Beautiful Books

Most people, when walking into my apartment, would say that I collect books. But is that true? To me, a "collection" implies items that are purchased to be displayed, but not to be used. Porcelain figurines would be a collection. Stamps are a collection. Action figures in their original packaging are a collection.

Books can be a collection too, if they're put up on a shelf and never touched. When they're opened and read and enjoyed, they become a library. For the most part, my books form a library. I buy the books I want to read, and then I read them. Whether or not they're ever opened again, I have read them, and that can never be taken away.

There are exceptions, however. Every so often, I visit a used bookstore, like the Strand, and I see a Beautiful Book. They are classics, of course. They are always hardcover, and often bound in leather. Invariably they have gold leaf, and not just to form the lettering. They are decorated, designed to be beautiful as well as functional. I open the cover, and discover that they are on sale for the price of a paperback. They come home with me.

Problem is, they become part of my collection, not my library. It's not that I bought them without the intention of ever reading them. At some point in the indeterminate future, I tell myself, I will read them. But the problem with the indeterminate future is that it remains the future no matter how much time advances. And so these Beautiful Books sit upon my shelves, making collections of dust of their own.

So in 2011, I have made a resolution to add these books to my library. I have selected twelve in particular, and over the next twelve months, I will plumb their secrets and make them my own. They are:

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding
• The Robe, by Lloyd C. Douglas
• The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens
• The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare
• King Solomon's Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
• The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Stories from Rudyard Kipling, by Rudyard Kipling
• Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
• The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
• Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Mutiny on the Bounty, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
• The Red Badge of Courage and Other Selected Stories, by Stephen Crane

Each month, I will select one of these books and read it. As of yet, the order is undetermined, but I plan to start small and work my way up. Tom Jones is the largest by far, and I plan to tackle that at some point over the summer, perhaps in July or August. I will also save one of the shorter volumes for next December, since time is always short around Christmas.

If the experiment goes well, I may continue it. These are not the only books I have collected but never read. I'm not sure how long it would take to go through all of them, but it seems to be a worthy experiment nonetheless.

The Gush

I do the bulk of my writing in the morning, with the occasional bout at lunch if work permits. I did both of these today. So why am I also working now, in the evening?

I'd say it's the post-slog gush. (And let's face it, that's just fun to say.) When the hose is kinked and you let it go, it bursts out with more than the usual flow. And it wasn't but a few days ago that I was all slogged up. Now, I'm finally getting to a cool scene that I've really wanted to write, so I'm pushing through to get there.

Who knows? I may even write some tomorrow. On a Saturday.

The Slog

Some scenes just won't die. It's not that they're bad scenes, but for whatever reason, they're just hard to write. Every word is an effort, and it feels like they'll never, ever, ever end.

They do end, but on one condition--you have to keep writing them. The temptation to stop, to get away from the feeling of inadequacy, can be very strong. But it's better on the other side of the scene.

Now, I've got to stop using this blog post to put off writing the end of my own tar pit of a scene.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 30/30

It looks like my word count for November will be around 20,000 words. In that respect, I "lost" NaNoWriMo. I could think about that.

Or I could think about how I'm 80 pages further along in my novel. That a whole big swath of story that didn't exist before this month is now on paper. That I've made new personal discoveries about the craft of writing, and begun to apply them to my work. That I've maintained a working writing routine for two months. That I've drunk a whooooole lot of coffee.

Instead, I plan to think about next month. My goal is a very simple 30,000 words. An improvement on this month, but a reasonable one around the holidays. The minute I hit that 30,000 mark, I'll be ordering Dr. No on Blu-Ray. And for a bonus, if I manage to exceed my goal by 10k, I'll throw in a P.G. Wodehouse book. (How about a book for each 10k I go over?)

The bribes will be fun, but they're not the reason I write. I've got 167k words that prove that. I write because I love it, and that's why I get up at 5am even when it sucks.

Day 100

Today, I am about to start my 100th day of writing Bryony's Market. That's 100 days of writing, not 100 days since I started. If I count the number of days since I actually began the story, we're looking at... carry the one... 789 days. (That's not a very good record, but that's not my point.)

