Off the map

I did something yesterday I hadn't done in two weeks. I wrote. And it felt good.

I've been working on revisions to my latest Mighty Tome, trying in particular to shorten and tighten the narrative, especially in the front end, and it was going pretty well. On July 12, I hit the hundred page mark--and there I sat. For two plus weeks.

Unlike revisions in the past, I decided this time to type the entire, 426-page manuscript over again into a new, blank document, using a heavily-marked printed version as my guide. It was going well, until I started leapfrogging. As an example of what I mean, a series of events that occurred in the Page 150 section of the previous draft are now occurring around page 100. Which is fine--this manuscript does need to be shorter, and it needs to be more urgent in the first half. The problem, though, and the reason I stopped writing, is that I found myself thinking, "Now what? What happens next?"

It's a bit like driving before GPS, when you had a navigator in the front seat with you trying to makes sense of the world using one of those Rand McNally or Hagstrom road maps in the spiral bind. "Turn left at Sycamore," your friend tells you. So you do. "What next?" you say, but now you're off the edge of the map and they're trying to turn to map 34 and find where you are. Or, in more modern terms, it's like somehow getting three steps ahead of your GPS. "In one thousand feet, turn left on Sycamore Street," says the GPS, but you're already on the interstate highway, and the next exit isn't for another forty miles.

In an effort to find my way, I printed out those hundred pages and read through them again (finding a lot of things to fix, damn it). Yesterday, I sat and wrote. It was only 1100 words, but it was a start, and I can see where I need to go next. I'm back on the map.

Do you ever get lost in revisions? How do you find your way back to where you need to be?

Wandering in the Fog

The beauty of being a wingman is that you can start with an empty page and the briefest glimmer of an idea--it doesn't have to be an overarching idea for a novel, either; it can be a character or a single scene with almost no context at all--and start writing. At the end of the session you have something, something that suggests the next scene or chapter, something that may even suggest how it's all going to turn out in the end (though that may take a few sessions). As you string sessions and scenes together, the story starts to take shape. Like an object seen in the fog, it goes from being a vague, slightly-darker-than-the-background thing to something solid, definite, definable.

The story's somewhere out there. I think.

The problem with doing it this way, of course, is you can get yourself lost in some plot dead end, where things don't make sense and it's not clear how to get out of it. That's when you find yourself scrapping large chunks of manuscript that you poured your heart's blood into, when you find yourself thinking, "Why did I delete that scene in Trafalgar Square???" (Which is most likely followed by "Did I save  that scene in Trafalgar Square???" and a bit of praying as you search your hard drive)

Despite all the hubbub of the weekend, I made significant progress on my manuscript, and find myself at the 70% mark. But now I find myself at one of those trouble spots. During my last read-through, I came to a section where I realized I had cut a significant scene. I don't remember actually cutting the scene, but I remember why I did it, which is kind of funny. That scene went back in, and I'm glad.

Unfortunately, every scene that goes in or out at this stage has a ripple effect. I am now almost at the point where I had inserted a chapter's worth of material on my last revision, right before I sent the manuscript to Carrie. This I remember writing, and I remember why I wrote it, but on my post-Carrie read-through, it felt heavy-handed and...not exactly wrong, but not exactly right, either.

And this is the part where I think I should compromise with myself and do some form of outlining. I'm not talking about abandoning my wingman ways, no. But once I actually start getting my story down into a fairly solid form, maybe I should outline it--really outline it--and keep that outline handy and updated (I usually do some form of outline, but I don't keep up with it, so it's kind of useless). This way, maybe I would have a better sense of what one change in Chapter 15 might have in Chapter 18, instead of having to discover it all over again.

Should be a fun week! Do you ever got lost in your work? How do you get out of it?


"Tree And Fog" by George Hodan, from http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=64794&picture=tree-and-fog
 

Weekend Update: Change Is Good

If you've been reading this space for any length of time, then you're almost certainly aware that I am a card-carrying member of that subset of writers known as 'Wingman'. I am not a planner, not an outliner, not a plotter. I plunk myself down at the keyboard and start writing and just let it flow.

Now, you might also know that winging it is not quite as purely improvisational as it sounds. When I'm not writing, I'm thinking. I'm thinking about my story. Not ALL the time, but when I'm driving to work, or showering, or walking the dog, or washing the dishes. Those are great times for thinking of story. And the way I often think about my stories is to essentially have it play out in my head. When I sit down to write, it's almost like a transcription session, though it often goes off the rails and takes wild turns from what I had envisioned moments or hours or even days before.

My current project is one that has bedeviled (did I really just used 'bedeviled'? I did, by gum, I did) me for quite some time. The idea first sparked more than a year ago. I wrote the intro in my writers' circle the same day and was really taken by it. But I was also busy with a revision of one project and a new draft of a another and on and on and on. I also found that, when I did sit with the intention of writing it, it just wasn't coming the way I wanted, so I left it alone, figuring it needed more percolation time. I sometimes need two strikes of 'inspiration', or whatever you want to call it, for an idea to really get going, and that second strike hadn't happened yet.

At the beginning of September I had a conversation with Carrie about next projects. I had two in mind and we talked them over, and she suggested I work on this particular one--the one that has been giving me fits. We talked over my roadblock with the project and brainstormed some ideas and I walked away feeling a little more fired up, but for the next couple of weeks, I still struggled--and so I changed my approach: I wrote an outline.



Well, I don't know if it's an outline or not. It's sort of an outline. I essentially outlined the broad strokes of what I had actually written to that point (which was a surprising 140 pages, but not a cohesive 140), and tried to fill in a little about what I expected to happen. It was a little muddy, especially the end, but I found myself with a little more confidence to move forward. From there I started taking pieces I had already written and retooled them, while also writing fresh scenes that 'appeared' in my head while washing the dishes, driving, &c. (and let me tell you, it's been good to have those scenes appear; it makes me more confident in what I'm doing)

But I'm also doing something else different this time around. Instead of sitting down and opening up my WiP and just starting where I left off, I've started my writing sessions in my outline instead. I'll start with a broad idea of what I want to write: "Emily wakes with a hangover. She remembered talking with her roommate about..." What's happening is that after a paragraph or so of 'outliney speak', I'm writing a full-out scene with dialogue, description, etc. If I get it good enough, I pop it out into my WiP proper, make some corrections, and I'm good to go on the next scene. If it's not quite good enough, it stays in the outline. Last night I took less than 200 words I'd written in my writers' group that afternoon and expanded it by 2000 words. It's not perfect. Tonight I'll go back in the outline and revisit it, make it better, and put it in the WiP. And this is something else that's new for me: in past drafting events, I've pretty much left what was written alone until the whole thing was done.

It's been an interesting approach for me, and one that has made me much more productive. In early October, I told Carrie I had a 6(!) page outline. It's not 27 pages. The WiP is approaching 20,000 words, half the length of the last draft, but is a better story, I think. Will I follow this new approach all the way through this WiP, and will I apply it to the next project down the road? I can't say for sure. What I can say is I'm glad I was willing to try something new. It's working so far.

Have you ever changed your approach to writing? How did that work for you?