Note to self: think about book X

Forgot to say, I finally made myself start reading a book I've been assuring people I was going to read for 2-3 years now. Recently I even had to fork over a self-imposed fine of five bucks to a fellow writer for yet again failing to read it as promised.

So I finally started it, this book everybody's read and praised, and boy, does it suck. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm absolutely fascinated by it. Because the writer makes it work. Through sheer force of plot and structure, the story moves along pretty grippingly, even though if you look very closely, you can see that nothing's actually there. There isn't anything going on but people moving around from here to there, and some mysteries that aren't very interesting because who cares if they're solved or not?

But, wow. The structure completely hides all that; it misdirects the reader's attention and gives the impression of being a gripping, excitingly wild ride. I can see that it partly does so through the way it uses hooks, and also by the way it uses alternating narrators.

This is exactly what I need to figure out how to do for my former GN.

What's really got me super-zeroed in on it now, though, is realizing that one of the two POV characters has a negative goal. I think part of what covers that up is the structure and the constant updating and adding of hooks, but there's also an announced strategy. And here's where it gets even more interesting: the announced strategy makes no sense. But it doesn't matter, because it works anyway. You don't even notice it has no reason to be either a strategy or announced.*

The only reason I noticed any of this is because I have a plotting disability and was bored, reading. I can see how gripping the story is, but I'm not at all gripped. It's sort of like the little kid who can't enjoy a great magician's trick because he isn't sophisticated enough to understand that he's supposed to be following the hand gestures. Sometimes there are advantages to having humongous blind spots.

Sometime when I have a chance, I want to really dig into this, maybe even go through and make a list of every scene. I bet I will find that it's extremely screenplay-worthy, with every scene carefully designed and set like a stage, and with actors hitting their marks right as the curtains go up. I also bet that nearly every chapter will have a deliberately imposed ramp-up of a ticking clock, and there's something intriguing about the hooks, too--like, maybe there's at least one new one introduced in the body of the chapter, and then another, different hook hits hard at the end?

Also need to look at:

• Which hooks are external stuff happening and which are internally-driven emotional cliffhangers.

• How the chapters cut in and out to hide the relative passivity of one of the storylines.

• How a passive character is given the appearance of being an active one.

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, making note of transitions.

• Beginnings and ends of chapter, for cliffhangers (I think some are actually dropped and never followed up on. But I'm not even sure! This is great!).

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, as read sequentially rather than alternately. I'm interested to know what the author has chosen to skip as not-ramp-up-able enough. Because, you know, I think s/he was probably right, since the book works so well.

Forcing myself to finish this thing is going to be a chore. But I think I can learn a ton of stuff when I go back to it once it's read.



*Something that's come up in discussion with writer friends is this theory: An announced strategy doesn't have to really do anything in the story; as soon as the actual story gets started, the announced strategy can just disappear, and be naturally swallowed up in the bigger, stronger, "real" story without you having to deal with it. But here, it seems to me, the possibility presents itself that the announced strategy doesn't even necessarily have to arise from story. Which poses the question: exactly how far can you go with the artificial pasting on of stuff to keep your story moving?

Yesterday, very busy, but still got some work in--continued freewriting from secondary character's pov. Today was very productive; more freewriting led to a real scene. This scene marks the first solid foray into the middle of the book.

I also went ahead and moved some of my freewriting into the actual ms because that new scene would naturally lead to an explanation of the secondary character's backstory. I'm considering leaving the freewriting as is; in other words the ms would suddenly switch pov, tense and voice for this big chunk of backstory. Right now that seems less draggy than the lengthy in-scene conversation that'd be required to get in this same info. However, I'm probably wrong, and also it may turn out that the info needs to be chopped up and scattered around the ms. Will have to see.

I also had the thought that one of the pieces from chapter six would do a stronger story job later in the ms, but I'm not moving it yet.

Again, 2000+ words today, even with doctor visits and family stuff going on. Took a notepad and scribbled some word lists and other thoughts while in the waiting room.

Very productive writing day--2000 words, all freewriting from pov of secondary character on whom the book hinges. I never lost interest, for nearly 10 hours of writing. It starts in scene near the beginning of the book and goes through deeply and inch-by-inch via SC's pov, using second person present.

I really don't want to write the whole d@mn book out twice if I can avoid it*, so I hope I can get going enough to eventually start skipping around and just figuring out this guy during certain key points in the story. Not sure which points, just so long as I don't have to, like I said, write inch by deep inch through the whole novel twice (or g*d forbid, three times, for the sake of that third character who's so important, the antagonist).

