Rearranging and Shuffling Scenes

Over the years, the elements of writing that I've had to focus on during revisions has changed. When I first started writing, clarity was a problem for me. I had to learn to see my stories from an outsider's point of view. Then, I remember a time where I had to focus on endings that felt satisfying.

Lately, much of my revision energy has been focused on rearranging the pieces in a scene and shuffling those scenes around in a story. The fact that this simple thing has occupied so much of my time is funny to me. It feels like such an easy thing, and yet I'm finding that it's having a big effect on how engaging my prose can be (in my opinion).

Today, for example, I was working on Cyberlama, and I wrote a chapter that discussed a news story in which one man murdered another man. I wrote on the topic from start to finish, including events before the murder, the actual murder, and then some people's speculations on why the murder had occurred. But, when I was done, I asked myself what would happen if I didn't get into the speculations right away. Instead, I took that chunk out of the chapter and pasted it in several pages later, after I had already written about a couple of other, unrelated topics in between.

For me, shuffling the scenes this way gives my story more tension and also makes the speculations more powerful somehow. There's more tension because the murder story doesn't quite feel complete. It's like a subtle form of a cliffhanger. There are some questions left unanswered. I think breaking up the scene also makes the scene more powerful because when the speculations are farther away from the actual murder events, they resonate more...like they resonate beyond all of the material I inserted between the murder and speculation. By bringing it back at a later time, it feels like something important that keeps re-emerging in my narrator's mind.

I find that I also rearranging things to keep similar elements closer together. I had, for example, a scene where a woman brought her violin in to play for a group of people. When I originally wrote the scene, the violin performance was broken up by the thoughts of some of the audience members. While I was revising, though, I ended up putting all of the audience members' thoughts at the end, so that the the performance was told in one continuous passage. I felt like that made the concert experience more vivid.

Has anyone else focused on moving elements around like this? Like I say, I'm not sure why it's taking up so much of my attention at the moment. But, I'm realizing that it's a powerful revision tool, one that I hadn't taken advantage of as much in the past.

My New iPad Haz Kewl Appz

I have been resisting the lure of the shiny new iPad thingie, because the last thing I want is another expensive toy to drag around all day and I don't really write on a computer; I tend to work longhand. But last night I was at the Apple Store and the salesperson showed me a bunch of iPad-only applications that might make my life as a writer a lot easier. For example:

iKnowWhatYouMean is a really cool add on to the iPad version of MS Word that uses predictive technology to change what you've written into what you actually meant to say. For $49 more you get the Limited Edition software version that can edit similes into metaphors, which is really really amazing.

iVeSeenThatBefore is a program that lets you enter the bare-bones plot of your story (in 3-act or 5-act structure), asks you what the genre is (comedy, tragedy, sf/f, etc) and then searches an online database to tell you if you've stolen the idea from a recent book or if you've stolen the idea from one of the classics.

iKnowYoureOutThere is one of those "force you to write" programs that you enter your normal schedule into including a regular block of time in which you should be writing, and when the clock comes around to that scheduled writing time, if you aren't actually using the iPad's writing software, it closes all other applications and opens MS Word and gives you a threatening message about being such a slacker. The message is customizable. If you aren't using the iPad at all during that writing time, it turns itself on and flashes lights and makes noise to attract your attention. Totally brilliant.

There are some more apps for writers but I didn't get those, because I'm not made out of money, you know. Anyway, the new iPad rawks and I think it's going to change the way I work. I'm very excited to start using it.

Happy Friday everyone! What's new with you?

How do you slow down time in your prose?

Y'day, Scott talked about his new strategy to slow down time at critical points in his story. I got home from work, excited to slow down my own fiction, when I realized that I only had a few tricks for doing it.

Here's an excerpt from my fictional fictional story, The Cyberlama Cannibal. Spoiler alert, we're in the penultimate chapter and we are reaching the climax of the story.

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw.

(Dear Pulitzer Committee, you can reach me at dmalasarn (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 555-Word.)

Now, let's say I wanted to slow this down. I have decided that this scene is important, and I want to make sure that's clear to my readers. What can I do?

One approach that I'm embarrassed to admit I do fairly often is what I call "the window approach." It would go something like this:

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. Outside, the sun was setting, and the fragrance of jasmine came in through the high window. The lama stopped just long enough to take in the sweetness in the air before he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

As stupid as this example is, I do think it serves to slow down the scene like I had intended. It gives CL a bit of humanity, perhaps some emotion (albeit not much) before he gets to his task.

Another approach I use, which is slightly better in my opinion, is "the stopped and looked approach".

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head and fired. He was dead. The cyberlama turned and looked across the way at the dingy gray walls that surrounded him. He stared at the walls for a long time. He listened to the noise in the street as a bus full of rowdy children drove by. Then, he picked his victim up and began to gnaw.

Again, I think this manages to slow the scene down and assign the character a moment of contemplation, perhaps regret or some other emotion. It works, but at the same time it's limited in what it can convey. A character staring out at nothing can only give you so much information.

When I'm feeling the most energetic and the most imaginative, I'll do a sort of expansion, like looking at the scene under a confocal microscope (which is similar to other microscopes except that it's optimized for thick sample visualization):

The cyberlama stood over the man, who cowered and begged for mercy. The man kissed the lama's robotic feet. He stroked the lama's robotic ankle knobs. Cyberlama aimed his subatomic particle departiculator at the back of the man's head. He saw the pale part in the man's hair, the goosebumps and beads of sweat that formed there. He noticed that the man was whimpering, a sound that reminded the lama of a young yak that had once fallen through the ice in a frozen pond in U-tsang. The whimpering started softly and slowed down to almost nothing. The man did not look up, but instead kept his head lowered, his forehead touching the cyberlama's feet. He fired. The man was dead. He slumped over. His departiculated brains drifted upward like a thin trail of cigarette smoke. The lama picked him up and began to gnaw. The taste of the flesh was sweet. He chewed several times until the flesh formed a mush in his mouth, and then he swallowed it down to his electronic stomach and turned on the digestive valve.

What I like about this method is that it stays focused on the matter at hand, while the other two approaches I mentioned above have more of an escapist feel to them. I'm not sure how much emotion can come through using the microscopic approach, unless one decides to do some telling or perhaps bring back some symbols that had been set up earlier. Still, it's an approach I try to do more of.

In general, these are the three ways I have of slowing down fiction. I'd be curious to see what other people do. Feel free to use the cyberlama example or one of your own...as long as it also has cyberlamas in it.

What techniques do you use to slow down time in your prose?