The point is what it is possible to accomplish in a little more than three months of daily effort. And not a great deal of daily effort. Each day gets me a little bit further than I was the day before, until suddenly, I'm more than 160k down the road.

I look forward to a time that I no longer doubt that I'm making progress, when I write for the sake of writing, and I don't have to worry about pushing myself past the questioning voice that asks if I'm really accomplishing anything. And I think the best way of getting past that voice is one day at a time.

So now, back to the story.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 27/30

So here's my plan. Starting in December, I'm going to set a monthly writing goal for each month, no less than 30,000 words. That's a minimum of 1k a day (give or take). If I meet the goal, I buy myself a James Bond movie on Blu-Ray.

That will keep me going for 22 months (or 23, depending on how you count). It appeals to the collector in me, and gives me a tangible goal to work towards, more than simple word count.

As far as how I calculate the goal, that will depend. Chances are, I'll leave weekends and any special/travel days blank, and distribute the 30k among the rest. If my schedule looks too light, I might up the requirement by 5k or so. The point is not really to challenge myself with a high word count, but rather to challenge myself to continue writing consistently.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 24/30

Why November?

Seriously, NaNoWriMo, why November? Why not September? June? Even March? Why a month with a four day weekend where, unlike Memorial Day or Labor Day or Fourth of July, you're actually expected to spend time with your family? A month with almost inevitable travel. A month, in short, probably less suited to writing than any other. (Except Christmas. Please don't change it to December.)

I suppose from another point of view, it might be perfect. Thanksgiving could make the month perfect, by offering a large portion of time off right at the end of the month, time enough to get caught up. But not for me, and not (I believe) for anyone who does more with their time off than lock themselves in a room.

Perhaps it's because my writing comes from a place of routine. I work best when I have week after week of uninterrupted routine. Holidays disrupt that routine, and I get less done.

I therefore declare that I will be doing my own writing months. ShaNoWriMo, if you will. Each will have its own specific goals, and its own specific reward for finishing.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 22/30

I can definitely feel the holiday slowdown sapping away my energy. That's when there are so many exceptions to your normal schedule that there's pretty much no normal schedule left. This week is a great example of that, where today is really my own day to keep to a normal schedule. Tomorrow morning starts normal, and ends up with a flight back home.

In a way, I've made myself a slave to the normal schedule. Lately, my writing has been a weekday activity, with no progress whatsoever on the weekends. Is that a good or a bad thing? You could say I'm losing momentum. Or, you could say I'm recharging for the next week. So long as I stick to my schedule, I don't think it matters.

But of course, that's in a week with a normal schedule.

For the next week, I need to figure out a way to make writing part of the exception. That means making an effort to write when I don't feel like it, working the activity into the day in an unaccustomed place. Because if I go a whole week without making progress, I really will lose momentum. I've been down that road before, and it leads to October 1st, 2011, with me swearing that I'm really going to finish this time, honest I am.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 19/30

I've always had a hard time writing happy moments. It's not that I don't know how to describe them, but more that I don't know how to make them interesting. I think in order to write a happy moment for a character, the audience must already be heavily invested in the character. We have to want them to be happy.

Imagine reading a book where the main character wakes up in a great mood, eats a tasty breakfast, and has a quick, traffic-free drive to work or school, where he is extremely popular and well-respected. After a few hours, his boss gives him the rest of the day off, so he drives to the beach with the top down in his convertible, and... well, you get the idea.

Now, imagine that this character found out a few weeks before that he has cancer, and although he's going to be starting chemotherapy, there's only a small chance of surviving. This is the last day before he goes into chemo, and he is determined to squeeze every little bit of joy out of the day as possible.

Suddenly, the happy scene becomes significant. Presumably, you've already had the chance to identify with this guy earlier in the story, and you want him to get the good stuff. And you know that the good stuff won't be forever. This creates drama even in the midst of the happy.

A good writer has to torture his characters. And one of the best forms of torture is to give them everything they want, then take it away.