I figure the type of freewriting I did today is interesting enough that if the book gets published, I can publish these pieces on a website as a supplement to the novel. It really is fascinating (to me, anyway) to get the same info from this other guy's view, with access to his secrets and his extremely unusual way of seeing the world.



*And I hope I didn't just jinx myself by saying that out loud.

Thinking about the Hobby Formerly Known as the Former GN. Glanced through it, feeling very dissatisfied. It's got a lot of purty writin'. To which I say: So what? I'll bet my dog could write purty, if I trained it to type.

I thought about why I want to write this ms--obviously I do, because I keep sticking with it even though it's just purty and nothing more. The reason I want to write it is because I'm annoyed and angry--but not super angry, just sort of smolderingly angry.

Then I thought about where the ms picks up and gets interesting--the places where it gets more than just "purty." It perks up and gets a spurt of energy in the places where my snarky smoldering annoyance slips into the third person narrative.

This story is set 3,000 years ago. The points I want to make are from today's perspective. I've tried to make those points staying in a 3,000 year-old POV, but every time I go through the usual process of getting the reader to come to their own conclusions by experiencing a sequence of events along with the MC, it clearly warps the ms. There's too big a gap between today's world and the world of the book.

If I look at what I have, I've got a ms where I've consistently taken my own snarky conclusions out and tried to make the reader "get" the same conclusions on their own. It's clear that this process is not working.

I think a big part of this is getting the right third person voice and understanding how present I need to be in this ms.

A big part is also figuring out how to transition from piece to piece. I like the floating-around thing, and it's fun--but it's not satisfying me as far as actually getting something said. If I wasn't annoyed or smolderingly angry, I could probably float around the story forever and be content. But you can't float around a ms and be angry; the two just don't mix. Anger has purpose and direction.

Sigh.

I've got at least three different types of story going on here, and I don't know how to transition between them. They take place at different times and on different continents. In some the same people have different names. I don't see that I can just label the transitions by place and time, because it's so confusing that labels would be meaningless. On top of which sometimes the people in the sections are the same and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they're the same but the reader might not know it yet.

I pulled out my Scott McCloud, as an aid to thinking about transitions and spaces between. He lists five choices about visual storytelling: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, choice of flow. They also apply to textual storytelling, IMO.

Choice of moment: which moments to include and which to leave out.
Choice of frame: distance and angle.
Choice of image: Characters, objects, environment within the frame (scene).
Choice of word: the actual writing part.
Choice of flow: guiding readers from scene to scene.

More things to think about:

Choice of frame affects reading flow.
Choice of flow includes clearing the readers' path of obstacles.

Also, the types of transitions are: moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and the non-sequitur. The ones I'm having trouble with are scene-to-scene, taking the reader across space and time. McCloud points out that deductive reasoning is often required in reading scene-to-scene transitions.

Hmm. I need to look at what I have (which is about 250 pages worth of stuff) and see what idea storyline A could end on, that would echo or pick up on an idea in the first scene of the next section, which may be storyline C, but it may be B, I dunno yet. I don't know if storyline B and C need to go one at a time, or intercut.

I also need to get storyline B, the main storyline, carved to a bare minimum.

I also need to write out storyline C, because I only have some of it.

It also occurs to me that you can remove all obstacles by repeating a sentence or paragraph that opened or ended a scene earlier in the book. If you repeat it again later, the exact same way, that puts the reader right back in the same scene, at the same place where s/he first heard it. That would be a strong and effective way to transition the three storylines back together near the end: repeat the exact same words from storyline A--carry the reader straight back into A, only now knowing everybody's baggage and being fully invested in the stakes.

Worked on the former GN yesterday. I like the way it's going. It's clear, however, that this is just a personal pet project that can't be allowed to take time away from projects that somebody might actually want to read someday. Right now the ms is dividing itself into three chains of thought that are different in ways I can't succinctly describe. And there's no story, really. I can see that the three chains of thought will come together near the end, then, together, lead to the ending I want, the ending that's always been there. I keep trying to find a pattern to all this so that the whole big picture of the piece will suddenly fall into place and make sense, but I haven't been able to find one. If I could find the correct title, that would probably help it come into focus--but I've never been able to locate just the right name for the ms. The story and characters are fun to think about and play around with, but I can't let this take over my time. It must remain a hobby.