Do You Have to Sum Up Your Book in One Sentence?

Not long ago I believed that if you couldn't sum up your novel in one sentence, you were doomed. If you couldn't do that, you didn't know at all what your book was really about. In several ways, I still believe it, but as I write more and more I've discovered that part of that belief is complete nonsense.

Why a sentence is good
First of all, it's kind of nice to be able to talk about your book in one sentence. You know, when people find out you're a writer and they ask you what one of your novels is about, it's nice to feel confident in that one sentence. I used to hate it when I stumbled and fumbled with my words, trying to think of how I could sum up that huge story into a little tiny description. Now, if someone asks me what Monarch is about I tell them it's about a CIA spy who who has to track down a big-time terrorist, but also save his own heart in the process. The problem? There's so much more to the book than that. There's even more to the book than the back-of-the-book blurb. Lots more. The blurb on the back doesn't even mention the other two huge story lines and points-of-view.

 

Oh, well, though. That's marketing for you! It's also unrealistic to think everyone wants to sit down and talk about all the intricacies of your book with you. What they really want to know is the basic plot and idea, and honestly, if you don't know that about your own book, you might have some problems.

For instance, when I first wrote Monarch, I honestly had no clue what the book was really about. It's about a spy, I told myself. A spy who isn't like other spies. I wanted to take the James Bond character ideal and turn it on its head a little bit. I did, but even after two drafts the focus in my story wasn't clear. So, after realizing this, I finally took the time to figure out where I wanted to focus, and I rewrote the book with that focus in mind. Tada! The book worked. It wasn't quite as easy as I make it sound, but that was the core of it.

Why a sentence is bad

Just like you as a person can't be summed up in one sentence, neither can your novel. There are so many layers, so many characters and intricacies and ideas that boiling it down to one sentence is almost absurd. I've often thought the idea of my books sound absolutely boring when boiled down like that. For instance, Cinders is the story about what happens to Cinderella when she decides her prince isn't who she wants after they get married. Hmmm, interesting concept, but wow, that's missing a lot. My novella Thirds is about a girl who wants the same magic as her two evil stepsisters. That sounds overdone, if you ask me.

What I've concluded is that summing up your book into a sentence can help you in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. I also don't think your book is totally lost if you can't sum it up. Some stories are much more complicated than others, and all writers function completely different from one another. I know I've asked my friend, J.S. Chancellor, what her books are about in one sentence, and she told me I was nuts if I wanted her to do that. 

Will learning how to sum up your work in one sentence help you with a query? Probably, yes, but as I've discovered, a query isn't the embodiment of your novel. It doesn't even begin to explain your book to its full capacity. It's more like dangling a worm on the end of a hook, like the back-of-the-book blurb of my novel, Monarch. My publisher and I decided what to focus on, and we ran with it. That book could be marketed probably 80 different ways. The blurb that's there now is the worm we decided to dangle.

Sideshadowing and the Battle Against Inevitability

For a very long time in the history of the novel, writers have tended to produce what theorists call "ideal texts," which means that the novels form sort of closed systems where all the events in the stories lead to a distinct end point (the climax) and all the various subplots and strands of the story are wrapped up and concluded by the last page of the book, often in a denouement of whatever length is necessary. The idea is to leave the reader with no unanswered questions or loose ends, with a feeling that everything is over and the reader's mind can rest. This "ideal text" is based on the false premise that life is a neat, closed system wherein every conflict has a resolution. Now, we all know this isn't the case outside of made-up stories, and over time there has been a growing movement to reject this "ideal text" and the imposed closure of this sort of narrative.

Today I'm going to talk about a narrative technique called "sideshadowing." This is similar to "foreshadowing" and "backshadowing." To quickly review, foreshadowing is the technique of putting clues into the narrative early that a particular event will happen later on, a sort of warning that "something's coming." Backshadowing is the technique of putting commentary into the narrative later on that refers to earlier events, a sort of "should've seen that coming." In general, foreshadowing is visible only to the reader, not the characters. Backshadowing is visible to both reader and character.

Sideshadowing, on the other hand, is the technique of pointing outside of the narrative, of deliberately suggesting to the reader that more things might be going on than what's expressed in the narrative, that there are in fact a multiplicity of narrative possibilities, and that the story in not a "closed system" and that everything can't be all wrapped up neatly by the ending, or even at all. I realize that this is a vague definition, and likely that's because sideshadowing isn't a single technique so much as it's a variety of techniques, and because writers are not thinking in terms of "sideshadowing." The term itself is pretty new, the invention of literary theorist Gary Saul Morson. Go look him up.

Sideshadowing suggests not what happened or what will happen, but what else might happen/have happened in a story. Sideshadowing techniques include:

Unanswered questions
Loose ends
Half-told stories
Digressions
Historical backdrops vaguely referenced
Unexposed backstory

Sideshadowing is sort of an argument against inevitability, if you will. Where foreshadowing and linear "ideal" stories close off narratives step-by-step, sideshadowing opens up a narrative moment-by-moment, offering the reader the idea of more than a single possible outcome. Here are the examples of sideshadowed narratives that came to my mind right off:

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Lady and the Dog by Anton Chekhov (and lots of his other stories)
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern
As well as the works of Borges, Beckett, Rushdie, O'Connor, Oates and others.

I think that writers who have resisted the closed nature of "ideal stories" use a variety of techniques all in the pursuit of narratives that more closely reflect the open-ended nature of reality and the many possibilities that exist in each moment of our lives. I think this "now-ness" is what many writers are looking for when they use the present-tense (and that so many writers are using the present-tense because there's an unrecognized but growing sense that "ideal stories" are inadequate vessels for certain types of realist fiction). In other words: modernism has taken a deep hold on current fiction behind everyone's back. For me at least, there is an expansiveness, a feeling that these sorts of stories are not isolated things unto themselves, a hint that these narratives are connected to the larger world and I like that feeling.

This is something that I've been trying to do in my own work. In one of my novels, I refer obliquely to real-world events and mention larger historical movements in passing to give the impression that my characters are part of a complete, forward-moving world. I also leave the essential large-scale conflict unresolved, because it's a large-scale conflict that goes on even to this day. In another novel, I have my main characters' story intersect with the stories of supporting characters and you never learn how those other stories play out. Readers are left, hopefully, with the idea that there is a real world going on outside of my story, that things are in motion and that new stories can come winging into my narrative from any angle and change the course of lives. At least that's one of the intended effects.