By the way, I'm about to start chapter 42. That is the Answer.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 18/30

I've divided up my index card stack into multiple stacks. They're just getting too big to stand alone. Perhaps once I'm completely done with Book 1, I'll join them up and see how long it is. I like the idea of the book tumbling down the stairs and coming to rest at the bottom with a good six feet still to extend.

I'm on the cusp of finishing one chapter, and I'll be starting the next one today.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 17/30

All day yesterday, I was desperate to be writing, but this morning, the enormity of the task ahead feels more daunting. It's time to scale back my point of view from the wide, holistic approach I had yesterday to a more focused, scene-specific view. Yesterday I was the architect, and today I'm the bricklayer. The architect resents having to get his hands dirty, but the bricklayer picks up a brick and gets to work. Neither could function without the other.

I'm starting to understand why big, successful mainstream authors get ghostwriters. They get to be the architect, and never have to build.

But you know, I don't want to do that kind of writing. It's too generic. I want my writing to be distinctive. So maybe instead of a bricklayer, I'm an artisan. A craftsman.

That's what I'm telling myself right now, at least. I'm gonna go tote some bricks.

The State of the Novel, mid-November 2010

Sometimes in writing a story, you're the construction worker, laying brick on narrative brick. Other days, you're the architect, whose task it is to figure out where all the parts need to go to make a completed structure.

Today was an architecture day, and although I didn't get any actual writing done this morning, I can't help but feel like I made significant progress.

I have finished my plan for Book 1. Not just the arcs, or the main story beats I need to hit, but a serious scene-by-scene plan. There are a total of 106 scenes, of which I have currently finished 70. That's approximately 2/3 of the way done.

At my current rate of progress, that means I should have the whole thing finished in (gulp) another forty or fifty days.

Now, I should probably take a step back and define what I mean by the whole thing. As this story has grown, the scope of it has widened, and certain events that at first I considered to be "backstory" are now full-blown revelations, and major movers of plot. As a result, a lot more has to happen to get to the ending I've been planning all along.

The current volume will end once I've written another 36 scenes. The way that usually divides up, we're talking another 18-20 chapters, probably. In terms of word count, maybe 250k. As a point of reference, most epic fantasy lives in the 200k - 300k range, with the occasional giant tome around 400k+. So I'll be in good company, length-wise.

After that, I'll be taking a short break from Bryony. I have a few other projects I want to work on, or finish, and the end of a volume is a good place to pause. The next stage will be some good heavy plotting. So far, I have stick figures drawn for the next two volumes of a proposed trilogy. I need to turn those stick figures into skeletons, then turn part of that skeleton into flesh and blood. (That is to say, I need to take the sketches of events that I have and build up my scene structure, then heavily develop and write the scenes in the early part of the novel.)

And so the process goes on. I hesitate to set any dates because I've proven myself wrong so many times before. But this time feels different.

January 31st, 2011: Completion of Volume 1
February-March 2011: Other projects
April 2011: Plotting and development of Volume 2
April 2011 - July 2011: Volume 2, Part 1
August 2011 - September 2011: Other Projects
October 2011 - December 2011: Volume 2, Part 2
January 2012 - February 2012: Other Projects
March 2012 - May 2012: Volume 2, Part 3

Come back in 18 months and see how I did!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 16/30

Funny how things work. As soon as I decide I don't care about word count, I whip out 2,020 words in a day. Go figure.

The first thing I did this morning was detach my big stack of index cards, after a point one and a half scenes from now. There are a few more things that have to happen before I get to that point, and those scenes need to get added in. So part one, plan out the next week or two of writing.

This brings up a point that I occasionally find frustrating about my writing methodology. Early on, my index cards pretty much have a one card, one scene ratio. Later on, as I develop the story more, I realize that I need more connective tissue to hold them together, so I wind up adding in extra cards. Sometimes, it feels like I'm not making progress, just adding more and more new cards in between. It's not true, but the feeling is one I have to be aware of, so I can deal with it.

After the cards, I'm going to see if I can finish up this chapter. I've done half up to this point, and I'm happy with what I've written. Let's see if I can do a second half to match the first.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 15/30

I realized something this morning, while taking a look at my writing statistics. I didn't feel like writing.