Today I took time to work on the dystopian ms, feeling out the backstory and writing down the current story of the main secondary character--in other words, going through the story from his POV. Nothing big about the plot has revealed itself. I was a little surprised to realize some of his motivations and desires, but they line up with what I already know happens, so I'll have to keep thinking my way through the ms.

It may be that, for once, everything is going to hover in midair until a certain plot reveal gets settled, and that once that happens, the ms will start rolling again. I don't know how to decide on something plotty like that, though--usually I let the emotional story dictate what happens plotwise, and when. It'll be interesting if for once the emotional story can't fall into place until part of the plot is set. Lots to think about, here. Definitely a learning process.

Yesterday I worked on writing-related stuff not my own. Today will probably be mostly if not all the same.

I started rereading Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. The last time I read it, it was just for fun, but this time my own work is in the back of my mind as I read, and it's a little overwhelming and discouraging to see how somebody else can make a book work so nicely. I need to look at the POV, because now that I think about it, I don't know if it moves around within chapters or not. I just know that I somehow know what most people are thinking, unless I'm not supposed to know, but to wonder for a little longer.

Yeah, will have to do some hard thinking about this. It's very character-driven, and now that I consider, some of the things that pull you along are wondering about character's backstories and secrets, not what's behind the door or whether the MC will survive his fall from the helicopter. Not that there are any helicopters in this book.

I just like reading it for fun, though. I don't want to ruin it by thinking. Maybe I should go ahead and read through it once just for the pleasure, then come back and look at how all the character and backstory and plot and explanation are woven together.

Yesterday I had other things going on, but I decided to write a little anyway. Unfortunately it looks like I'm switching things up again because I pulled out the swordfighting ms and did a wee bit of work on that. I would much rather have worked on the former GN--and I did think about it some--but everything I need to do on it right now involves thinking in a creatively organizational way, and that part of my brain ain't working at the moment. That part is just flatlining, for some reason.

By creative organization, I mean pulling the story parts together in a way that rises and builds. I mean looking at the pieces I have and being able to see ways to link them into one big, connected picture. I can't see squat at the moment, as far as that's concerned. Dunno why, but it's probably to do with the multiple other things going on in writing and real life. Sometimes a creative part of your brain just gets drained, and all you can do is wait for it to fill back up.

I wrote a new beginning for the swordfighting ms, pulled together from old beginnings and one made-up new part. I backed up and started in the middle of action again, and at the moment I have three POV characters, third person past limited for each. I did this because I know I want to play around with structure and timeframe to see if I can get something about this story to work. However, with the creative organizational part of my brain on vacation, I can't move any farther than that on the ms. So today I'll probably write a "thingee," backstory or whatever I feel like writing from the pov of one of the three characters. He could end up being a POV character. Or not. But today will probably be freewriting along those lines.

It did occur to me yesterday that if I had a lot more skill than I do now, I could probably pull this ms into something really cool, like some of Louis Sachar's work that I admire for his plotting and POV changes. I love the way Holes' plot fits together, but my favorites of his books are Sixth Grade Secrets and Boy In the Girl's Bathroom. Oh, and the Face one--Boy Who Lost His Face? Is that the title? Anyway, I wish I had Sixth Grade Secrets, but I lent my copy to one of the neighbor kids who never brought it back. But I remember while I was reading it that I thought it was cool the way Sachar kept changing POVs yet never lost me. I'm a very easy reader to lose, so the fact that he didn't says something.

The fact is that I've got this swordfighting story down. I just don't know how to tell it. If I start with the exciting part, the emotional arc is dead. If I go chronologically, it's boring and overstuffed (to me it is, anyway). So: how do I make it work on all fronts at the same time? I do not know.

Side note: I don't think I mentioned I heard that a fellow writer who has been reworking the same ms for maybe a decade finally figured it out. Thus raising (if rumor is true) what was a perfectly good publishable ms to a great one that achieves the potential the author has been holding out for all along. This is awe-inspiring, but it also makes me wonder if I have this kind of intestinal fortitude. I'm thinking I may not. I'd like to hope I do, but I'm not sure I have the strong sense of writing self it would require to look at a good, publishable ms, and say, "No, not yet--I can do better." I mean, I know I kind of do this a little bit already, but not anywhere near the degree we seem to be talking about here. Maybe. Will have to read the book when it comes out.

I meant to write yesterday, but got sidetracked by learning that Rashomon is going to be the next Samurai Saturday movie on IFC. I've been wanting to see that! I know it's supposed to be one of the greats, so I read up on it a little in hopes I can pick up on some of the interesting points as I'm watching. It's supposed to be one event (a rape and murder) told four times from four different POVs, so there's a lot to watch for.