Anyway, this is likely very obscure and idiosyncratic but it's what I think about lately when I think about writing: how to open the narrative up and imply not only a larger world than the fictional world of the narrative, but that the narrative is only one possible outcome of the premise, that other endings are possible and may have actually taken place. This technique is still a work in progress for me, and I claim the provisional status of my ideas as an excuse for all the vagueness in this post.

Does Alliteration Ever Help?

Alliteration is a technique that has always been a mystery to me. It's the term used to describe phrases or sentences that repeat particular sounds, mainly in the first syllables of words, such as "The cats crashed on the couch."

We're probably all familiar with this, but I wonder if anyone has ever used it effectively. The technique originated in poetry, which may be cited as the justification for its existence, but I see it often enough in fiction writing. From my experience it gets just as many compliments (I like the alliteration here!) as it does criticisms (You have some awkward alliteration here.)

I have used it on occasion myself in places where I thought it was helpful. For example, if I had a sentence like "Alfred was furious." I might revise it to "Alfred was angry." because to me it pairs the subject of the sentence with his emotion a little more powerfully. Even that explanation feels a little forced to me, though. Sometimes I begin to wonder if the only reason writers use alliteration is just to prove that they know what it is.

Do you use alliteration? When have you found it to be the most effective?

Stop and Go Sentences

I remember intensely studying Banana Yoshimoto's novella Kitchen and trying to figure out why her story was so unputdownable. The plot was forgettable, at least to me. The characters were also forgettable. Yet, each time I read it, I found myself propelled from beginning to end. That's how I figured out that she was using a great technique on the sentence level of her prose.

Take this generic passage as an example:

The family lived in a house. It was an oddly-shaped house with two large bedrooms at either end and a squat windowless kitchen in the center. Emil Lacadally chose it because of its symmetry, a quality which he valued over anything else when it came to matters of architecture.

Taken step by step, the sentences do not propel the reader forward. Each one holds its own idea and doesn't lead into the next, even though they logically follow each other. The first sentence sort of just sits there with nothing of interest contained inside of it. The second sentence is a bit more interesting, but it also feels like a complete thought that doesn't push the story forward. And so on.

The paragraph could be rewritten like this:

The family lived in an oddly-shaped house. Two large bedrooms sat at either end, and a squat, windowless kitchen was wedged in the center--it was the obvious choice for Emil Lacadally. He loved symmetry. It was a quality he valued over anything else when it came to matters of architecture.

Here, the first sentence prompts the reader to ask the question, "How is the house oddly-shaped?" The second sentence answers that question, and sets up a new question: "Why is it the obvious choice for Emil?" The third sentence answers THAT question and prompts the question "Why does Emil love symmetry?"

Instead of each sentence feeling self-contained, it instead pushes the reader forward by setting up a question that the reader wants answered and answering the question that was set up before it. I'd argue that, even if the story itself is boring, this type of knitted prose can successfully snag a reader. It's hard to find a stopping place in a paragraph like this.

And, notice that the second sentence is actually two independent clauses. It could have easily been broken up into two sentences, but I think this construction, avoiding the momentum-stopping period, helps to keep that forward movement going. (And, yes, I'm pro-semicolons!)

There's also a level of predictability in this. The reader can sort of predict what the next sentence will be about, assuming that they expect their questions to be answered. This creates a logical flow pattern for the prose that feels smoother and faster-paced. If you are able to write these sort of "go" sentences and mix them up with "stop" sentences like in the first paragraph, you will gain a good level of control over manipulating your reader in the best sense of the word.

So, if you want self-propelled prose, consider having each sentence work to answer the question set up before it and inspire a new question to be asked. Be sensitive to a reader's expectations, and work to meet them. This is an easy technique to master, and I've found a lot of use for it in my own prose.

Use Pacing to Create Shape

Lately, I've been encountering two types of flawed stories. In one type, the contents of the story are great, but the emotion in them feels lacking. In another type, the emotion somehow seems to be there during the first read, but when I look back, I find that I've somehow been tricked into feeling emotion that wasn't actually there.

The first story suffers from lack of structure (in the stories I've been reading). All of the pacing is the same, or the pacing is working against the natural highlights of the story. A climactic scene, for example, is sometimes hidden away or summarized. A less significant detail is oddly magnified, calling more attention to itself than it probably should.

The second story, while lacking in content, will initially feel like it works because the structure has been manipulated in such a way that certain highlights exist, even if those highlights don't have any substance behind them.

What I've decided is that a solid structure, regardless of content, is sufficient in making the reader feel like they've been taken on some sort of journey. It can take a reader on an experiential roller coaster ride, including ups and downs, even if the actual writing isn't saying anything of meaning.

Remember Mad Libs?

Once there was a ___________.

But the _________ was _________.

It wanted ___________.

For many years the ___________ __________, but one rainy day, a _______________ arrived and ________________.

The ______________ thought that surely all hope was lost.

Then, suddenly, _____________________________!

Even though the stories that came from our random collections of nouns and adverbs and adjectives and verbs were almost always nonsensical, we felt like we had heard a complete story. I think that goes back to the solidity of structure and pacing that go to create shape.

Do you focus on story shape in your work? Has reworking the shape of a story given it more emotional impact?

Friday! Filler! With Charts!

Here is a chart showing the chapter-by-chapter wordcounts of my novel "Cocke & Bull":



Here is a chart showing the chapter-by-chapter wordcounts of my novel "Killing Hamlet":



I cannot help noticing that the profiles are very different. The middle chapters of "Cocke & Bull" are quite long, where the chapters of "Killing Hamlet" are all about the same length with the exception of chapters 6 and 18. Those two chapters come at the end of the First and Fourth acts (I'm using a 5-act structure for this book).

Do I know what any of this really means, or can I glean anything useful from it as a writer? Not so much. But the charts look cool. I'm a big fan of Excel. Anyway, it's Friday and I got nothing for you. For me it's going to be a 3-day weekend. Hopefully I'll get some writing done. Tonight, Mighty Reader and I are meeting some friends for crepes and wine at a nice French restaurant. You?

And this is for Nevets:

A Map of the World

I have been working on the first draft of a novel for the last couple of months. If I really push, I'm pretty sure I can finish by the end of September. There is really only the final conflict to resolve and some subplots to tie up and a last image to leave in the mind's eye of the reader. I figure maybe 20,000 more words or a bit less even than that. This all means that I have written the bulk of the book, and I have the story down on paper and I can refer back to it whenever I want and that the ending should be pretty straightforward to write. Except that I can't, or I won't.