I mean, I got up already, so I'm going to do it. But that big gap between my current word count and the NaNoWriMo goal feels insurmountable. This is supposed to be the halfway point, after all, and I'm barely halfway to halfway.

But you know what? Since I started daily writing again back in October, I've done 43k words. That's nothing to sneeze at, even in more than a month. At my current rate of progress, I'm set to top 55k by the end of this month. I'm making good, steady progress. Why should I feel bad about that?

And so, I retooled all my writing statistics with my own goals. Not the huge, 2,700 word-a-day goals that I would need to maintain to succeed in NaNoWriMo around work and the holidays. A normal, 1,689 word goal for normal days, 500 for weekends, and 0 for days that I'm traveling or otherwise tied up.

That makes my goal for the month just over 30k. And what's wrong with that? Not a damn thing. It's a good, solid chunk of writing, 100 pages.

I'm still a little behind, but not by 12,000 words. I'm behind by 6,000, and that I can overcome.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 12/30

Visions of the future. That's what I got for Bryony yesterday. As I've stated before, I know where the story is going, could pretty much write the final couple of scenes right now. But if I had to write a summary of the entire story, it would be very detail-heavy at the front, and more and more general toward the end.

That's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned. Part of the fun of the writing process is the creativity that comes along with the process of composition. As I write, I'm taking those general statements and turning them into full-blown narrative, discovering new aspects to the story along the way.

But sometimes, a pulse of creativity runs down the entire length of the story, and that's what happened yesterday. I can't claim that I got a lot of words down, but I did achieve a new clarity of vision that will make what I write from here on out that much better.

I also know my stopping place. Not a permanent one, but a place where I'm going to step away from Bryony for a time and work on something else. I'll need to charge up my Bryony battery (batteryony?), and I think the best way to do that is to keep writing--but to write something else. I'm thinking, though, that my stopping place is easily months away. And when I'm done, I should have a complete "chunk" of story, something with a defined beginning, middle, and end. Not the whole story, but a good part of it.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 11/30

Willpower is what you call getting up at 5am after a 19 hour day that started in Nova Scotia. But, as I've read online, you only have a limited amount of willpower to go around in a day. So if I gorge on cheesecake tonight, it's not my fault. I used all the willpower up.

Lately, I've been drifting a bit from my outline. Not a lot, but I've anticipated the need for a scene here and there that was not in my index cards. I need to go through and add those cards in at some point, because the visual impact of the colors for each POV character is a great way to balance things, and if I don't keep them synced, I lose out on that advantage.

I look forward to resting up over the weekend. And maybe getting caught up too!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 10/30

Argleblurrhhhhhhhhhhhh*

(*Transation: I got up at 3:30 am, and that's Nova Scotia time, to catch a flight back to New York, where I'll do a full day of work before getting to come home. I'm not sure how much writing I'll get done today. Also, argleblurrhhhhhhhhhhhh.)

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 9/30

Time to go write in a foreign Starbucks. I wonder if my card will still work?

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 8/30

I think it's safe to say I'm below target. The road ahead is steep, but perhaps not insurmountable.

Today, I'll be traveling. Airports and airplanes are great for writing in. I'm making sure to copy my work off the external drive, though, because those are not allowed in airplanes. (If you used one, then the terrorists would win.)

Tomorrow and Wednesday might be tough for writing, though. Well, if I can discipline myself adequately, tomorrow won't be too bad. I'm not due to be picked up from the hotel until 8:30, which means that a 5am wakeup will give me plenty of time to write. The time change between Eastern and Atlantic time is inconsequential since we just got off of Daylight Savings Time, and the two should cancel each other out. Wednesday, we have an early, early morning flight, so any writing I do will have to be in the airport or the plane.

I think what I've learned from all of this is that I write better in a routine than I do out of one. I get up, I come to Starbucks, I write. Take me outside of that pattern, though, and I'm likely to avoid writing.

No excuses today, though!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 7/30

Well, I'm on budget for today. Goose egg! Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll have a chance to catch up.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 6/30

It's Board Games in Bohemia 2! Which means I wrote less than 200 words today. But that's okay, because I had budgeted nothing for this weekend.