I also found (online) the two short stories (both by Akutagawa Ryunosuke) the movie's based on, the main one being "In a Grove." It's a very short story, but has seven POVs, each one telling about the rape/murder as that particular POV character saw/did it.

Then today I was looking through McCormack's book (see yesterday's post) trying to find something else, and saw a few paragraphs about characters "braiding" together. McCormack is talking about a ms where the author switches POVs among five characters, which is not what's causing my problem with my swordfighting ms, but he mentions the symptom "little sense of increasing momentum," which of course caught my eye. Then (re. having five characters' stories going on all at once) he uses the phrase "don't entwine into a humming cable of circuitry." He's talking about a different type of problem than the one I'm having, but now I'm thinking characters should braid into a humming cable of circuitry. At least, they should in this ms (the swordfighting one) because all three major characters are of nearly equal importance in my eyes.

So now I'm feeling a little more strongly that I need to buckle down and write out the story from the two non-main characters' POVs, in order to provide myself with a firm footing. I probably also ought to strongly consider whether the ms would come to life if I tried different POVs for different chapters. This is not what McCormack was advising but, hey, I take ideas where I can get them.

Side note: WF says that the problem of the MC with a negative goal can indeed be solved by the stated/announced goal (see yesterday's post). In short: the sagging or nonexistent tension of a goal-less MC can be negated by having the MC plainly state small plans or goals or strategies that aren't necessarily about the main problem of the ms. So. Hmm. Am trying to wrap my mind around this and see where and how it might be helpful to me in the former GN.

Worked on former GN today. Am formulating and collecting ideas about what to do with the swordfighting ms by discussing approaches to plot problems with various writer friends. I was thinking about changing the ms structure re. timelines, but after discussion it hit me that maybe looking at pov changes would be better (alternating pov's?), and then I thought perhaps I'd better back off and think through character again, to get a grip on what everybody wants and whether anybody's story arc weighs heavier than the others, or if they all weigh equally, and what all this ought to mean in terms of approaching the ms.

That's what I was thinking about. But I worked on the former GN, trying to bring more scenes into line, into a readable and reasonably booklike flow.

No writing of my own--all w-f-h.

Was thinking about swordfighting ms, wondering if I'm all messed up and wrongheaded about it, and need to rethink from scratch again. Then I thought, no, the best thing to do (when I pick it up again) is to jump around as needed and work on the parts that have a strong sense of story to me. Of course, when I say "story" I don't mean what other people mean, because I don't have a strong sense of story. I mean the internal story, the emotional story, taking the MC on his emotional ride.

I know that doing this actually can work for me, process-wise. I ought to be able to leave little blanks where I understand what happens plotwise, then after I get enough of the emotional ride put together, to go back and hammer away at the gaps till they work in the emotional story, too. I remember I had to do that for Repossessed late in the revision process, in the scene near the end where the demon and Lane are together. I knew what happened plotwise, but couldn't get it right, so I had to just redo it and redo it till it came to life properly, in a way that meshed with the rest of the ms. So what I need in the swordfighting ms is a strong emotional drive for the MC--at least in my head--and I need enough of it to provide a firm base so that I can leap over the gaps where plot must step in and carry the story. I can fill in the gaps once I have the rest.

The question is, can I get enough of the emotional story for that firm base? I'll have to think hard, and go back to the part where the dad dies and take it afresh (in my head, not writing it out yet) from there. I'll have to toss out the plot and just focus on what is going on at the moment and think what happens next. How will this connect with the plot I already have? No idea whatsoever. G*d help me, maybe it won't, and my lovely plot will have to be tossed.

Was thinking about the movie 300 and the movie The New World, and how some critics hated 300 (the Thermopylae movie) because it was more style than story, but loved The New World (Terrence Mallick movie re. John Smith, Pocahontas, et al.) because it was more style than story. I like them both because in each case the style is strong and seems to me to match the story. I'm not sure if the anti-300/pro-NewWorld critics are snobs, or if my teenage-guy streak is prejudicing me.

I think both movies have extensive voiceovers. What is the equivalent of a voiceover in a novel? Not sure, and no time to consider right now because I must get back to w-f-h.

I kinda figured this was going to happen sometime soon, but I thought it might wait a few more weeks or even months. But nope, today it hit: sudden desire to play around with the former GN.

