Numbers Game - The Almighty Wordcount

Christmas comes in 86 days.  Between then and now, I have something close to 50,000 words to write to have "The Order" completed on (re)schedule.  Considering that it's a national pass-time to write as much inside of a single month, hopefully I can manage the feat in three.

"The Order" in its new form is a far more comfortable layout than what I was trying to do before.  As I mentioned last week, short stories are weird, and trying to apply their meter and method to a full-length novel results in something with an awkward, knob-kneed gait.  The new version should be much neater, and honestly give more of a glimpse into Geno's growth from harmless innocent to seasoned killer, which is the whole reason I wanted to write it in the first place.

I've been outlining scenes for the entirety of this week, which is to say I've gotten almost no writing done, but I expect that to change here shortly when my cloning experiment yields what I'm certain will be passable results.  Seriously, though, time will be freeing up in my average week from here till the end of the year, so I have time to write the page a day I'll need to complete this on time.

I mentioned previously that aiming to pen 1,000 words a week will give anyone a novel every two years without even trying hard.  Writing just over 1,000 words every two days isn't much more difficult, until I paused to consider just how many words I'm already writing in the average week.

• The average Rant is 750 words.
• The average Anomaly so far is over 1,250 words.

With 2,000 words a week in the bucket, I have to then account for the fact that my average email is 100 words and I send something like 3-5 an hour, which is just over 3,000 words right there.  17,000 words a week all told, just shy of 70,000 words every month just as part of my regular job.  And I wonder why I hate trying to write after 5:00.

Adding another 17,000 words a month is equivalent to growing a new week.  It means putting another work window in the middle of a cool-down period, which you'd much rather be unwinding from the stress of the day.  It's a part-time job unto itself, except the only chance of seeing a paycheck comes long after you're finished, just as the ramen stores are running low.

The trouble then becomes motivating yourself to write.  It's much like starting an exercise regimen:  yes, you should do it; no, it's not that painful; yes, it's worse the longer you put it off; and yes, Soul Calibur does seem like a much better use of your evening.  Before we get to the "how" on that, we need to examine the "why."

Know why you're writing when you start.  It may be the only thing that gets you over the hump into the middle of any writing project when you start to question the need to go further.  If you're writing to remind yourself how to put words together, stopping in the middle may not be a tragedy, but if you're hope is to see your name on a shelf at Barnes & Noble, you have a lot of work between here and there.

Thinking of writing like work may work for some people, but to many of us the reason to go to the office is the paycheck.  Writing for the money is like stripping to get over your stage fright:  there are far easier ways of going about it; a fact you're going to realize just a little too late.

Writing for the art of it will sustain a number of potential authors for many years.  Unfortunately, it also tends to lend towards authors in love with their own would-be legacy, unwilling to pen anything they feel falls shy of their ludicrous expectations.  It can be crippling to any writer early in the game.  Musicians practice the same meaningless gesture thousands of times before ever playing anything that sounds even vaguely like music.  Writing is the same way.  Start small.

Writing to entertain may be the most sustainable model, although I imagine it will always receive criticism from the second sort.  If you want to make people smile, laugh, cry and feel, then you have a good chance at keeping your writing going purely for the enjoyment of it.  There's nothing quite like looking back over 4,000 words and chuckling at your own dialogue.  Entertainment makes a wonderful reward, especially for an early writer.  Write something you'd want to read, and I guarantee you you won't be the only one.

Once you have the goal in mind, write it down as one simple phrase.  "The point is to make them laugh."  "Leave them guessing till the end."  "I want their heart racing just reading this."  Whatever your goal, put it on a sticky note and staple it to your writing space (if you have cats, consider taping it down.  I speak from experience).  Any time you get lost in the middle of a scene or you feel like you're typing in a bowl full of tar, glance up and remind yourself the point you're going for.

But the "why" isn't everything.  Even in a good novel, there are pieces that are necessary but unfun to write.  They're the backbreaking hurdle that topples far too many would-be writers:  the long exposition or calming down-time between the exciting elements of the story at large.  If you're a short-story author, you may never have seen these strange phenomena, but novel writers can choke down dozens in a single book.