Now I'm getting back to hanging out with friends, which is the whole point of all that. Until tomorrow!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 5/30

5/30 = 1/6 = 16.7% = 8,333 words

Not there yet. But not so far behind, either.

Yesterday, I compared NaNoWriMo to a fad diet. It asks a lot of you, making you change your lifestyle significantly to accommodate it. But it also comes with an end date, a specific, short-term goal. And you measure it by the numbers... not the quality.

What both of these do is ask you to make room in your life for a new behavior. But it also requires a level of energy and dedication that is difficult to maintain afterward.

What happens to all the crash writers on December 1? Do they gain back all that wasted time that they lost?

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 4/30

After staying up to 1am to finish, the giant millstone of awesome reading is finally off my neck. And by "finally" I mean "approximately 30 hours after I bought it. I don't think I could have finished the audiobook in that time if I read straight through.

Towers of Midnight was great, and I assuaged my writing conscious by trying to analyze, when I remembered to do so, the way he was writing. I think I did learn, although mostly what I learned is that I need to do more close analysis of the writing in the books I like.

I also decided that I want to write the kind of books that cost you sleep. A book like that kept me up until past midnight, but the desire to write one is what got me up at 5am on the morning after.

Time to play catch up!

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 3/30

Yesterday was another good, productive day. But I'm not sure I can say the same about today. Since yesterday afternoon, I've been reading Towers of Midnight, the newest and penultimate book in the Wheel of Time series. It has been quite the distraction, and my writing this morning has suffered for it.

There are two ways to deal with a distraction--ignore it or remove it. This one is kind of hard to ignore, and removing it means finishing the book. I've made a deal with myself, to allow myself to read so long as I do my writing for the day, but it's hard to switch back and forth like that.

I suppose there will always be distractions in life. If this one is more acute than others, well, it won't be forever.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 2/30

I did well yesterday, far exceeding my usual 1,689, and even topping my weekday goal of 2,421 words.

So how much did my first day get me? 5%. It's a bit of a sobering thought. It's not enough to do stellar work one day. You have to do work every day. In fact, I think doing a little bit every day is better than a huge push of huge output.

I've averaged about 70k words per year on my novel, writing over a six week period each time. That averages out to 192 words a day. That's almost nothing. I can totally write 500 words even on a busy day. And if I'd done that, I'd be at 365k right now.

The point is, I should stop writing this blog post and actually accomplish something. Every little bit helps.

NaNoWriMo 2010, Day 1/30

50,000 words in thirty days. Totally doable. I've done it before, although never during the specific thirty days of November. I've come close the past two years, but this time, I think I'll manage it.

It won't be easy. There are several weekends in which my writing will be severely curtailed, not to mention two trips during the month, one international. (But hey, isn't that what laptops and airports are for?)

Since I've once again been coming to Starbucks in the morning to write for over a month now, this kind of just feels like another day of writing. Except now, the clock is ticking. Better get to work.

The Drama of Boredom

I was recently presented with a challenge--write a scene about a character's boredom, but make it interesting for the reader.

The construction of this scene took longer than usual, because I had to proceed very, very carefully. In a normal scene, you can use the interesting stuff that's going on, and the narrator's engagement in it, to keep the scene moving. But what happens when the narrator is bored out of her mind?

This challenge made me consider in greater detail what it takes to make an interesting scene in the first place. First and foremost, I believe that comes through character--the reader must be engaged in what the character is experiencing.

Secondly, the reader must enjoy learning about whatever new information is being presented in the scene. Let me state for the record that "enjoy" doesn't necessarily mean that they'll like it. The reader may be horrified by what they learn, but they are drawn to find out more. Whatever happens in the scene has to scratch that itch.

Finally, the scene must in some way address the character's goals. That's not the way real life works, but it's the way a story works. There are lots of things that happen in real life that never make their way into fiction because it has no relevance to the story. So how does this scene bring the character closer to, or further away, from the goal?

I will now take the discussion out of the abstract and into the concrete. In this particular scene, Bryony was waiting. She thought she was going to be trained as an attendant, but instead, she's just sitting in a room getting more and more restless. I'm going to now describe how I attempted to address the three points above.