I had been thinking that a way to solve one of my problems was to undercut unwanted impact of later scenes by introducing the reader to the mindset of this particular world early on. I vaguely figured I'd insert little references to soften the reader up gradually, so by the time we reached the later scenes the reader would be able to take them more in stride.

Another problem was that I'm not being hard-edged and realistic enough. The whole thing needs to be grounded more in the real world rather than a mythical hazy place. I've got the MC's immediate surroundings pretty well set, I think, but what's outside has never been anything but a vague cloud. Once I realized that the harshness of the real outside world didn't mesh with the MC's day-to-day, I came to a grinding halt. I had thought that this difference was sort of a point of the ms, but now I'm thinking that this problem and the above problem could be linked.

So I'm going to see what happens if I bring in some stuff from out of the MC's pov. This has not worked before with this ms, but before I was doing it with an angry feminist agenda. This time I want to come at it from a slightly different angle. I'm going to play around with it and see what happens. Although I should not be working on this at all today; I shouldn't be working on my own stuff anymore this week. I've got deadlines. But I need to do this, just a little bit anyway, and see what it looks like.

Got some work done on those three items I was talking about.

Looking back on the evening's writing, what I'm seeing is that the reason I didn't have a grip was that I was driving--or was in danger of driving--this whole part off base by working too hard to be clever. I got away from the purpose of each item, away from what needed to be done. Or, to be fair, I didn't know what needed to be done so I tried to impose a slant or meaning, which meant author intrusion, digressing into descriptions that I overloaded from my own authorly pov, and losing all track of everything except plot. I have to let the characters provide their own slant or meaning to each scene. If they don't provide it, then I need to figure out why. If I'm writing properly they should be doing most of the work for me, looks like.

So now it appears that one item is going to be a paragraph at most, buried in the rest of the ms--it's not important. The other two items seem to be moving aside a little, taken over by other things that are going on in scene. One of the items seems unimportant now, but I can see that it will be remembered by the characters; their slant on it will change, driven by what happens to them in the book. The last item I'm not sure about because I didn't get to it yet. We will see.

Did a little bit on my WIP today, but not as much as I should have--so am about to work some more and (we hope) achieve enough to be able to watch Robot Chicken with a clear conscience.

Yesterday I went back and worked through that "kitchen" scene more carefully. I went in with the idea that I'd figure out what one very small moment meant--but I never did figure it out. I tried, but I still have just the description of the room and the two people, basically, only with more details and a more concrete "picture" for the reader to see.

But...somehow that was enough to make me see that I needed to have a chapter/section break much earlier than I did. This part of the ms was a long series of scenes flowing into each other, with some narration/explanation/transitional stuff, and that kitchen scene, then some things that happened afterward that led into still more scenes and narration. After I got that one small "picture" clearer, I suddenly could wrap my mind around a chunk of the ms. I realized I had to lop this one section off and finish it. All that "afterward" is something new that will need to be addressed on its own.

I don't think it's coincidence that somewhere around the end of this long series of scenes is where my writing momentum petered out and I started becoming unsure where I was heading.

It makes me think about my other WIP, the swordfighting one. That's completely different, because it's a normal prose ms, not an experiment with shards of prose and white space. But I have the same confused feeling with it that I get with this ms when I lose my momentum. So if breaking into smaller, more manageable pieces helps here, maybe I can use a similar process to help with the swordfighting ms somehow. But that is for another day.

So anyway, earlier today I tied up that lopped-off section and tried to make it one basic idea. What I'm shooting for right now with this ms is that every page has one basic mini-idea (centered mid-page, with equal white space at top and bottom), and every section is a bigger idea that the individual pages add up to. Like, this section is now 16 pages, around 2600 words. The title of it (for today) is No Harm Done. One page might be a couple of paragraphs whose main point is that Helen's life is dull because her brothers are gone, and they are the only thing in her world that ever changes from one day to the next. Another page might tell about this slave boy and what his duties are. Another describes a dark, narrow staircase that Helen is going down. Etc. etc--but the overriding idea of the entire section is that she leaves her prescribed part of her world and edges out just a bit to take a peek at what lies beyond.