One of my rules for writing a first draft is that I don't read any of what I've written once it's written. That is to say, I just keep plowing forward through the story and don't stop to go back over what's already on the page if it's earlier in the story than the chapter I'm currently writing. Sometimes I allow myself to go back and look up factual data like a date or a place name or how to spell "Corambis" or whatever, but that's all. The primary purpose behind this self-imposed exile from the written parts of the story is to keep me from endlessly fussing and revising and not finishing the first draft at all because I'm spending all my time revising Chapter One.

Something I've always wanted as a tool for writing has been a sort of way to map out the whole novel, a chart or a map showing the entire story arc and all the plotlines that I can refer back to when necessary. Nabokov used notecards to outline and keep track of his story, and I am experimenting with notecards for the final part of my current novel, but you can't really lay 150 or more notecards out end-to-end and see what's going on in a book. I have been building this big structure by hand and I will never be able to see the whole of it all at once, because of course the only true and accurate map of a novel is the novel itself, and I don't have one of those minds that can hold the whole novel all at the same time. I can only "see" bits of my own novel, which is a baffling and frustrating and fascinating thing. Possibly that's tied to complexity, and if I were writing a more straightforward tale, I'd be able to imagine the whole story simultaneously. I don't know.

So here I am, writing the last 20,000 words of a novel when I don't remember the first 20,000 very well. I feel like I'm a man who has walked along a very long mural and I can only see about five feet of it in either direction and the bulk of it is hidden by fog or in shadows and my memory of it is inexact. Certainly I'll have to do some work in revisions to make sure that the story is consistent all the way through, and there is one scene that I think I'll cut entirely because I never developed that particular subplot so what happens there makes no sense at all.

How do you go about "visualizing" the whole of the story? How abstractly do you think about the main story arc? How do you keep track of where you are? Does anyone have a really cool system for charting the entire story (I am looking for a visual/graphic system where it's all displayed together, sort of like a Microsoft Project(tm) graph or a Venn diagram or a flowchart or something)? How do you keep notes, I guess, is what I'm asking.

If You Were Rothko...

Do you know Mark Rothko? He was an abstract expressionist painter who spent much of his time painting very large canvases with rectangles of color.

Here's an image of one of his paintings, taken from Wikipedia:

I've been a fan of Rothko's work for years, but it wasn't until 2009 at the Tate gallery in London that I saw his paintings the way they were supposed to be seen. When Rothko allowed his works to be viewed, he was very careful to specify the type of lighting he preferred (usually dim), the height at which they were to be displayed on the wall (sometimes close to the floor, sometimes several feet up), what other works were allowed to be displayed alongside his work...he even specified at what distance he preferred his viewers to look at his work (sometimes 18 inches, which is very close considering his paintings are larger than any large screen TV I've ever seen.)

These mandates by the artist might seem out of line, and maybe some would say Rothko wasn't even a very good artist, considering all he ever painted were rectangles. When I saw the exhibit at the Tate, the first thing I felt at trying to view his higher-placed paintings in dim lighting was frustration. I could barely see them. They were just blurry spaces, almost like ghosts of color. Frankly, I didn't like them at all.

But, I found myself thinking of these works weeks after I left the gallery. Not only did I like them more, but I found myself wanting to see them again...or, more accurately to experience them again. Rothko wanted his work to be displayed in a particular way because he wanted to envelop us with his color, to create something that surrounds us in an intimate way. And, without me knowing that, I suddenly longed for it. Only a year later--last weekend to be exact--did I learn about what his intentions were.

Rothko, in my opinion, was a brilliant artist. To compare his work to those of Rembrandt or Renoir or Dali or Munch would be pointless because he had created something new, something unique. And, when he was faced with wanting to do something that no one else had done before, he didn't change his work to conform. Instead, he changed the viewers, he trained people to see his work.

All the rules that I talk about, all the tools I present here will only get you so far. And, if you follow them perfectly, chances are you will end up sounding like everyone else who has learned to follow the rules. (Granted, a lot of people won't even get that far.) You can change your work if you think you are improving it. But, don't change your work because the world hasn't learned how to see it. Teach us. What would you demand of your readers if you were Mark Rothko? What rules would you give us so that you didn't have to conform to rules yourself?

Who Is Your Protagonist When He's At Home?

Here's an amusing (if you're me, which I'll grant that in all likelihood you are not) story: About three years ago, I got the idea to write about the characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet, based on the observation that Hamlet keeps calling the Horatio character his "best friend" even though, based on the text of the play itself, there is no reason for him to think this. I thought that was interesting and I wanted to explore some ideas surrounding it. Anyway, I wrote me a novel and revised it six times and then queried some agents and found a high-profile guy all the way out in Manhattan who said he wanted to work with me on the MS. That was in March of last year. My agent has since then read two revised versions of the book, and he keeps coming back to me and saying that there is something missing, something about the protagonist that just doesn't work. The problem is that the protagonist is sort of more narrator than protagonist, and while the premise remains cool and my writing is quite fine, the second half of the narrative lacks the emotional drive it should have within the protagonist; my main character was too vague, too much a cipher. As my agent said on the phone yesterday, he could sell this book right away if he knew who the protagonist was.

I've been working for the last year to solve this problem, and I've tried all sorts of things that, frankly, haven't worked. My agent (because he kept pointing out this flaw in the book that I could not fix) has been high on my list of people to hate. And my brain kept revolving in a truly simply awful and maddening way around the question "Who is this guy?"

I kept framing the question as "What does he want and how does that affect this story?" and that, I tell you, was a huge mistake.

I was in effect treating the main character as a prop, a plot device to move the story along, and not as a character. I can tell you loads about all the supporting characters, but I could not have told you much of any substance about my protagonist until yesterday afternoon.

Now, of course, I have realized who the protagonist is and what drives him and suddenly the story has a sort of motor, a perpetual-motion machine at its heart that will drive every scene and by gum, that's a cool thing to have. My current book, "Cocke & Bull," has had that internal motor from the beginning, but that book began as a conception of the two central characters. The book my agent has did not, and I spent too much time thinking about Shakespeare's play and not enough time thinking about my protagonist.

How'd I have this breakthrough? Well, it's thanks to my agent (Thanks, Jeff! Love you! I mean that this time!), who suggested that I mentally remove Horatio (my protagonist) from the story told in the book and pretend that he never met any of the other characters and never traveled to the book's settings and lived his whole life outside of the story I've written. So in that sort of vacuum as just some guy and not the hero of any particular story, who is this guy? What's he want? What interests him? What would he do with his life if he hadn't met the Hamlet Family? My agent had a suggestion that was completely wrong, but when I thought about why it was wrong, it got me thinking about what sort of thing would be right. That line of thought sparked an idea of my own a couple hours later, and that spark turned into a flame which has overnight grown into a big roaring bonfire and I can't wait, frankly, to get back to work on this book because it all makes sense now and I keep thinking of ways to make it even cooler than it already is and that spells WIN.