At this point in the novel, if the character isn't engaged in Bryony and what she wants, then I doubt they're still reading. I entered into the scene after a tense emotional moment, so hopefully the reader sympathizes with her and is willing to want what she wants. Okay, good, we've got them hooked.

Next, the new information. Here, I was handicapped because Bryony was seeing for the first time a place that we, as the reader, had visited before. The information was not entirely new. I included some reminders of what the place was like, in case it had been forgotten, then gave some more detail. Although I touched on the setting, I tried to spend more time with the people. I also attempted to demonstrate how Bryony was dealing with her boredom by describing her visual tour of the room. (In other words, working in some character beats to strengthen it.)

As for the goals, I needed Bryony to come to a new realization of what it meant to train as an attendant. I did that through the introduction of Cohenrad. He is an established character, but one that has been offscreen for a while. Bryony had never met him, but I needed to forge that connection for later on. I used him to convey to Bryony, and also to the reader, the appropriate information.

However, I didn't want to turn Cohenrad into a puppet, spouting exposition. I made sure to include Bryony's reaction to Cohenrad, and his reactions to her, as these first impressions will form the basis of their relationship. I tried to make the exposition come as naturally as possible.

If I had to judge my success, I'd say I got about a 3 out of 5. When I revised, I'll want to make Bryony's desires clearer, so that the drama of her boredom is more sharply defined. It was definitely a slow scene, but there's not much I could do about that. We'll just have to see if the next few scenes can build some more momentum.

Repeated Phrases are Repeated

Something I've been struggling with lately is the fear that all of my writing sounds alike. I'll be reviewing something I've written earlier, and suddenly I realize that I used the precise same phraseology to describe two similar scenes. I didn't know I was doing it at the time... in both instances, I felt that the description was new and creative.

That's scary, because it calls into question absolutely everything I've written. Am I repeating myself?

Have I already posted about this?

Part of the problem is a language limitation. There are only so many words in the English language. Even with our huge array of synonyms, not every word with a given meaning is appropriate in every context. Despite our vast store of words with the same meaning, some lexical items that bear an equivalent significance are not fitting in all places.

See?

What I'm telling myself, and I think it's true, is that the problem is one of revision, not composition. If I find that I have written a scene using language similar to one that came before, I'll change it. If it's still too similar, then I'll approach the scene from a different angle. Then the temptation to use the same language won't be as great.

And above all, my tendency to repeat myself comes with a bit of comfort too. How many times have I wondered how the story would have come out if I hadn't stopped writing it at various points? Turns out, there's nothing magical about the way I did it the first time. Chances are, if I had it to do over again, it would come out the same.

OOW (Object-Oriented Writing)

Let me get a holla from all the programmers out there!



Actually, I don't know how many programmers are also writers. My instincts tell me not many, but my instincts have been wrong before. ("Heroes had a great first season... let me watch the next two!")

But for those of you who cross over, let me give you some truth. Good writing is object oriented.

First, what do I mean by that? Well, in programming terms, an "object" is a particular collection of data paired with what you can do with it. In essence, it is a self-contained capsule of programming that can be used by other programs in a predictable way. You can change the programming behind that object, but so long as it behaves the same to the programs that use it, it doesn't matter. Like I said, encapsulated.

It gets deeper than that. One object can be essentially a special case of another. We say that it inherits from the original class. If you change the original, you also change the classes that depend on it.

So what does this have to do with writing? It all comes down to good scene structure. A scene has to establish setting and point of view. (Think of that as declaring your local variables.) It must then introduce the conflict that the scene is about. The conflict is developed, comes to a brief climax, and then ends with a hook for the next scene. You could think of all of these things as methods that are defined for the Scene class.

But to achieve good writing, we can't just close off the whole scene so that nothing else can affect it. Otherwise, we've got a series of short vignettes, not a novel. A scene has to foreshadow future scenes, and to pay off previous ones. In order to make the novel hold together cohesively, you have to be aware of what you're foreshadowing and what you're paying off.