That's the form I'm working with right now. Why not just a regular prose novel? I don't know. All I know is, it doesn't want to be a regular prose novel. It never has. It never has come out that way, not from the very beginning. And I learned the hard way with Damage that it's a freakin' waste of time when the ms is pushing you strongly one way and you try to fight it. With Damage, I thought using second person was the stupidest thing ever. I thought, nobody can read this, and nobody will want to, and it will never sell. And I thought you're supposed to have a good literary reason to choose a pov tense. So I tried forcing the ms into first person, and when I kept losing momentum with it I tried alternating first person pov's among the characters--at one point I had three pov's--and I vaguely remember I tried third person, too. All a waste of time. Just go with it, that's what I learned from that. Otherwise you make yourself miserable and you doom yourself to failure and you're just going to end up doing the exact thing you're fighting so hard against.

The problem comes in when the ms isn't telling you strongly what it wants, or when you feel great because you're writing along in whatever way it insists on being written...and then it just stops coming. I don't have any solutions for those. But I'm trying hard to increase the number of tools in my repertoire, so maybe as I gain experience I can find solutions quicker and not spend 15+ years with a ms hanging cluelessly around.

After the negative morning, I have been surprised to find that this has been a good writing day. I think I got a good 10-15 pages in a working order--or at least to where I can wrap my mind around them for further work.

I think part of this may be due to the writer friend wh0 reported back on the bit I sent. When I sent the first 20 pages, I included the first 4-6 pages (or however many it is) that are framework and out of voice, even though I haven't been working on that part at all. WF said that part isn't working, but that the main part of the story--the part I have been working on--is.

I didn't realize that I had been fretting a little, in the back of my mind, about the framework and structure. I knew I was coming up on a piece that has been in the framework/structure viewpoint, and although I've been moving it around, it's been getting in the way while I try to think out this section. It does not fit. In the back of my mind, I had been thinking--but not wanting to admit--that really, most of the framework/structure viewpoint stuff could probably be folded into the main story and not made to stick out in in style or design. Most of it--except that very first 4-6 pages.

So when WF said the first part isn't working, I somehow gave myself permission to let it go for now, and let the rest of the story work itself out as smoothly as possible. Just forget about that and focus on what's in front of me. You wouldn't think I needed somebody else to say something that would allow me to do that, but apparently I did. I was like, "Oh. Well, I guess I'll just pretend that part's not there and continue on as I have been."

I cut a character out today. I hated to lose some of the bits she was in, but in the big picture she wasn't doing much--and I've already got so many characters to juggle anyway. We'll see if the story progresses okay without her. I suspect it will. I'm sorry about those lost bits, though, and am thinking about handing them to somebody else, albeit with trimming and other changes. Probably I'm just slowly talking myself into cutting even those last vestiges altogether. Somehow it's easier to swallow losing stuff I like if it vanishes little by little rather than all at one whack.

Was thinking about how people sometimes gripe about dead or missing parents in YA. Yeah, you try working in a couple of extra characters who not only don't do anything for the story, but actively undermine it because their function (by definition of "parent") is to ease the way for the MC and help solve his/her problems. I'm telling you, my MCs are lucky to ever have any parents at all.

I saw today that Kazuya Minekura has a series out called Wild Adapter, which I may try to get hold of. Apparently it's way upper teen, to the point where it's shrinkwrapped so the kiddies can't get hold of it. Today I was looking at son #2's D. Gray-man, and was really struck by the way it's almost all fighting by books 7 & 8. It's like, introduce a character and everybody fights. Then they fight some more. Then they get wounded, heal, get new powers, fight again. This is really the same for most of the manga I read, but what makes me like manga is character development. I like the backstories and flashbacks and gradual revelations about what drove somebody to be the way they are. Some of the manga just don't have that--and some have to it to start with, but as the series goes on and on all the depth is lost and the whole thing is just a series of fights.

Am still thinking about how to do these cut-to-flashback things in a novel. There doesn't have to be a rhyme or reason to it in manga because the visuals give the clues and set up the change for the reader, but in prose it's bound to be very confusing. The ones I have in my WIP probably aren't working because they're too far apart, so the reader won't understand why the voice and style are suddenly different. It seems like there might have to be some kind of regular pattern to them. Or, I suppose, the design for those pages could just be different. Still, if they only happens once in a blue moon throughout the book, it's going to be confusing.

This also led me to thinking about my other WIP, the swordfighting one on the back burner. I thought, if I was doing it right, it would be more effortless, right? Maybe I just haven't found the way the story needs to be told. I thought about alternating viewpoints again--with much dread, because that's a hugely time-consuming dead end if it's not the right thing to do. And if I think about individual scenes, I just don't see there being enough for each character to chew on for a whole chapter at a time. I don't know. It's a project I still have to grow into, I guess.