So likely I'm coming late to this party, and you've all been doing this forever, but it's a really cool tool for me, to remove my characters from the story I'm writing and see who they are when they're at home, as it were. I wanted to share this epiphany and see how many of you are already thinking like this.

Also, please note that I write this on Thursday (that's yesterday via the magic of teh internets), because today (which is tomorrow as I write this) Mighty Reader and I are off at an all-day garden show where we hope to learn how to prune the fruit trees in our back yard, which trees had been ignored for years by the previous owner of our house.

Moving Blindly Forward

I decided to write this post because of what Scott wrote yesterday about his narrative proofs, which I found quite fascinating. His strategy (and the other writers who also mentioned working the same way) seems totally logical to me, and at the same time it's so completely counterintuitive from what I do. So, as a fun contrast, I thought I'd describe how I go about developing my stories.

I start with a premise. I'll use the example Scott used:

Red is walking to her grandmother's.

At this point, I actually try very hard NOT to think about how I want the story to end. For me, knowing where I want the story to go makes me suddenly manipulate my characters in unnatural ways. If I decide I want Red to end up with a woodsman, I'll suddenly have her stumble upon the National Woodsmen Convention, where she's ushered into the main hall and forced to listen to some boring lecture by her soon-to-be lover. For me, that won't work.

Instead, I look at what I have started with, and try to carefully take the next step forward. Who is Red? Why is she walking to her grandmother's? These are clues for how the story should move forward. I inch my way forward, collecting data, not knowing where it will go. I try to take logical and interesting steps based on what I have before.

Red is walking to her grandmother's. She gets there and knocks on the door, and her hairy, long-fanged grandmother invites her in.

If I were writing this story, the woodsman probably wouldn't occur to me until very near the end, if at all.

I actually think of this approach as sort of setting up some game pieces that will eventually control themselves based on the rules of the game. What I can manipulate is the beginning, and what I try not to manipulate is the end. So, I guess for me, it's that middle section that is the most important and the most fun. I'm past the hard work of set up, and now I just get to sit back and watch. (The scene where Red is asking the wolf all of her questions is the most memorable scene for me.)

Along with this, I've found that when I love a book, I don't want it to end. And, the way I interpreted that was that the ending shouldn't be the best part. For me, this approach was the most true to my own life experiences. Living in the present always felt like being in the middle of the book, and it was always this middle that felt the most important.

As a result of this approach, I think my stories usually have vague or open endings. Again, for me, this is acceptable because it feels true to life--not that all stories must be true to life. I hope that it's the middle of the stories that people enjoy.

So, there you have it. The panster's approach.

Do you all think it matters how a writer approaches their story? What other effects can approach have on the final product?

Narrative Proofs

I have been working on a new story idea lately, and as I push concepts around to see if I can actually make a story out of my idea, I have come to the somewhat startling realization that what I'm essentially doing, when I put together the barest of bare-bones original outline for novels, is creating a sort of mathematical proof of the story.

For those of you who slept through maths in school, a proof is a demonstration that a statement is true, using deductive reasoning. Sort of like a syllogism, you know. You essentially create a list, or a chain, of statements, each statement building off the preceding ones. Oh, go look it up. This isn't a math class.

Anyway, one of the very first things I do when I have an idea is begin attempting to build a story, creating a "proof" of the story. Me, I like to imagine the outcome of my premise as soon as possible, because my essential definition of a story is "a narrative describing how some state of affairs came to be." That means that I am telling my reader how we got to the end of the book, and that ending is the most important thing about the story. So I am working my way to that end, step by step, in my "proof."

For example:

I have this idea about innocence, and I get the concept Red is walking to her grandmother's. For whatever reason, I decide that I want Red to end up with a strong character. A woodsman, say. So my premise is "Red is walking to her grandmother's" and my endpoint, the theorem I wish to prove, is "Red ends up with the Woodsman." How do I get from my premise to my theorem?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red ends up with Woodsman

I could have Red meet the Woodsman, they fall in love and run away together. Say, that's...dull. No conflict, no drama. I could have them meet and hate each other, and for some reason they get thrown together and have to solve a problem and see that they are indeed not only compatible, but they are attracted to each other. So that's more interesting. So I need a problem.

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red and Woodsman solve problem
6. Red ends up with Woodsman

So good so far, as Richard Butler used to say. So what's the problem they're going to solve? Maybe there's an evil creature in the forest. Like, I don't know, a wolf?

1. Red walks through forest
2. Red meets Woodsman
3. Red and Woodsman don't get along. Lots of conflict.
4. Red and Woodsman go separate ways
5. Red encounters Wolf, who is Very Bad
6. Wolf does Very Bad things
7. Red and Woodsman give Wolf his comeuppance
8. Red ends up with Woodsman

And so on and so forth. The original outline, the first "proof" of my WIP "Cocke & Bull" looks like this:



As you can see, it's just a list of chapter titles, but the titles all meant something to me and I could follow the narrative down the list and see that it all made sense and led from the premise to the theorem (the ending I envisioned). So I have, at least at the very basic compositional level, a fairly rigorous method to establish the character arc and the plot arc (the plot arc is a function of the character arc in the way I write), and I need to have this in place before I can start to write. There's loads of room to improvise, and sometimes the "proof" changes drastically as the ending changes. I am currently working on a change in the novel that's in my agent's hands, and for the last week or so I've been knocking myself out trying to create a workable "proof" for that novel that allows the story to work if I make the change I have in mind. It's been a job of work, getting that "proof" to function all the way from start to finish. I've wasted lots of paper making up versions of the story that don't work at all, but thankfully I have stumbled upon the Big Idea that will let my new idea play out correctly.

Anyway, as you can see these attempts to create informal proofs of the narrative are really just a form of brain-storming that result in lists. I'm a big fan of lists, though sometimes I make charts instead. Look back at the hand-written list of chapter titles for my WIP. As I begin to write each chapter, usually I don't just jump immediately into the prose, but instead spend an hour or so making one of my informal "proofs" of the chapter, so I know what I'm doing. These are looser in structure than what I've got above, and are combinations of lists and chunks of dialog, mostly. I have several notebooks lying around the house just for working out these sorts of proofs.