When you hit the points you need but don't want, adjust your scale.  Count off each sentence as a tiny win.  Reward yourself for paragraphs rather than pages until you're through the rough patch.  Yes, it will make the stretch take about five times as long, but if you trust yourself to swallow it whole you can lose a lot more time putting off the attempt.  There's an old line about eating a whale one bite at a time.  This is a little more like liver and onions when you're six.  And no, there is no "feed it to the dog" option.  Just pinch your nose and get started.  It'll be over before you know it.

And never forget why you sat down to eat this whale in the first place.

Novel, in G minor

I have a lot of respect for high school English teachers.  It takes superhuman persistence to try and express the value of Shakespeare to a crop of 16-year-olds who can't stop laughing at his "gay neck brace."  And yet for as much as I love these brave bastions of educational might, I can't help but wonder if they're missing the point.

The sheer number of people reaching college age and beyond with no understanding of how to write can't be chalked up entirely to an era of text messaging.  There's a fundamental piece to constructing a story in a way such that someone other than you can access it that has been missing from far too many classrooms for the last decade or more.  With all the focus on either playwrights or professional writing, it's no wonder so few people see the glaring, chalkboard-scraping flaws in the works of modern phenoms like Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.

I know that there are still positions out there where a five-paragraph argumentative statement is a valuable salvo in the war to keep your job, but realistically most professional writing these days is done through email, with all the amorphous edges and conversational tone that medium entails.  Any more advanced professional documentation, like grant proposals and research papers, require so specialized a format that they're covered in the college-level curriculum of the fields to which they apply.

Likewise, while I know that the five-act play is still not only a reality but a cultural mainstay, the range of applicable careers for its skillset falls more in line with theatre than English class.  Leave the Drama majors to their vague stage directions, writers need to know how to properly describe a scene with more poetry than "go to table, pick up dagger." 

The only stylistic writing I recall from four years of high school English is the one form that seems sensible to tackle in a single semester:  short stories.  It gives hopeful writers exposure to character building, narrative description and forming the pieces of the literary rollercoaster that is their tale of adventure.  But there's a problem:  short stories are weird.

If you've never written a novel, you may not quite see at first what's so different about a short story and a full-length work other than the word count.  In truth, there is such a shift in form that it's hard to recognize one from the other.  It's as different as reading a play:  the missing pieces between the dialog constitute the majority of almost any work of fiction.  Like broth in a stew, they're the essential pieces that flavor the interactions as a whole.  If the broth tastes like bathwater, it doesn't matter how tasty the meat was when it went in.

In an effort to stop making myself hungry, let me change analogies:  writing short stories as an introduction to novel writing is a lot like teaching someone to play the drumset by handing them a gong.  It's a percussion instrument, sure, and it makes noise when you hit it with a stick, but the similarities end there.  For one thing, you only have one thing to focus on, but you also have to hit it a completely different way.  In reality, all learning to play the gong teaches you about a drumset is how to hit a thing to make it make noise, and you probably knew how to do that already.

The structure of a novel involves dozens or even hundreds of rises and falls between the movements of the plot, all in turn traveling along a larger curve as it crests its way to the climax.  That isn't to say that short stories are easier (when you only have a gong to play with, it's a lot harder to get all the different sounds out of it that you want you audience to hear), but the two formats are so different that one doesn't suffice in teaching you how to use the other.

Short stories begin in the middle.  You have enough time to introduce a handful of characters halfway through there situations, either on the cusp of or smack in the middle of the core conflict of the work.  From there, it's all action (from a literary perspective) to the end, with just enough time to set up a three-part pattern before you run out of word count.  If you listen to a rock song, the pattern is similar:

intro, verse, verse, bridge, key change, verse

You create a pattern with the first two verses so that the audience settles into the way things are, and tacetly assume that this is the way they always have been, or always will be.  The bridge comes in sideways and knocks the main character entirely off his course.  He then comes back to the verse with the proper key change to denote that the character has grown, but hasn't lost who he was in the process.  With only three minutes to kill, there isn't much room for anything else.