Got some decent headway made in the middle part w/Menelaus. This area was conceived and written as GN scenes, so as I translate them back to prose the story's not flowing the same as it did in previous parts. The parts that originated as stand-alone prose are stronger and clearer, with sharper wording--sort of like snapshots made of words. The parts conceived as GN scenes are more fluid like movie scenes, spreading over pages as well as (I think) backing off editorially. I'll have to keep an eye on this and be prepared to rethink.

I heard again today about some writer saying they're jealous of another person's writing. Every time I hear this, I either don't believe it, or think, Man, that is one twisted writer. It's easy--and, from what I've seen, almost universal--to have flashes of envy about another writer's money, fame, critical acclaim, or apparent ease of process. But why would you want to write like anybody else? That's like wanting to wear their underwear. Blech.

Decent writing day, amidst other stuff that had to be done.

Talked to a writer friend on the phone. WF had a good idea re. swordfighting ms. Specifically, since it's in third person, why not put a short teaser at the very beginning, from an unknown person's pov? Let us know somebody is watching the hero, but we don't know who. Periodically put little bits like this between chapters, where they seem to fit. Voila!--instant tension and raised stakes. It also lets us know up front there's a villain, where otherwise you wouldn't know till well into the book.

I noticed I had a bear of a time trying to explain the story line to WF. It's so confusing to me, I can't even describe it over the phone. Not good.

I worked on the used-to-be-GN. Did one of the, er, raw scenes, one of those that are going to get me in trouble and prevent this from selling. Also started developing other bits that seemed quick and simple, but when I got started, I realized they're threads that go all the way through the book. This really is a novel, even though it's not going to read like one.

Also thought about formatting. At the moment I'm going with no indentations and an extra space between paragraphs. Then when the first thing happens to limit the MC, the margins shift in. I don't know how this will work as I progress and her world gets smaller and tighter, but it's a good place to start.

I don't have the dialog form down yet, though. I don't like what I have, and don't even stick to it as I write. Will have to see what happens with that.

I pulled all the myth/slant sections out and put them into their own document, so I could play around with them and see them more clearly. Immediately they started taking on a snarky, vitriolic tone that almost addresses the reader directly. Then I had to stop and go pick up a kid from school and I was thinking along the way that maybe the way to tie the whole thing together is to switch the Helen parts to third person present rather than first person present.

At first glance this seems like a promising fit, because the main thing that bothered me about doing this particular novel in this experimental format--one of the things that made me think GN in the first place--was that Helen's voice feels smarmy to me. I did half of Beating Heart in a floaty kind of lyrical first person, but that has always felt wrong here, like more of the same, like the inside of my head is turning into a cute Disney ride and I need to go take apart a car engine and get grime under my fingernails and grease in the creases of my knuckles.

The irony is that I've been comparing Helen's voice to the dead girl's voice in Beating Heart and feeling icky about it, when now it looks like I should have been thinking of the other viewpoint character in Beating Heart, the living guy.

Because his parts of BH had the same d*mn problem. The exact same! I couldn't figure out how to do his parts because they felt smarmy and icky compared to dead Cora's lyricism, so--I swear, I did this--I wrote all his parts out as a GN. That gave me a foot in the door to start thinking about his half of the story in a different way. The GN was a step that I had to go through to get my head going in a new direction. It led me to trying his half as a very flat, matter-of-fact, third-person present that in no way competed with Cora's evocative voice.

I can't believe I didn't notice this before.

The thing is, even just working on this revamped Helen idea for a little over a day, I can tell that the whole project is forcibly trying to take a strong 90 degree turn and become about the issue that drives me, which is not Helen's story (that's why I have zero interest in world-building for this ms, and why it has never wanted to have traditionally set scenes; the fictional world doesn't interest me much and I don't care about drawing the reader into it).

The issue that propels me with this ms is unfairness; the way people rewrite history and situations to make themselves look better by scapegoating others. The unfairness comes in because traditionally it's the ones who do the writing who get to set the stories down in stone--which for the most part means white men of property and education. Everybody else in history pretty much gets badmouthed, condescended to, and blamed.

I think for now I'm going to let it proceed with the vitriolic snarky tone, and let Helen's parts fall into a neutral third person, and see where that goes. This is not my usual kind of thing, because (I was just telling some students this a couple of days ago, ironically) most of the time I don't like to make a big moral deal out of a book and tell people what to think. Most of the time I like to ask questions and leave them hanging, and the reader can either extrapolate from the rest of the book what my own opinion is...or not.