So my point, if I have any today, is mostly just to say that I realized at about 3:00 yesterday afternoon that what I was doing when working out my original story ideas was to create these informal mathematical proofs, and I think that's sort of interesting. To me, anyway. Does anyone else work in a method similar to this? I know that we have here our share of "seat of the pants" writers, so likely this post has been a long yawn-fest for you. But I'd be very interested to see examples of other people's outlines, if possible. Or descriptions of outlining processes, especially in the initial stages of pulling a novel together.

Classic Plot Structure (3-Act Structure)

One of the cool things about the software we use to track visitor statistics for the Literary Lab is the ability to see what search terms were used to lead visitors here. A lot of people find us by entering "classic plot structure" into Google or whatever search engine. While Davin has written a post about the classic plot structure that you should by all means go read, it's more a commentary than a definition, so I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about the basics of the classic plot structure, which I'll henceforth refer to as the Three-Act Structure.

In brief, the Three-Act Structure is a framework to arrange story elements into a narrative, with pacing and major plot points as goals, a template into which you can pour your characters and events to give it shape. Narratives are constructed in three consecutive sections, or acts. The author has a distinct job to do in each of the three acts. The basic formula is:

Act One
Exposition, set-up, inciting incident. Hero is given a goal.

Act Two
The middle. The hero tries and fails to achieve goal.

Act Three
The climax and resolution. Hero makes last attempt to achieve goal and succeeds at last or fails forever.

(These are really sweeping generalizations, I know. But I didn't invent the classic plot structure, I just report on it.)

More detail:

In Act One, we see the hero (a word I use because it's shorter than "protagonist" and I'm less likely to misspell it) in his daily life, whatever and wherever that is. The hero has some internal need, usually, that can't be met in his daily life. Then, something happens to knock the hero off the rails of his daily life. He's been given a problem or a quest. Act One ends when the hero decides to solve the problem or take up the quest. The author's job in Act One is to establish the crisis in the hero's life that the hero must solve. There are lots of tasks involved in doing this job.

In Act Two, the hero struggles to solve the problem or complete the quest. He appears to be having success, though it doesn't come easy. The antagonist/villain fights against him indirectly. At the end of Act Two, the hero, who has been successful all this time, suffers a major defeat at the hands of the antagonist. Usually this defeat is caused by the hero's internal need which he has yet to deal with. This is the hero's lowest point, morally/physically/spiritually. All seems lost.

Lots of times, Act Two actually consists of the hero solving the problem that came up at the end of Act One, only to discover that it wasn't his real problem at all, and that he's got bigger fish to fry, which frying takes place in Act Three at the climax. The author's job in Act Two is to keep the action and the conflict rising toward the climax, and to show the hero attempting to re-establish equilibrium in his world (that is, achieve his goal). Lots of tasks involved in this job, too.

In Act Three, the hero bucks up and decides that he can go on, usually with greater resolve because yes, he's solved his inner problem that was holding him back. Or, he's realized he has this inner problem and is going to confront that. Either way, off he goes to fight the big fight at the Climax, after which there is a short denoument. The fight, of course, can be internal or metaphorical. Or fought with laser cannons; it's up to you. Your job, as author, is to resolve the crisis one way or another (or show how it cannot be resolved) in a manner that is believable within the rules of the story. The climax must seem both surprising and inevitable (except for those stories where you see it coming the whole time and hope the hero will avoid it). Again, lots of tasks are necessary to do this job.

So you have rising action, rising conflict, the possibility of total defeat and then even more action and conflict and then climax. Sometimes the hero dies or is otherwise defeated at the climax. Anyway, that's your classic Three-Act Structure in a nutshell. It gets more complicated as you layer on subplots and themes and other story elements, but you get the idea.

Another way of thinking about the Three-Act Structure is in terms of Action/Reaction/Results. Or perhaps as Problem/False Solution/True Solution. Or Crisis/Loss of Identity/Rebirth. Or At Home/This Is Not My Beautiful House/This Is My New House. Really, the different stories you can tell in this three-part structure are endless.

Now, is the Three-Act Structure of any use to a writer? I think very loosely in these terms when I do my outlining before I've begun actually writing. I also have begun lately thinking in terms of the Action/Reaction/Results 3-part structure when writing chapters and scenes, which gives a nice feeling of controlled flow to the writing. But I do think it's easy to fall into the trap of writing to a formula, which generally results in stories that are predictable, melodramatic, and otherwise suck.

The idea of the Three-Act Structure grew out of Aristotle's basic structure (which interested parties can read about in his Poetics):

Beginning, Middle, End

But Greek plays had only one act and don't divide nicely into the Three-Act template. Roman plays had five acts (as did the plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans), but that was to allow for intermissions and snack breaks. Ancient plays were longer than our two-hour movies so there were practical matters to which playwrights and theaters had to attend.

What I think is as useful for a story template as the Three-Act Structure is to divide the story into two types of action: the action that creates the problem, and the action that resolves the problem. This is how real conflict works in real life. You might try writing down the action that creates the problem and then the action that resolves it, and then break those actions down into scenes and see what you've got.

So while the Three-Act Structure might be a helpful organizing tool, I caution anyone against tying themselves too tightly to it. Stories are about who we are and how we solve problems, and I suggest we think in those terms and not so much in terms of "I haven't raised the stakes for my protagonist" or "I need to use my antagonist's minions in this act."

Beginning, middle and end. Start with the end, if you know enough about your story to know who your characters are. Who is he at the end of the story? Then tell us how and why he got there. That is what you are telling us. That is a story.

Chekhov's Gun

First: Happy belated Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates that holiday (and to those who don't anyway). Mighty Reader and I had turkey, potatoes, yams, stuffing, pies and a lot of hooch. It was swell. I'll spare you any anecdotes and private jokes, and just say I hope you all had a wondrous Thursday, no matter what you did.

Today I'd like to talk about details. Playwright Anton Chekhov famously once said, "If a gun is loaded in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three." What he means by this is that if you make a detail seem significant at the time, then you owe it to your reader to make good on that significance. There should be some sort of payoff for drawing the reader's attention to a detail or an action. This theory of payoff from significance is known as "Chekhov's Gun."

Chekhov's Gun provides a good general rule about writing, one that forces us to pay attention to the level of detail we put into our stories. I'd like you to keep the idea of Chekhov's Gun in mind for a minute while I talk about something else.