The reason you have to be aware of it is because of revisions. Let's say I've finished my novel, and I want to revise it. I get to a scene that needs to be rewritten. I rewrite it. And suddenly, the foreshadowing I used to set up later events just isn't there anymore.

In object-oriented terms, I changed the definition of the class, and now the old method and property calls don't work right anymore. Instead of changing the class definition, I really just want to make the code work better, while leaving all the structure in place.

In order to make a revised scene work, you have to understand precisely what it accomplishes in the overall narrative. Then, make sure the rewritten scene accomplishes the same goals.

No program, and no novel, works right the first time. Don't be afraid to debug.

Digital Hygiene

First of all, I'd like to commemorate my 255th post. If life were Zelda, that would be as many as I could do, because 255 is the largest number.

The real point of my post today is digital hygiene. You know how the bulk of your early childhood was spent learning how to keep yourself clean, the difference between number one and number two, the joys of napkins, etc? It's all hygiene, right? It's figuring out how to use the human body in the proper way.

Of course, different people may have different ideas about what constitutes proper, but in general, hygiene is there to keep you healthy, and to make it easy for you to get along with other hygienic individuals.

But the parents never taught us digital hygiene because it didn't exist. And you know, a lot of people from my parents' generation (my actual parents being exceptions) have terrible digital hygiene.

You've seen the symptoms. A desktop full of documents, so much you can't see the default Windows wallpaper behind it. 57 Windows updates waiting to install, and a Yahoo toolbar they don't remember installing on Internet Explorer. They were never taught how to clean up after themselves, so they don't.

Now, I'm not saying I have perfect digital hygiene. There is a folder on my desktop called "Desktop Documents." Whenever I'm too lazy to save something where it's supposed to go, I'll use my desktop. And then, when it starts to get too crowded, I'll just dump everything in that folder. I have no idea what's in there, but if I can't find something, that's a good place to start.

But for the most part, I keep myself digitally hygienic. Which brings me to writing, which is the whole point of this blog anyway.

If you're a writer, it is of supreme importance to keep good digital hygiene for your typed stories or other writing. For me, that means a directory by genre. Inside the Fiction folder, which is the largest by far, I have folders for each individual story or novel. They are arranged, not by name, but by date. Down at the bottom is a sad little folder called "Abandoned," where bad little stories go to die.

Within each story folder, I may have multiple copies of each story. I name each one with the current date in yyyymmdd format (so they sort chronologically, natch) and save each day's work separately. I cannot stress enough how important this is. I mean, c'mon. Haven't you ever written something, decided it was crap and rewrote it, and then started thinking that the original version was brilliant and you should never have gotten rid of it? Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but if you never save over your work, you'll never have to wonder.

For longer projects, like Bryony's Market, I have a folder called "Daily Work." Each day of writing is in its own file. I do this because it makes getting a word count for the day easier, and allows me to easily keep track of progress in a way that a single long file can't. I do copy and paste these into a "Combined" file, which I maintain for sending to interested friends, or for editing purposes. (And yes, with a different one for each day.)

I have a folder for notes, a folder for compilations, etc., etc. I do all of this because the organization makes it easier to find what I want when I want it. I'm keeping my digital house in order, and I think my writing is better for it.

The Experimental Film Scene

Every so often, I'll run across a scene that I have defined more by its effect than its content. I try not to do this, because that's when writing tends to get contrived. But sometimes, you just need something to happen. Something--but you're not sure what, just what it's supposed to accomplish.

I call this an "Experiment Film" scene, based from a line in the They Might Be Giants song of that name.

I already know the ending,
It's the part that makes your face implode.
I don't know what makes your face implode,
But that's the way the movie ends.

The scene that I was dreading two days ago was something of an Experimental Film. There's a lot of weight riding on this little scene, since it has to support motivations for a couple different characters moving forward. I knew what it had to do, but I didn't quite know how to carry it off.

And in reality, I don't think I quite managed it. All the pieces were there, but it lacks smoothness and consistency. I'm going to leave it behind and continue on with the story, secure in the knowledge that I can revise it later. Maybe when I do, it will make your face implode properly.