So if the ms continues this way, it will be a far cry from my other books, and perhaps more like my private e-mails to friends, in which I am vitriolic and snarky a goodly portion of the time. Of course, what with all the sex and violence and the lack of good role models and the weird form, that means this ms will be a tough sell. However, I work better that way. I work better out on a limb that's half sawed off, especially when the work means turning around to saw that limb the rest of the way through.

Very tired again. There's not really any time for writing today, but still I'm cramming in just a little before I have to turn to other things. It's like chipping away at a boulder, but at least I can say I chipped.

I'm greatly concerned about the girl character, whom I will have to figure out at some point, and probably soon. I can't do girl characters. I don't know why. They just turn out "unlikeable" to people who, er have money to buy mss with. It's very puzzling, because I swear I turned in one ms where the male character was a lying, cheating, stealing, swearing bully. So who was unlikeable? The girl character, because she was "prissy." I know some of the problem has to be my writing and the way I presented her, but I also think the world is really a screwed up place where prissy is a cardinal sin compared to being downright mean and criminal. And I can't help but think that the world has a screwed up view of women, too--that a female must have certain personality traits to be acceptable. Boys can steal and hit and lie, but g*d forbid a girl should want things clean or tidy. Because, you know, females never do that in real life.

What's really weird--and I may ask some writer friends for opinions on this--is that in my second book, Damage, I had alternating viewpoints during one stage in the process. One viewpoint was Austin, the eventual sole POV character. The other was Heather, his girlfriend. Heather was criticized as being unlikeable. Which she is, because she's selfish and conceited. But here's the thing: when I took her parts out and recast them through Austin's POV, she became bearable. Not any more likable, but not such a turnoff that it ruined the book. Okay--but why????? She was doing the exact same things she was doing from her own POV. She was thinking the same things, had the same motivation. So why was she acceptable from the guy's POV, but not on her own?

H*ll if I know.

So I've got this girl character now, in this WIP, who has the same problems as all my girl characters. She's unlikeable. People (who have money to buy mss) don't want to read about her. When I take out the stuff that pins her down and makes her real, she becomes a cipher. But the stuff that makes her real is the stuff nobody likes. I dunno.

This is going to have to be sorted out. There's just no way around it. But I'll be d*mned if I'm going to write a girl character that is conventionally "acceptable," with conventional flaws, just so that I can sell this ms. I might do it for w-f-h, but not for this. I'll spend the rest of my life sweeping the floors at Taco Bell with my head held high, and take the unfinished ms with me to my grave.

Did a page or so of thingee*. Then was thinking, while I mowed the back yard, about this book I was trying to read in a waiting room today. It's hard for me to finish reading published novels because writing has ruined me for reading. I'm pretty sure I won't be finishing this one, either. However, I was thinking, while mowing, about the thingee I started, and about how there's a page of it and almost all of that is internal blah blah about how the character feels. I had intended to sit down and actually set the scene and write it in scene. But no, it came out all feelings. Then (while mowing) I realized that the book I'd been trying to get through in the waiting room had almost no feelings in it. It's very internal--yet I read maybe half the book and I still have no clue how anybody felt. That's not necessarily a handicap for a book (especially if the book is plot-driven; this one wasn't), but it's generally not on my top ten list of things I enjoy reading. Or writing.

So I was thinking, maybe I need to go through my ms and consider in more detail how the two non-POV MCs (don't know what else to call them; they're not the MCs, but they're not minor characters) feel as the story unfolds. I hate to think the whole stinkin' book out step by step for two different characters (besides the one I've already done it for, the main MC), but maybe I should at least try. Sometimes I do think out scenes from non-POV characters' POV, but usually only for key scenes or to figure out what to do with bare-bones first draft dialog that I have to flesh out into a full scene. But with this book, since I'm working to stretch into a more plot-driven type of writing, maybe I'll have to go the extra mile. Otherwise, the story may not be "alive" like it should be.

Usually--maybe(?)--I start with feelings and work to let the story fall into place around them. With this ms, I'm trying to learn to start with story. I probably have to learn how to do feelings when they are set off or driven by what happens in the plot. I'm not at all sure how to approach this, or if I'm even on the right track. Will keep thinking.

No more writing today, though. Out of time.


*(my def. of "thingee"--pre-writing from any character's pov; usually helps flesh out and deepen ms; not often used in actual book although sometimes it can be cannibalized and pieces of it stuck in here and there)