When we are writing our first drafts--or when I am, at any rate--I tend to put in all sorts of details about people and places and then cut most of them out in revisions later. Some of the details are odd things that I have no idea why I'm writing them in, but at the time they seem to be the right details. For example, say that you're having two characters talk to each other, and for no reason you can think of, you have one of these characters mention his limp. Why's he have a limp? Who knows; it just works there so you leave it. You might also have another character wearing a foolish hat that nobody can stand but he won't be take off. Or you have a woman who is playing with a ring on the small finger of her right hand. These are little things you've stuck in to round out your characters, but mention maybe only once and then forget about as you finish the first draft. When you go back through to revise, you can't recall why these details are in the story and so you cut them and move on.

What I'd like to suggest is that some of these details, seemingly meaningless, did signify something to you when you were in the white-hot passion of drafting. At some level, they were the right details, and you should consider keeping them. But don't just leave them how they are. Do something with them. Think of these details as potential examples of Chekhov's Gun. Before you cut them out, ask youself what they could possibly mean in the larger context of the story. Do they say something about your characters that can be expanded, that will deepen the reader's connection to the characters?

For example, the guy with the limp. Maybe he limps as a result of some event about which he's ashamed. Whenever he gets to know someone new, they'll inevitably ask about the limp. How honestly he answers them can be a measure of how much he trusts the other person. You could even be clever and have an inverse relationship: the more honestly he answers about his limp, the less he cares for the other person and, maybe, the more likely he is to do them some sort of harm.

The guy with the hat could've gotten the hat from someone special to him that he's trying to reunite with. Or, to be more clever, he refuses to doff his cap to anyone because he sees himself as the equal or even the better of anyone he meets, and at some point he will, dramatically, take off his hat for some character.

The woman with the ring? Maybe it's her mother's wedding ring. Maybe it's a ring someone gave her when she was little. Maybe it's nothing of the sort. Maybe it's a ring she stole and can't remove and her playing with it is a sign of her constant worry that she'll be caught out in her theft.

Not all of the little details you spontaneously throw in will lead to bigger story elements, but some of them probably can. I scatter these things into my first drafts and I know at the time that they'll probaby be cut but I also know that they might develop into pointers to larger ideas in the rest of the story. One possible way to visualize this is that, with the mention of (for example) the walking stick the antagonist carries in Chapter Two, you are lighting a fuse that will lead to some kind of explosion in a later chapter. The explosion needn't be big. And it might not even be a sort of "A leads to B" chain of events. It could just be that your "insignificant" details can be made significant if you ask yourself not just what they mean where you've first written them, but what else they might mean. Sometimes, they mean nothing at all, and that's why you've got your delete key. But sometimes, they can lead you farther and deeper into your characters, and you should follow those leads.

Write What You Don't Know

There are a couple of cliches that get thrown at writers all the time, one of the most common being "write what you know." It's like the first piece of advice given to all writers and is, I think, one of the worst. The idea is that if you write about a subject matter in which you are well-versed and knowledgeable...something. I don't know what. You'll write well, I guess. Me, I think this is bollocks. Bad advice. Wrong and wrong-headed. Et cetera.

Writing about what you know will likely allow you to write at great length about subjects that don't inspire you, that don't challenge you, that are not particularly interesting to you. That's a recipe for bad, dull fiction. For example, I know a lot about spreadsheets. Should I write about that? No, I didn't think so. How about discretionary spending on grant budgets? No? How about expression matching in PERL? No! "Writing what I know" will not yield compelling stories or good fiction.

What I think we should do is write about what we care about. Write about what fascinates us, even if we know nothing about it. If we're really interested, we'll do the research and get smart about our subject, because we'll have a passion to find out the facts and the history and the details, and our writing will be informed by that passion.

Or, as John Gardner put it (so much better than I have), "Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche’s censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully and interestingly about one’s own home town, one’s Episcopalian mother, one’s crippled younger sister.”

And really, more to the point, good fiction is less about subject matter than it is about character. We should write about characters that we care about and in whom we are interested, and because we care and are interested, that care and interest will be translated into our writing and to our readers.

I'd like very much to lead a campaign to eliminate the "write what you know" advice. If someone is a beginning writer and asks you for advice, don't tell them to write what they know; tell them to write what they care about, what they are interested in, and tell them to write it the way their favorite writers would do it.

I was going to write about details, but this seemed more important today. Maybe I'll write about details on Friday, when everyone is out shopping. We'll see.

Just Write The Next Word Down

I was going to do a sort of follow up to my poll from last week about protagonists, and tie that in with Davin's recent discussion of sincerity and Lady Glamis' discussion of honesty, but I've been sick this week and I'm still not feeling quite right in the head, so I'm going to just fall back upon some practical advice for first drafts.

I'm reaching a stage in my own first draft where I've essentially already discovered the main things about the characters and the story and I'm sort of doing mechanics, by which I mean that I'm writing scenes that set up the inciting incident at the end of Act One. It remains interesting reading, I think, but on the writing end it can be more like playing a game of chess (strategizing and suchlike) than, say, falling in love. If you know what I mean. If you don't, bear with me and take my word for it that the similes above are fantastically accurate but I'm still too dragged down by illness to explain why.

Where was I? Oh, yes: I am at a place in my first draft where writing is now a lot like work and not a lot like artistic visionary trance, and I'm really laboring to start each scene. In fact, I find myself thinking about avoiding the draft because right now the work is hard work and I'm essentially a lazy old man. I sit down to my notebook, pen in hand, and don't know what to write because I think the next scene is going to be a real bitch, so I go off and make myself a cuppa or throw in some laundry and in the end I don't write anything at all.

The best way I have found to combat this is to simply write the next word down, even if it's the wrong word. In fact, the less likely the word is to be the right word, the better. For example, I'm writing a story about two men in Colonial America, so if I need a scene about these two going to a tavern to meet a third person but I have no point of entry into the scene, I'll write down something like "peacocks" because that's so obviously not the right word. But then I make myself finish the sentence that begins with "peacocks" because nature abhors a vacuum and I abhor an unfinished sentence in a manuscript.

Why does this help me? Because it usually forces me to come up with the right words. Sometimes it takes a paragraph or a page of rubbish about peacocks, but writing about the wrong stuff for a few minutes reminds me of what the right things are for that particular passage, and I'm able to bring the writing back into focus and get on with the scene.

Sometimes, the clearly wrong idea will spark something cool, too, and suddenly I'll have a brilliant passage about peacocks that I'd never have put in originally. The argument could be made that I chose "peacocks" or whatever because, subconsciously, this is really what I wanted to put into the book at this point, but I don't care about that because the trick is to get writing again and if I've tricked myself into writing something I subconsciously thought should go into the book, then well done me, right?

