing about writing in a bit.  If you know me, you'll know why that's a good thing; it's because I've been too busy writing new material to bother writing about writing new material, and I'm only doing this tonight because my laptop is already packed for a trip I'm taking, starting tomorrow, and I don't feel like unpacking it so that I can work on Penumbral only to have to re-pack an hour or so later.  Maybe that makes me lazy.  Actually, it probably makes me lazy, but I'm okay with that.

The writing has been going well.  I passed page 420 in the ms last night, which means somewhere in the neighborhood of 125k words thus far.  The two storylines are going well, moving at about the pace I anticipated, which means that I may have to speed one or both of them up to get in under 200k words.  I've not managed to be totally consistent with the four Mack books, which could be a problem down the road.  Or not.  I guess we'll see.  With this one, I just had a major "moment" type of scene for one of the protagonists, and Mack is about to get hit with the crux of the problem he's going to have to figure out in order to get what he wants.

Yeah, sorry.  Vague is ever my rule when talking about what's happening in the books, since anything else gives away plot points.  And I'm still assuming that at some point, these books will sell, and this blog will be found, and people will read it with interest in order to try and figure out what's going to happen in books that have yet to publish.

In that vein:  Characters die.  Demons plot.  Mack swears.

One of the things that I've found myself needing to do, with as "large" as this story sometimes gets, is to listen to the characters.  There are things they want, and it's helpful to let them talk every so often.  Just to express themselves.  I know how they are in my head and in my heart (to spout some useless floofery that makes little sense even to me...), but letting them put things in their own words is important for them to really be able to grow.  I live in Mack's head a lot, and there's plenty of room for internal monologue with a guy as into his own opinions as Mack.  However, it's different to hear him talk to somebody else about his problems, to really express what he's trying to get out of the interactions and situations he finds himself in. 

My other protag got a major opportunity for that this week.  It was a scene I'd had planned from the outline phase (yes, I did a basic outline of this ms, because not doing so would have gotten me lost - and yes, the outline has already morphed, particularly with storyline 2 taking some unexpected turns and pushing the character in directions that are more interesting than what I'd originally intended) that, when I started writing it, took on a life of its own.

It's straight-forward in structure.  It's a dialogue between two people who've known each other a long time, but don't necessarily know each other well.  They're part of one another's lives, but at the same time they keep at arm's length for a variety of reasons.  This was, and remains, essential to the core of one of the two.  It's just how that person is, was, and feels the need to continue to be.  Unfortunately, it just hasn't been working, and the resultant conversation was one that had tumbled around in my head for a while.  How does it even start?  How much gets shared?  What is the ultimate reason that is given for the sharing?  How does the other person react?

You can plan these things, you can make notes on the characters and their backgrounds (I do things like this, as noted elsewhere, any time I end up in a restaurant by myself), but until you stop thinking and start listening, there's no way to tell how the conversation will shape itself up.

The best way that I've found to listen is to just let the conversation begin.  Pick the sentence that leads it off - which may be a feat all its own, but is something that you can't start without - write it, tag it as necessary, and let the scene go.  When I enter into a big dialogue scene, the background becomes just that.  I don't spend a lot of time on things outside the conversation.  There may be cues that one character or another gives off (sometimes I think that my writing is too full of frowns, raised eyebrows, and sighs, but those are the kinds of cues that get noticed as people talk to one another, so are the kinds of things that I'm willing to credit POV characters with noticing during interactions), but the objects and space around the characters aren't important.  If there are two people talking, you let them talk, you listen to them talk, and you allow them to be honest in their responses. 

For all that I'd thought about the conversation, I didn't want it to end.  Before I knew it, I'd written five pages of material.  I won't promise that all of it's good, but all of it is honest interaction between honest people, and I was only able to get it because of my willingness to listen to what they had to say.