A novel is more like a concerto.  If you don't know what I mean, go to YouTube and search for "Bach."  Watch for a moment and you may start to see the key difference.  There isn't one pattern created, but many, and they begin to interrupt each other.  Four minutes in, new patterns are still being introduced to the work as a whole, only to merge with and change the other patterns as the pieces rises towards its climax.

It's no different with parts of a novel.  Several veins of plot all intersect, criss-cross, or even seem unrelated as the new elements are introduced and begin to collide, but out of it all a beautiful harmony is formed.  The complexity alone becomes a thing to marvel, to say nothing of the music that goes with it.  It's easy to sit back and listen to a three-movement piece in about 8 to 10 minutes and feel the full depth of the composer's intentions, yet no one once told me how similar it was to trying to craft a work of literary wonder.

Even the dreaded five-paragraph essay fits the same unified model.  Five paragraphs, five acts, five movements.  Literature, theatre, music.  Three fields, one common vein:  getting a rich emotional experience out to an audience you've never met by taking them on a pre-designed rollercoaster. 

Here's a different approach:  novels are a science.  It doesn't matter which science you follow, there's an expression of it that fits the growth and shaping of a novel.

Physics:  Novels focus on interactions.  All spare matter and energy must be accounted for.  It's in the small pieces that are forgotten that we often learn the most about our world, when they begin affecting things outside the range of our initial experiment.  More than that, momentum tells us that even small things can be forces of great change if they get even speed behind them. 

Chemistry:  Even stable elements can become explosive under the right conditions.  Put characters together in the wrong amounts and things start to change, drastically at times.  If the elements won't react on their own, introduce heat to the reaction, add energy to the mixture, or introduce a catalyst.  Keep going until something starts smoking.  Just remember to clean up the lab when you're done.

Biology:  Living things adapt to changes in their environment.  Anything tough enough to survive new challenges will grow to shape itself around them.  Evolution takes time, and you don't always get it right on the first mutation, but sooner or later life finds a way.

Atomic matter:  Your character is like an electron:  he's somewhere in this general cloud about 90% of the time (we think).  We know he's coming around again, and that he's going to keep orbiting the same general point, but what shape that path is going to take is anybody's guess.  In the end, he's just waiting for some positively charged ion to wander by so that he can set up a nice paired orbit and become a happy little atom.

I could go on, but I think I'm wandering into established turf.

Returning to my original point, English teachers might be better served educating their students on the common veins in the various curriculae.  If you understand how to interpret a work of fiction from six different angles, chances are that one of them will work for you.

That, and it gives writers the excuse to dress up in lab coats for a change.  Nothing says "I love my copy editor" like holding a manuscript over a Bunsen burner.  Or making a Kindle live up to its name...

How to Write a Novel Without Trying

A brief outlining of my planned and future works left me with one very present notion:  I will be writing forever.

At my current age (just south of 30), I already have enough planned works to keep me writing until I'm 51, which does not account for marriage, children, and the various other life moments that tend to take precedence over penmanship, nor does it account for more than 20 years of continued experience and the neverending imagination which has led to so many topical options in the first place.  That is to say, my creativity has entered something of a cycle of perpetual motion.

The List, such as it is (tentative titles, all):

• The Order
• Dawnwatcher (fantasy epic)
• Gunner 7: Final edition
• The Rules (romantic comedy)
• Shinigami Blues II
• The Empty West:  Book III
• Darcy's (three intertwined stories)
• Letters to Marianna (dark Elizabethan romance)
• The Furies (modern sci-fi adventure)
• Persephone's Return: Book I (future sci-fi adventure)
• Persephone's Return: Book II
• Persephone's Return: Book III

That said, I both aim to have children and to have enough of these ideas out of my head by the time I'm 40 to make room for 10 years' worth of inspirations, which leaves me very much in need of a new strategy.  Cranking out a new novel every two years with more than half the process being staring at a blank screen for half an hour before deciding to do something else is simply not a sustainable model in the long-term.