The larger point, of course, is that books are written one word at a time, and there is nobody but you to add those next words, so you have to do it all by yourself. I believe Neil Gaiman had some inspiring thoughts about just this very thing, and possibly later I'll find a link to them. No matter.

If you are stuck, then just write the next word down, even if it's wrong. Even if it's "the next word." Simply having something there on the page forces you to think about the story, and the more wrong what you've got is, the better your chances of correcting it with something that's right.

Anyone have any other simple but effective tricks for getting past those momentary "I have no idea what comes next" pauses in our writing, especially during first drafts?

Some Thoughts on First Acts

If you are basing your novel in any way on the traditional three-act structure, I think there are certain things you should think about when writing your first act. This applies to stories where the protagonist is goal-oriented and must work against some sort of active antagonist; other types of stories will require other types of structures, I'm sure.

In many of the unpublished mss I'm privileged to read, the first act isn't very strong. The ideas are there, the conflict is there, but there's just not enough of it. I don't like to hand out formulas or recipes for writing, but I do think that writers should have tools they can use (and no, I'm not prepared to distinguish between "formulas" and "tools" today), so I offer up these thoughts.

1. Your first act should end with the literary equivalent of a train wreck. What I mean by that is that you should be moving constantly toward a collision of conflicting needs and desires that results in the protagonist having to make a major life decision and consequently act upon that decision.

2. Your protagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. Often this is a wrong-headed goal based on a misunderstanding the protagonist has about the world. The train wreck at the end of the first act will leave the protagonist with a better picture of reality and possibly a new or modified goal to which he must direct his life and actions.

3. Your antagonist should have a clearly-defined goal. This isn't necessarily something Evil, but it has to set your antagonist and your protagonist on intersecting paths that will result in the above-mentioned train wreck. Generally, the train wreck leaves your antagonist stronger, and his goals won't change at all; he'll just keep moving in the direction of his goals and continue acting upon his desires and needs.

4. Your support characters should have clearly-defined goals. These are usually goals that are supported by or aligned loosely with the protagonist or the antagonist. Know which is which. Your protagonist could be allied with people who are actually working against his goals, even if not deliberately or with Evil Intent. Their lives will also be affected by the train wreck in some way. Some of them will change their goals, others won't, but all of them will continue to act to achieve their goals.

5. The story must MOVE toward the train wreck, and things have to REMAIN IN ACTION. Think of your first act as the opening of a game of chess, where each side is closing in on the other, and pieces are constantly being moved forward, some pieces captured and removed from the game as it progresses. Often the protagonist won't even know that there is another player opposite him, killing his pawns and planning to put his king in checkmate. The point is, the characters are all active and constantly moving forward.

You are, in a traditional first act of a traditional three-act structure, moving toward a point where all of these conflicting courses crash into each other with a big bang, from which the rest of the story will spin away toward the climax.

Your job is therefore to:

Keep your characters moving toward goals
Let your readers know what these goals are
Let your readers see what the conflicts are
Let your readers know what is at stake for each character
Let your reader see the train wreck coming before your protagonist sees it
Make sure all the motivations are plausible and clear

I do find myself thinking in terms of either a train wreck between locomotives racing toward each other on the same track, or a street intersection with two or more cars all speeding to a messy crash. Don't get me wrong; the pace of the story does not have to be breakneck. But you do need to set forces in opposition and have them collide.

The most effective way to do this is not, surprisingly, through plot but through character. What happens to people is not nearly as interesting as what people are trying to do. This is a very important distinction. Don't let your plot push the protagonist; have the plot result from the protagonist pushing against life. Agents, editors and, yes, readers generally aren't interested in characters who are reactive, who get pushed around by life. You might think that this sort of victimhood will make your characters sympathetic, and you may be right, but you will probably be wrong if you think that will make them compelling to readers. So think of the train wreck you'll be creating as a collision of characters and goals, not as the meeting up of plot strands, okay?

Sorry about all the italics. I got carried away.

Note: I am currently on vacation, so I won't be able to reply to any comments on this post. Hopefully Michelle and Davin can pick up the slack for me. Apologies all around. Also: someone needs to remind me at some point that I want to write about beginnings of stories, Chekhov's gun and how the two can work together to give a writer story options.

Step Into My Office

Lois Moss had a post yesterday about music and the positive effect it has on her while writing. Making off with that idea of hers, I am thinking about the writing process in general, and what things are necessary in order to get the work done.

Over the years, my minimum requirements for the right surroundings have shrunk to almost nothing: a stable writing surface, good paper, a good pen and nobody speaking to me. For years I wrote in restaurants and a decent (or just any) meal with coffee was a requirement before I could write, but I've written on crowded buses, on lawns, on planes, in cars and just about anywhere where I could be ignored and open my notebook. It doesn't matter if there's music playing, or people talking around me as long as they aren't talking to me, or where I am. Good light is important, though, especially as I get older. There's a great pho restaurant nearby that's just too dimly lit for me to write in, which is a pity because I like their pho and they have big tables.

At home, Mighty Reader and I set aside a room that's part library (though it only holds about a third of our books, if that), part sunroom (the cat spends a lot of time on the chaise lounge by the window), part music room (it's where I keep the guitar and the violins) and part writing room. We set up my writing table, a couple of lamps, my printer on a stand and my laptop there, and allegedly it's where I'll write my books. Certainly that's where I type up my revisions and new work, but I haven't actually written anything there. Time at home, alas, is still mostly given over to working on the house or recuperating from long days at the office. So even though I do most of my writing in restaurants and on the bus these days, I still have a dedicated space in the house set aside for writing, and here's what the view looks like from my chair:



There's a rack of CDs behind my chair that you can't see, and I can hook my laptop up to my small-but-powerful speakers so that, on those days when I actually do use the writing room, I can listen to music. There's no pattern to music played while writing, either. It's pretty much whatever comes on the iTunes shuffle or whatever disk I grab blind from behind me off the CD rack.

So what I'm wondering is: what are your minimum requirements for writing? What things make it impossible for you (for me, it's people talking to me but not much else)? Got a photo of your writing space at home? I don't think you can actually post those in comments, but maybe you could email them to me and I'll add them to this post. That might be cool. We'll see. For now, let's just see under what sort of conditions we've all been laboring.

Additions! Rick Daley and Annie Louden have bravely sent me photos of their writing spaces. Here's Rick's:



And here's Annie's:



This is where Davin Malasarn writes. I assume the green book is Tolstoy:



You'll notice that none of them has a stuffed Gir:



Which is why I rule.