So, the plan is thus:  every week of every month of every year, I will write at minimum 1,000 words.  In addition, I will be aiming to meet the NaNoWriMo challenge each year. I will, however, except a total of 30,000 words instead of the typical 50,000 pending the following condition:  June is now mini-November, meaning that I will be partaking of two Writing Months each year.

Running the math, I'm left with 44,000 words from the weekly devotion plus (at minimum) 60,000 words from the paired NaNo's, producing over 100,000 words per yer, which allows me to meet just about any publisher's minimums.  Any novel falling shy of 100,000 words will be edited using the remaining word count time.  I anticipate at least a few of these to run over, but the overall model is maintained:  instead of a novel ever two and a half years, I can put out most novels in a year, fully functional, and the larger projects in two years or less.

For any potential writers out there who can't seem to get an idea off the ground, I highly recommend this model.  1,000 words to the average person is about 2-3 hours of writing.  That's less than1.5% of your week.  You likely spend as much time reading Digg, Facebook, or various random blog postings :)  Hold yourself to 1,000 words a week and you'll have 50,000 words at the end of every year.  It's not as grueling as the NaNoWriMo challenge.  Not only will you not risk losing friends, it's likely they won't even notice you're writing until the work is complete.

If what you're having trouble with is forming your idea, stay tuned:  next week I plan on discussing the nature of the novel idea through the eyes of a number of other more familiar media.  It turns out even writers have a Circle of Fifths, and I'm not referring to the drinks around the table :)

Moving - Updates and the New Mission

Welcome to the new home of the random ramblings of Andy Click, a part-time author with aspirations of publication.  If you're curious about where this all began, follow the "Old Blog Archives" link to the old LiveJournal blog where it all started.

I've been writing for almost exactly ten years now, with four completed works and a fifth in its final four months of gestation.  I'm proud to say I have met the NaNoWriMo challenge (November 2008, "Shinigami Blues"), and plan to do so again (hopefully this year, despite my earlier intentions to the contrary).

The current work is called "The Order," a prequel to Gunner 7, a book I can best describe as a sci-fi western, which is always fun to say.  Other genre buzzwords like "post-apocalyptic," "dystopia," and "steampunk" vaguely apply.  The ten-second synopsis is that a virus has killed off a large percentage of our vast populace, and cut off the remaining few into pockets of clean air and water, one of which happens to be the middle of a god-awful desert where our hero, the last devoted bastion of a coalition formed to end the violence of the few remaining gunslingers, works to collect and melt down the only remnant firearms still floating free in their tiny bubble of life.

Despite the seeming intentions of the earlier portion of the work, Gunner 7 was never meant to speak against gun ownership, or to depict all gun owners as violent.  In fact, the contrast of the main character as less anti-hero and more obsessed jerkface was intended to prove that violence is violence regardless of the weapon.  Gunner 7 is due for one final rewrite in the middle of next year, but we'll get to that in a moment.

The Order was intended to talk about the days before, the coalition the main character (Geno) belonged to, and the days when they still believed they were doing the right thing.  It helps to humanize the main character, further explain the world inside the "bubble" of the New Southwest, and explain the events which led to the world as it is now.

I recently realized that writing an entire 250-page novel in medias res was actually a terrible idea that would lead to much confusion and loss of emotional impact, which is to say, I've given myself about 150 pages more to write within the span of the remainder of this year.  But hey, that's what November is for.

Once it's done, I'll have the first two pieces in the eventual trilogy I'm thinking of naming "The Empty West," with a third title pending within the next five years that will describe the coming of the end for the virus plaguing mankind and the re-opening of the world into a large and scary place again.

With The Order to be out in print this coming January, I hope to then wrap up Gunner 7 by midsummer with all the new changes, in time to start a new fantasy epic called "Dawnwatcher" in November of 2011.  Given the size, I don't expect to finish it before 2014, but I'm hoping it will be well worth it.  Of everything I've written and currently have planned to write, Dawnwatcher is the one I'm most proud of already (with Shinigami Blues being a very close second).

Anyhoo, that's the plan for now.  I'll be posting updates as I get The Order closer and closer to complete, with previews of new scenes and the like as they come.